Antec Kuhler 1250 CPU Liquid Cooler Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,196 words · ~5 min read
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buy an unlocked Intel 4th gen core i7 or core i5 processor and get a free copy of
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roam 2 total war click now to learn more all right so there's not much innovation
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left in the whole pre-filled liquid coolers thing basically you're gonna
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have to have a CPU block a pump a radiator tubing
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and coolant inside that's okay i guess you'll also need some fans on it to
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actually take the heat away but that didn't stop antec from trying here guys
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okay so this my friends is the cooler h2o 1250 a truly unique if nothing else
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all-in-one liquid cooling unit so unlike many of the products on the market this
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is not a coolant or an acetech rebrand
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this is an antec design that is very different from some of the other stuff
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that we've seen on the market that much will be apparent just
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looking at the thing so let's start with the features that really stand out so
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number one is that it uses a dual radiator so not all liquid coolers out
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there use a dual rad most of them still use single 120 or at the very most
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single 140 millimeter it's a standard thick radiator with a fairly high fin
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density so it is definitely going to perform optimally in a push-pull style
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configuration which is why ntec actually shipped the unit with not only the fans
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that are pre-installed but also a couple of extras although we will be testing in
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our standard configuration which is two fans not push pull so there you go guys
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it also has integrated fans so integrated fans and shrouds these are in
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a push configuration by default and because of the bulk of the tubing and
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pumps on the one side of the fan here it does only go in one way so compatibility
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may be a little bit more of a challenge with this one than with other ones
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versus having one larger tank at one side and then a smaller tank at the
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other side it has two medium sized tanks at each side to accommodate the extra
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tubing all right so the next thing i actually mentioned this briefly already
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is the dual pump design so it has two
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pumps built in one on each of the fan hubs here this again adds bulk but it
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also adds potentially performance but more importantly redundancy if one of
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these pumps were to fail the other one would be able to keep operating the unit
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regardless this is one of the things that i dislike about all-in-one liquid
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cooling units and that is that they add more points of failure with a heat sink
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you got a fan on it there's one point of failure with an all-in-one liquid
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cooling unit you've got usually one fan and one pump which is two points of
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failure so two ways for the unit to die it also has what they're calling a
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sophisticated micro channel cold plate designer and why they insist on calling
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them cold plates come on the entire water cooling community calls them water
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blocks why can't we just call them that anyway so the water block has a pre-applied thermal compound on it and
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hooks into your system in pretty much the manner that we've come to expect
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from any of these pre-filled liquid cooling units that does have a built-in
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control so you've actually got oh my goodness look at all the wires okay here
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we go and they're all black so you should be able to hide them relatively easily so we have power so you can go
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ahead and plug that into your CPU fan header then we have usb so you're
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actually going to use antex grid software in order to configure things
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like the customizable RGB led on the top as well
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as things like pump speed and fan speed you can monitor your coolant
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temperatures and all that good stuff and then finally also coming out of the unit
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here we have two wires that head into y-splitters so we can power the two fans
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that are built into the unit and then two additional fans directly off of the
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pump right here so that's pretty much
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the summary i guess all that's left to it oh yeah it has a coolant inside
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that's water based with glycol so pretty pretty typical stuff although it's a
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proprietary blend or something like that so all that's really left now is how
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does the thing perform well i guess we'll find out is it worth
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the compatibility disadvantages and the customizability disadvantages of not
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being able to swap in your own fans in order to have that redundancy and
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potentially better performance i'll leave that to luke to determine for you
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guys on our standard test bench i'm running a 3930k at 4.0 gigahertz with a
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voltage of 1.3 and that processor is
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crunching numbers in prime95 i also have an NVIDIA gtx 580 running combustor and
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overclocked a little bit just to add some more heat to this system for
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installation problems we didn't actually have any unless we wanted to put more
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fans on top of the radiator in which it would not have worked in our case
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configuration at all if you're looking to buy this product just make sure that
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your case and motherboard combination is going to be compatible with the configuration you're going to want this
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cooler in because you might have trouble with how your case has the radiator
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aligned and how your heatsinks on your motherboard stand out i was informed
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that i couldn't swap out the stock fans but i wanted to try anyways just because
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i love you guys and i got that off but i found that once the fan was off i
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couldn't actually put a new fan on realistically because the power for the
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pumps was ran through the fans so i didn't bother and we ran with the stock
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fans and we ran the stock fans at 100 RPM just like we normally do our knock
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to a fan so there is a little bit of a variable here as all the other coolers
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are tested with Noctua and ff12s and these ones are not but it's as close as
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we could get it in a market awash with lookalikes the cooler 1250 didn't do
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quite as well as its competition that being other 2x120 all-in-one liquid
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coolers but it's an interesting innovative cooler and i'm excited to see
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where they go with it if you like this style of cooler or if you don't like
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this style of cooler be sure to comment below and please express your most
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profound feelings with the like and dislike button and as always also please
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