Swiftech MCP655 Water Cooling Pump Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,284 words · ~6 min read
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Today I have an unboxing of a product that holds a special place in my heart.
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This is my personal favorite water cooling pump. This is the Swifttech MCP
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655. So what makes it my favorite water cooling pump? Well, a couple of
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different things. First of all, in my experience, both as a an enduser of this
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product and as a reseller of this product, it is phenomenally reliable.
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These pumps almost never die. They come with a one-year warranty, but I can tell
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you with a fair amount of confidence, you pretty much won't need it. Number
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two, the performance is awesome. This is one of the best performing pumps on the
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market. Yes, you might be looking at, you know, this pump with sort of this
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aftermarket adder that on paper outperforms it, but the reality of it is
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once you have a good high performance pump that's pushing water through the
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blocks, you're talking about maybe a half a degree tops a performance
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difference between this and something else that that outperforms it in a
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synthetic test. So, I really do love this particular product and I do use
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one. In fact, my MCP655 is a few years
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old and still going strong in my personal water cooled machine. So, what
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does Swiftech have to say for themselves here? Ultra quiet. Okay, fair enough. I
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buy that. No maintenance, compact design and adjustable speed, extreme
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performance, reliability of 5 years meanantime between failure. Yeah, I buy
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that for sure. Quick and easy installation, which is also true. And
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yeah, that pretty much summarizes it, doesn't it? Here's a little diagram of
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what the pump looks like on the inside, although you pretty much shouldn't need
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to uh disassemble it for any for any reason. Okay, packing list. Oh, it uses
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universal four pin Molex, which is great. So, you can plug it into your system no matter what. Pump speed is
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adjustable from 4,800 RPM down to 1,800
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RPM. Now, this is key. This is the most silent pump out there on the market that
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I would consider reliable. There have been other silent pumps, but this one is
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the one that won't fail you. And there's no nonsense. You're just turning down a
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very reliable, very high performance pump to a lower speed. Here we go.
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Operating voltage range, 12 volts. Yep, that's good. Plugs into a Molex. Here
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are all of the technical specifications, which personally I'm not going to worry
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too much about because what it comes
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down to is it's silent, it performs great, and it looks a little something
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like this. This is I I actually can't
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stress enough the silence. There's two versions of this pump. There's the MCP
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655 and the MCP 655B, which stands for
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basic. Now, the basic version does not come with the adjustable uh
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RPM. To me, that makes that pump not nearly as attractive an option because I
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basically just take this, I turn it all the way down to one, and it is dead
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silent. Now, I've tried I've tried testing this. My loop has a CPU block, a
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GPU block, radiator reservoir, and this pump. And I go, okay, I'm going to turn
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it all the way up to five. I'm going to turn it all the way down to one. How much of a temperature difference is
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there? Nada. It's not measured by the
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thermal probe on my CPU, which means it's probably somewhere in the 0.5 to 1°
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range, like within that margin of error. It's much more silent and it's also a
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very convenient feature because when you're first filling your loop in order
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to get air bubbles out, it can be very useful to turn it all the way down to
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the bottom, then crank it up to the top, then turn it all the way down to the
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bottom. What that can do is it will alter the flow of the water through your
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loop in order to dislodge air bubbles that might be trapped in your CPU block
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or your uh radiator. So, that's going to mean that that annoying sound of of air
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being sucked through the pump that makes like a
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Yeah, that kind of noise can be eliminated much faster with a new build
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if you have a pump that has variable speed like this one. Accessory wise, it
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comes with a double-sided sticky mounting pad. Looks a little something
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like that. You got some noise isolation, vibration isolation, dampening foam in
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between and then two stickers on either side so you can stick it down. You can
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also screw it down. That's what these holes here are for. Okay, so it comes
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with screws as well as in a little instruction manual. Now, how does the pump work? Nice long Molex connector.
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Recommend sleeving that if you're going to run it anywhere like far because it's
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kind of ugly, but that's okay. Okay. Molex connector on the
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end. And then you've got your inlet and your outlet. So, this is the inlet for
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the pump that goes right into I hope you can see in there. I'm not sure if you'll
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be able to see. Can you see? Okay. Well, it goes into the pump one way or another. And then it spins
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inside and then pumps the water out the top. So, couple things when you're
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installing a pump that are very important. Number one, you always want your pump to be lower cuz gravity works
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than your reservoir. So, the reservoir water will feed into the pump without
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any effort. You also want to make sure there's no restriction around the inlet
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of the pump. So, if you have a really tight Ubend right before the inlet,
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that's bad. If you wanted to limit the
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flow rate of your pump by using tight curves in the tubing or whatever the
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case may be, you should limit it at the outlet rather than at the inlet. The
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inlet should be as restrictionf free as possible from the reservoir. Okay. And
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that's pretty much it in terms of important. Oh, another one. Never let
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your pump run dry. Ever. Never let it
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run with no water coming into it. That's very, very bad. Never take a pump and
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just, you know, oh, you know, I don't have my other water cooling components, but I want to find out if it works and
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plug it in. Bad, bad, bad, bad. You will destroy your pump. Guaranteed. Okay.
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Next. This pump includes half-inch fittings. So you can see these are/ inch
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uh barbs and they are not removable. So
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what that means is in my case when I want to use 3/8 in tubing I have to dip
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it in boiling water and then stretch it over the fittings in order to make it
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fit. Now there are aftermarket pumps for the D5. Although I see no particular
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reason to use them because once you stretch a smaller tubing like a 7/16 or
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a 3/8 in tubing over it, it will never
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ever leak. I will personally guarantee that if you get it all the way over to
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the end. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
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MCP655. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
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reviews, and other computer videos.