Thermaltake Water2.0 Pro & Performer CPU Coolers – Water vs. Air
The Test
We have been living with the Water 2.0 Pro inside our Overseer RX-I for many weeks and we love it for all of our needs including extreme CPU overclocking. Almost any decent aftermarket cooler will allow one to clock the Core i7-3770K to 4.4GHz but then as voltages increase, so do the cooling needs and starting at about 4.6GHz-4.8GHz requires a high-end cooler.
Let’s take a look at our setup:
The Setup and the Test
Test Configuration
- Intel Core i7-3770K (stock, 3.5GHz/3.7GHz withh Turb0) overclocked up to 5.0GHz
- EVGA Z77 FTW (latest beta BIOS, PCIe 3.0 specification; CrossFire or SLI 16x + 16x using PLX chip).
- 8 GB Kingston DDR3-PC1866 RAM at 1866MHz (4×2 GB in dual-channel supplied by Kingston)
- GeForce GTX 690 supplied by Nvidia
- 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.2 hard drive
- ToughPowerXT 775 W power supply (supplied by Thermaltake)
- Thermaltake Water2.0 Pro Universal Cooler (supplied by Thermaltake)
- Thermaltake Water2.0 Performer Universal Cooler (supplied by Thermaltake)
- Noctua NH-DH14 Universal CPU cooler (supplied by Noctua)
- Overseer RX-I full tower case (supplied by Thermaltake)
- Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
Test Configuration – Software
- GeForce WHQL 305.37 Driver; high quality filtering and optimizations off
- Windows Vista 64-bit SP1; very latest updates
- DirectX latest.
- All games are patched to their latest versions.
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
- Vista 64, all DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths
- OCCT 4.1
The Test
First we tested our idle temperatures. The Performer was unable to reach 5.0GHz as it started to get rather warm at 4.8GHz when .1325V was added.
For our load test, we ran OCCT for at least ten minutes and recorded the highest temperature reported by a single core at maximum load. From 3.5GHz to 4.2GHz we used no additional voltage and then added +.025V with each +100MHz of core clockspeed increase until we reached +.1325V at 4.8GHz, +.1375V at 4.9GHz and +.1425V at 5.0GHz! 
It appears that 5.0GHz is not attainable with our level of cooling with either the Pro or the Noctua cooler under OCCT’s thermal torture test. We needed over 1.425V to achieve stability and the temperatures quickly rose to 105C and thermal throttling. The Pro was able to keep our CPU cool longer than the Noctua, but 4.9GHz was all we could achieve needing +.14V
The Performer did well until about 4.8GHz but at 4.9GHz it required .025V more for stability than either the Noctua or Pro cooler. We saw it run OCCT for about 5 minutes before the temperature spiked to 105C and our CPU throttled. The Noctua fits in-between the Pro and the Performer in terms of cooling efficiency in our test and the Pro definitely won the cooling contest at 4.9GHz. The Performer kept our CPU cooler than the Noctua until about 4.5GHz but needs the Pro’s thicker radiator if it is going to cool above 4.8GHz.
Let’s head for our conclusion
