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COOLIT DOMINO ALC
Today's CPUs are getting
smaller, faster, yet seem to still be producing
tremendous amounts of heat. With that heat
comes fan noise. So many of us switch to
watercooling. But such esoteric solutions can
be a pain, messy, and sometimes unreliable.
Well, CoolIt Systems has created a self-contained,
maintenance-free water cooling system called the
Domino ALC.
In the package we have
the radiator which has an integrated pump, 120mm
fan, and control box. That radiator has two
semi-flexible metal hoses attached to a waterblock.
This waterblock has replacement plates that allow
fitment on AM2/AM3, LGA775, or LGA1366. One
limitation we see in this design is the short,
nearly inflexible hoses which make installation
challenging. So if your chassis doesn't have a
120mm hole above the I/O plate area, then you've got
to figure out a way to mount and exhaust the hot air
too. The fan and control box draw power from a
standard 3-pin fan connector, which makes the
electrical part quite simple.
Inlet side of the radiator. Control box has a
button on the side. This is used to select
operating mode (L, M, H).
Exhaust side of the fan/radiator setup, and the
control box with its display
The display is backlit with blue LEDs, and it shows
the fan RPM, pump RPM, water temp, and current fan
setting. Awesome!!!
So now let's get to some
tests. Here is our test bench. We are
using AMD's latest Phenom II X4 quad-core processor
screaming at 3.2GHz. Windows XP SP3 is our OS,
and we run Cinebench 10's multi-core test to bring
the CPU to 100% usage. Ambient is 70 F.
TEST RESULTS:
As we see from these
results, the Domino ALC did better than all the
other coolers, except the Thermalright when set to
low. In terms of noise, the Zalman,
Thermalright, and low setting of the Domino were are
pretty much inaudible over background HDD and PSU
noise. Considering the installation
requirments, performance, and cool factor of the
Domino ALC, we feel that this product should be
seriously considered when planning a system.
just keep in mind that the chassis should work with
it!
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