Liquid Flow Restriction

I use a Xylem D5 pump with a standalone reservoir, with the pump being powered through a direct SATA connection from a PSU used only for watercooling components and not part of the test system. The pump is controlled by an Aquacomputer Aquaero 6 XT in PWM mode. There is a calibrated in-line flow meter and Dwyer 490 Series 1 wet-wet manometer to measure the pressure drop of the component being tested. Every component is connected to the manometer by the way of soft tubing, compression fittings, and two T-fittings that have been accounted for when it comes to the liquid flow restriction in the loop.


This is a fresh start for CPU blocks being tested on the LGA 1700 platform, thus I have chosen to have only new blocks here that have not been covered previously. This also allows all these blocks to have pricing including various logistics and material costs so that I can generate performance per dollar charts again. Apologies then, to other manufacturers, but to be fair, I don't have your LGA 1700 versions either. The one entry here that is not specifically supporting LGA 1700 is the EK-Quantum Velocity² for LGA 1200, as marked above, but fits well enough although the mounting pressure could be better. Regardless, we see how the higher number of microchannels and microfins here makes for a cooling engine that ends up more restrictive than the others tested—not much of a surprise! As such, I'd classify the Alphacool Eisblock XPX Pro Aurora as a medium-to-high restriction CPU block.