Closer Examination

The first thing that came to mind when I took the radiator out was how light it is. I had only seen the name and went in expecting this to be a 25 mm thick radiator, and at 25.5 mm thick, it might as well be the same. This makes for a very slim radiator that weighs just under 1 kg and is ~50 mm thick in total if paired with standard 25 mm thick fans. The end tank design is also far more rectangular than the hexagonal shape from before and part of the design tweaks Alphacool made for its v.2 radiators. We also see the logo in the expected blue color on two side at the bottom-right corner, facing the right way for most installations. The radiator is thus predominantly black with a smooth finish, and the blue logos are the only color accents visible in use.


The fan holes are well-threaded into the steel frame, which gets the aforementioned black paint to better match with most PC DIY builds than the native steel color. These holes are the standard 15 mm apart, which works with just about any case today. There are no screw shields underneath, and the fan holes are not offset from the tubing channels underneath. This can be a hazard if screws other than those provided by Alphacool are used—those Alphacool includes are threaded only at the bottom, such that they go through the plenum spacing between the frame and radiator core, but do not touch the fins or coolant tubes at all.


The two BSP G1/4" ports on the end tanks are part of the frame in that there are brass inserts for the actual threads since copper is too soft. These are also threaded perfectly and come with plastic covers that are really only meant to keep dust out before use. You would replace these with standard BSP G1/4" threaded fittings when using the radiator as part of your loop. I wish there were more ports here, especially on the other side, to be used as a fill, drain, or accessory port for other things, such as temperature, pressure, or flow-rate measurement. The core adopts the more typical U-flow design for the coolant, with either port as the inlet and the other as the outlet, which depends on your plumbing layout for the custom loop. There is a single row of fins/tube stacks with twelve ~1.5 mm thick tubes. This total of a 12-way parallel split of the coolant will decrease coolant flow restriction relative to single-row radiators with thinner tubes, like the Black Ice Nemesis GTS, but generally suffers compared to multi-row radiators, as well as single-row ones with more tubes, such as the Bykski 30 mm RC series with 14 tubes. The entire core is based on copper, which itself signifies the absence of an alloy in favor of a higher-purity copper core.


While the core composition is different from the norm, the fin stack itself is not. We get the usual ~7 mm high and lightly louvered serpentine fins, which may increase the contact surface area for air flowing through the core, though it could adversely affect lower RPM/laminar flow regimes. The fins are rated at 15 FPI in density and measured in at 15–16 FPI on my sample. The core itself is ~18 mm thick with a 3–4 mm plenum on either side between it and the frame, which is not the easiest to measure, of course. Without exactly knowing how thick the fins are, this combination leads me to believe that this radiator will be a light/medium-airflow-optimized cooling solution. That having been said, we will see how the radiator fares in our testing over the next couple of pages.