Closer Examination

The Bitspower Summit M w/OLED CPU water block is lighter than the Premium Summit M block owing to the adoption of a predominantly acrylic top coupled to an OLED display and a metal top cover as opposed to the full copper top in the Premium Summit M. It also is more hexagonal in shape with the top cover plate also having cuts at the top-left corner for style. These fins, if you will, go through one of the threaded BSP G1/4" ports on top, and the Bitspower logo is printed above them as seen in the images above. The eye-catcher here is, no doubt, the relatively large OLED display at the bottom—the entire construction makes this block look like the face of a robot in my opinion.


There are no arrows or signs to indicate any preferred inlet or outlet ports, but the manual does cover this aspect. Ideally, you would want the port on the right as seen from the front as the inlet port, but you won't lose out on much performance if you have to swap things around for a better plumbing layout. The ports are very well threaded and spaced far away enough apart to fit the included fittings easily, as well as some larger fittings for larger tubing. From the side, we see the acrylic top used for the integrated lighting to shine through, as well as the LED cable that terminates in a 3-pin 5 V connector to plug into compatible addressable motherboard dRGB LED headers. This means you do not need a separate controller as an add-on purchase, which some brands, including CORSAIR, end up doing. The block also uses an non-plated metal bracket with the Intel bracket installed out of the box, and this is another point of differentiation to the Premium Summit M.


Flipping the block over, we see a plastic cover to protect the cold plate during transit, which also has a warning to remove it prior to installation. The cold plate is nickel-plated copper and has been given a mirror finish. There is a slight convex box here, which is expected of most CPU blocks from the past few years and onward, with the bow countering the flattening in the middle during installation and mating with the convex IHS on most Intel CPUs. AMD with their chiplet design for Ryzen CPUs does benefit from a more optimized cooling engine, but that would be hard to do for blocks that support Intel and AMD CPUs collectively.


As per usual, disassembly was done after all testing was complete, and the provided hex tool works well in removing the four screws on the bottom that hold the block together. There are four large pieces that make up the Bitspower Premium Summit M block, including the top and cold plate we saw before. The top houses a flexible Bitspower-branded digital RGB LED strip that goes around a recess, with the LEDs shining inward as seen above. Do not attempt to power these LEDs off a 4-pin, 12 V LED header since it can kill the LEDs and/or the header. That having been said, doing so is quite hard as the connector has a blocked-off middle pin anyway. We can also see the temperature sensor that juts inward far enough to touch the coolant as it goes through the ports; it outputs the measurement to the OLED display integrated into the block.

There is a translucent inner piece that helps with the lighting, but is also a molded plastic piece that directs coolant flow through a jetplate slit and around via two channels for the way out. The cold plate has a rubber O-ring to ensure no coolant leaks, and 300 µm machined microfins and channels that add to the overall surface area of heat transfer to help get heat from the CPU to the coolant. This by itself is not technically unique and the same as with the Premium Summit M, with competitors having hit a higher number of thinner fins in the same area, but there is always a trade off between coolant flow restriction and heat transfer, the latter of which also plateaus really quickly. So having more fins is not always a guarantee of better thermal performance, either.