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 from before 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. EK had sent this over by mistake originally instead of the correct LGA 1700 version and I wanted to see how this would fare, assuming it could even fit. As it turns out it fits well enough although the mounting pressure could be better. You can also refer to this page to see how the Hydro XC7 RGB PRO compares to the older collection of CPU blocks. No surprise that the liquid flow restriction is the same here too and we find that the increased number of microchannels results in a higher pressure drop across the new cooling engine. Thus, this makes the Hydro XC7 RGB PRO more restrictive than previous CORSAIR CPU blocks. We see the newer CORSAIR offering ends up in the middle of the pack accordingly to where I'd classify the Hydro XC7 RGB PRO as a medium-restriction CPU block.