Introduction

The hype around Optimus Water Cooling is something else, and no matter how the rest of the review goes, they deserve props for getting the word out as a startup better than anyone else I know of in this field. No doubt the US factor comes into play, with everything done in Chicago as opposed to a random factory in China, and then there are the online forum threads and Reddit discussions that have gone to place the company and their products on a throne of sorts. User upon user reports multiple °C improvements in thermal performance over other CPU water blocks. While these always need to be taken with a grain of salt, there is no denying that it intrigued me as someone who has seen it all for the better part of a decade, and with established companies with R&D budgets many fold higher, no doubt. Could we all have missed something? Was there more to the great thermodynamics equalizer which has led to some companies giving up that quest for the extra tenth of a decimal of improvement in cooling only to focus on coolant flow restriction and aesthetic features, including integrated RGB lighting? We aim to find out today and thank Optimus Cooling for sending a review samples to TechPowerUp.


I was pretty close to doing a review of Optimus Cooling's first CPU block in 2018, before they decided to hold off until they had revised their mounting system with stiffer springs at the time. Well, things have happened since and here we are in 2020 to take a look at their CPU blocks that have undergone more revision to where their current installation system does not even use springs. The company sent along the Foundation and Signature V2 blocks for the Intel platform at my request, and here we take a look at the Foundation block, which provides for a more budget friendly solution relative to the Signature V2 simply by having a less expensive top. This is not to say the Optimus Foundation is playing second fiddle. On the contrary, there is arguably more going on here than with the other, which gets a separate review. We begin this review with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications