A Closer Look

The bay unit includes everything for the watercooling loop except for the waterblock and its hoses. The front of the unit is black with silver and red accents, and has a small mesh-covered opening for the fan to take in air. This part of the Bigwater 760i takes up two 5.25" bays, which is fairly compact for the components that went into this cooling system.


On top there is a 120mm fan with a chrome fan grill typical of other Thermaltake products. The pump is the new P500 pump which is capable of outputting up to 500 liters per hour. The 120mm radiator uses Thermaltake's Dimple Tube Technology to swirl the coolant around inside the tubes, which slows the coolant down so the radiator can remove the heat more easily.


All of the wires coming off the unit are sleeved in black mesh and bound together with plastic wire ties. There is a built-in rheostat to control the fan speed, and the wires for the fan and pump have four pin connectors on them. There is an additional 3-pin connector for the pump that can output RPM speeds to the motherboard, which could be handy to make the system shut down if the pump fails. The tubing coming from the unit are stiff black-rubber tubes, which have the male quick connectors already mounted and the tubes labeled "In" and "Out."


The block is a new one designed with "redundant micro-channels" to improve thermal transfer. According to the Thermaltake website, "To decrease manufacturing cost, traditional water blocks often are designed with simple water channel. However, water within the liquid cooling system travels at very high speed and does not have sufficient time to absorb heat from the heat source. To overcome this major downside, Thermaltake developed water block with Redundant Micro Channel Design to effectively divide water flow into micro channels thus accelerating heat transfer from heat source to liquid material. In additional, micro channel are stacked on top of each other to fully utilize the available space within the water block and further increases heat transfer." The block uses compression fittings for the tubing, and the block has the top H-plate already installed for the user.


The new block has a very shiny finish on it, although it is not completely smooth. There are some small milling marks visible on the surface. The base is fairly flat, except for the very edges, but they are past the surface of any of the integrated heatspreaders on the CPUs this block would be installed on. In the second picture above, the mill marks and slight distortion (noting the unflat edge of the base) are visible inside the red rectangle.