System Components and Design Peculiarities
Main Water Block
The first thing we are going to talk about will be the main block of the liquid-cooling system. It looks like a relatively small box to fit into two 5-inch bays of an ATX system case. The front panel has two transparent windows in somewhat crudely designed silver frame. The large window allows controlling the coolant level, while the small one helps monitoring its movement inside the system:
There is a multi-functional emergency indicator in the lower right corner. It performs two functions: goes off when the liquid coolant inside the system reaches critical temperature of 70ºC and signals when the coolant level in the expansion tank is low.
There is not much at the top of the block: the expansion tank lid and four retention screws holding this lid in place:
There is nothing on the side panels of the block, too. The only thing you see there are the four retention holes for fastening the block in the 5-inch case bays:
The rear panel, on the contrary, has a lot to show:
There are two connecting pipes (the incoming and the outgoing), the power supply connector, two four-pin fan connectors with pulse-width modulation fan rotation speed control, USB cable connector and five ports for thermal sensors.
Once the top lid has been removed, we can examine the internal structure of the main water block:
Inside you can see a transparent expansion tank that can hold 260ml of liquid. There is a short tube connecting it to the pump and a pump itself:
The pump made by some unknown manufacturer performs at 450l/h rate and has the head of 2m. Very good specifications for a liquid-cooling system of this class. According to the specs, the ceramic bearing of this pump should function flawlessly for 50,000 hours and the generated shouldn’t be higher than the claimed 23dBA. True: you don’t even hear this pump working against the background noise from the system case.
There is a small board on inside of the main block rear panel. It carries control elements and connectors:
However, one of the connectors that looked very similar to the USB connector wasn’t utilized for some reason.
