Water Cooling For Just $79
When Geoff Lyon, the Chief Executive Officer of CoolIt Systems, told the Fall 2008 Intel Developers Forum that he was coming out with an Advanced Liquid Cooling (A.L.C.) solution for under $100 it grabbed my attention. I've worked with many cooling companies for the past six years and bringing a functional water cooler to the market for under $100 was said to be impossible if you still wanted decent performance. When I think of a low cost internal water cooling system the Asetek LCLC water cooler that was released back in 2006 comes to mind. When the Asetek LCLC water cooler was announced it was said to be available for roughly $40, but it never seemed to catch on and was available mostly to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and was not widely available to the public. Today you can find the Asetek LCLC at a few retailers on Google Shopping for between $60 and $106, but as you can tell the product never caught on outside the OEM market (Asetek informed me that they have sold over 100,000 LCLC kits since 2006). CoolIT Systems noticed that well built water cooler was still missing from the sub $80 retail market and went back to a drawing board to see if something could be designed that had the cooling performance that enthusiasts demand and a price tag that won't break the bank during these troubled economic times. After many long hours and a year in the test lab CoolIT Systems came up with a pre-assembled water cooler can be easily installed inside any standard chassis called the Domino A.L.C
The Domino A.L.C. is factory sealed ready to be quickly and easily installed, so the retail box is modest sized as the water cooler is already plumbed and ready to go when you open the box. The CoolIT Domino A.L.C. packaging shows all the important features and even has pictures to help you quickly see what the product is designed to do. A couple of quotes from past reviews on CoolIT products were included from various review sites, but sadly no quotes from our Eliminator CPU Cooler, Pure CPU Cooler or our USB Beverage Chiller reviews made it.
Removing the Domino A.L.C. from the box you will find the cooler safely packed in a clam shell that prevents things from banging around when being shipped to you.
A few minor imperfections were still observed on the radiator cooling fins as you can see from the image above, but they were easily straightened out using a small flat head screwdriver. Notice that everything is assembled and ready to go the second you open the box. The rubber band that is on the water block is to hold a plastic cover over the already applied thermal interface material, but I cleaned that off in order to use Arctic Silver thermal compound. This was done to keep the testing numbers consistent as no two thermal compound brands are identical. Now that we know what we will be looking at today we can take the Domino A.L.C. out of the box and give you a better look at how it works.
