The Art of H20 Cooling



Watercooling has certainly evolved from a purely DIY overclocking hobby into a multi-million dollar industry. With high quality pre-packaged watercooling systems those considering H20-cooling may choose from a plethora of options at various price points. It's been several years since that infamous DIY threads about the over zealous PC-Enthusiast who went about watercooling his PC by sealing all the holes and filling the case with water. Tales such as this have now become part of watercooling folklore. As far fetched as that thread may have seemed submergence cooling is a tractable concept using state of the art solutions such as 3M's Flourinert FC-77. Watercooling has afforded true artisans an opportunity to express their craft with the marriage of thermodynamics and CADCAM metallurgy. Perhaps the pinnacle of art and CNC waterblock construction can be found at the Spanish Enthusiast site DevilMaster. The example below of a graphic card cooler which uses direct impingement to the VPU and GDDR is one of many articles which explain the entire process from planning to performance.





Of course it's not economically viable to produce blocks of this magnitude for the masses, although I wouldn't hesitate to pay for such craftsmanship if I could. The majority of us demand two characteristics from our watercooling hardware, performance and reliability, anything else is an ergonomic icing on the watercooling cake. In the case of Viscool and in particular the V2 we're testing today we get much of the former attributes and some of the latter.

Viscool Eastern Euro CNC



Although Viscool might be considered a small manufacturer located in the Slovak Republic, what they lack in numbers they compensate for in innovation and precision machining. Back in 2005 Viscool released their Extherm CPU cooler (seen above) which as far as I can tell, had only seen one independent test bench via Watercoolplanet whom seem to find and test most every waterblock ever built. eXtherm was a decent performer and long before I had a chance to contact Viscool they had moved on to improve their design.



The block is well constructed and it's obvious the quality control and precision machining are there as well as decent ergonomics. The block is constructed using a copper baseplate, steel inlet/outlets which are encased in derlin. The mounting brackets are most definitely universal so long as the included through-board hardware is used. This is invaluable given the number of supported Socket's on the market at this time. I tested the Viscool on the relatively new AM2 system which did concern me until I realized Viscool has implemented what has to be the most versatile mounting hardware on the market. We'll discuss this in detail later on. Suffice it to say I was honestly impressed with the craftsmanship and exacting standards evident in the V2.



From the photo above its evident Viscool has done something different in the "impingement" area and as we'll see this design is an amalgamation of several concepts....