CoolerMaster AquaGate-Mini Review

CoolerMaster AquaGate-Mini Review
Posted :: Mar 28, 2005 by Impact

Installation:
Many people are concerned with the difficulty of seting up water cooling systems. The simple question, "How hard is this going to be to set up?" keeps many people away from using a water cooler instead of the standard CPU heatsink and fan combo. While the setup could have been a bit easier (the directions at some points are a little confusing), it was by no means difficult. If you're installing a water cooling system, you most likely have a fair idea of how computer hardware attaches, and can probably complete the installation process in an hour.

Note: The installation steps are summarized below, however Absolute Insight recommends consulting the AquaGate-Mini Installation Guide when installing the system.
The first order of business is to remove the protective film on the bottom of the water block. The film is there to keep it from getting scratched which lowers performance, but if you forget to pull it off you'll most likely end up destroying your chip (melted plastic is no good!).

Next, consult the manual to find the right bracket type for your chipset. There are plenty included, so find the right one for your chipset and screw it onto the bottom of the water block.
Note: Some of the brackets could fit on the block multiple ways, so you might want to eyeball the way it should fit on your motherboard and take that into consideration.

Attaching the water block to the board depends on your chipset (each has holes in different places), some use the back plate to have something to buckle to while others use rubber washers. The AthlonXP doesn't use the back plate, just rubber washers on both sides of the 4 screws.
Note: Due to the way these screws are tightened (from the bottom of the motherboard) they are backwards when you screw them into the bracket holes. This could be confusing.

You'll notice, on the NF7-S motherboard, the waterblock comes extremely close to 4 capacitors. Mine didn't want to fit without a little "convincing". To get mine on, I had to give the capacitors a bit of pushing, just a warning to you guys.

CoolerMaster was thinking ahead when they packaged this system. When tightening the nuts down on the back of the motherboard, you may find yourself wondering, "Where did I leave my wrench/needle-nosed pliers?" Inside the box there is a nifty contraption that has a hex-nut side, and a Phillips screwdriver side. You can quickly put this over the nut (using the hex-nut side of course), and put your screwdriver in the other to tighten the nuts down. Although the installation handbook doesn't say anything about how tight to make the nuts, I suggest making them pretty tight. I had to re-tighten them when I found out that the system wasn't cooling properly since they weren't tight enough.
Note: A good way to tell where "tight enough" is when the rubber washers start "smushing" against the board under then nuts. That's the hint that they're probably tight enough.

Once the water block is securely fastened, choose a spot to mount the fan and radiator. CoolerMaster provides quite a bit of flexibility. The fan can mount to either side of the radiator and can screw into any normal 80mm fan spot.

Despite the many options, my test cases had a bit of a problem. The cases I had to test with were the Koolance PC2-601 and a Chieftec Dragon, and unfortunately both of these cases are nearly identical (as are some Antecs). Inside the cases, there are plenty of 80mm fan slots, but all of them are setup with quick-attach/release clips. The clips allow you to pop a fan in or out without the need for screws, and therein lies the problem. Since the radiator is attached to the AquaGate fan, it doesn't fit in a quick-attach 80mm bay. Although not the fault of CoolerMaster, there is ay to screw the radiator/fan into either of my cases without drilling my own holes (I even tried removing the quick-attach brackets). Because of this, for the rest of the test, the radiator and fan sat outside the case, tilted to mimic the direction it would face when buckled to the back of a normal case.

You can see the purple fan clasps on the back of the case in this picture. The green tubing on the side is the Koolance water-cooling system (used to test against the Aquagate-Mini).

At this point setup is nearly complete. Plug in the two power connectors, one from the water block, and one from the radiator fan. If you don't have enough fan headers on your board, CoolerMaster included two adapters to go from 3-pin to 4-pin molex.

To attach the knob to a PCI slot on the case, screw the knob into the provided PCI bracket, put the cover on it, and install it into whichever PCI slot you wish. This can be used later to easily adjust the fan speed and in turn, the noise.