Watercooling has always been the height of sophistication for gamers and overclockers, but the fact that it can be fiendishly expensive and complicated to set up, not to mention that one wrong move can turn your motherboard or any other component into a $500 doorstop, tends to put a large amount of people off the subject altogether.

There is however a range of products which offer a cheap, safe, and easy first step into watercooling. One such product is the Domino ALC (Advanced Liquid Cooling) CPU cooling system from CoolIT. Designed to replace the CPU heatsink and fan on any LGA 775/1366 or AM2/AM3 motherboard, this unit is factory sealed ready to go straight from the box and requires no maintenance. Currently selling for $179 from PlayTech, it is slightly more expensive than even some of the best air coolers on the market, but far cheaper than most other watercooling systems.

Features:
* High contrast backlit LCD * Single push button control
* Audible status alerts * 1100-2900 RPM fan speed
* Physical Dimensions: 14.0 x 12.5 x 15.5 mm
* Weight: 1.03 kg * Power Consumption: 8W (Max)
* Life Cycle: 50,000 Hours (MTBF) * Fan Noise: 19.2 dBA (Min)
* Radiator Dimensions: 157 x 120 x 27 mm
* Proprietary coolant with anticorrosion/antifungal additives
* Proprietary Pro Advanced Thermal Compound
* 2 Year Warranty

How does it work?

The way this works is fairly simple. The CPU block is screwed down to make contact with the CPU, and the CPU heats it up. Water flows through the block and takes that heat away. The water in the system flows around in a loop, from the CPU block, through the pump, through the radiator and then back through the loop over and over again. When the water flows through the fins of the radiator, air passing over the fins dissipates the heat, and this is how the heat from your CPU gets removed from your system.

The key elements to cooling performance in this system (and any watercooling system) are the amount of water in the loop (a small volume of water will heat up quicker), the size of the radiator (more fins = more surface area and thus better cooling), pump throughput, and fan speed (to force air over the radiator fins). These are where the ALC will face its biggest challenges - with a relatively small radiator and low water volume compared to higher-end watercooling systems, how will it perform when the heat is on?

Installation

Installing the ALC is almost as easy as installing any big air cooler. First the motherboard needs to be removed so you can install the appropriate backplate. These come with sticky pads so that you can mount them permanently - people who swap coolers around often may just want to use 10% or so of the adhesive area so that it stays put but can also be easily removed if needed. Once the motherboard is back in place the next step is to place the block over the CPU (the block comes with pre-applied thermal goop) and screw the fittings down into the backing plate. The pipes are quite short and the unit is kind of heavy so a second pair of hands can be useful for this part. When installing this piece you'll notice that the part that touches the CPU has a mirror finish - a good sign of quality (or attention to detail at least) from the manufacturer.

Now that the CPU block is in place, the main unit needs to be mounted to the rear of the case. The fan which is on the back of the unit has four rubber bungs which need to be pulled through the slots where you'd normally put the screws for a 120mm case fan. Screws are also supplied for this part which are better when transporting your case, but the rubber bungs provide vibration-dampening so should be the first choice. Be gentle with these bungs as I inadvertently mutilated one with my fingernails when pulling them through - luckily they've thrown in a couple of spares with the system. Lastly, plug the 3pin header into your motherboard and bam, you're ready to go.

As you can see from the photo, the main unit didn't fit perfectly in my CM Scout case, and has to sit on a slight angle - a problem I've seen a few other people have with different cases. This isn't really a biggie though, as you most likely won't even notice once you put the side panel of your case back on.

Operation

When you turn the unit on for the first time or after it's been off for a while, you can hear a small yet satisfying gurgle as the pump kicks into action. The LCD readout panel has a soothing blue glow to it and shows you which mode of operation it is in; fan speed; pump speed; and water temperature.

There are 3 operation modes which are toggled by pushing the button on the side of the unit (yes, you'll have to open your case to get to it). The 3 modes are 'Quiet', 'Performance', and 'Full', with the only difference between them being the fan speed. The first two settings continuously adjust the fan speed to increase with temperature, but to varying degrees. Quiet mode is rated to operate within 1100 to 2500 RPM but in all my testing it never went much past 1200 RPM so was effectively silent. Performance mode operates within the same boundaries but much higher at any given temperature - I found it to settle around 1600 RPM during testing; also very nearly silent. Full mode just cranks the fan up to maximum speed - 2700 RPM - which is intolerably noisy.

Performance

To test the performance out of the ALC I've chucked it in my gaming rig and cranked up a healthy overclock on the CPU. After booting into Windows I've run Prime95 on both cores for one hour to stress the CPU and generate as much heat as possible - the highest temperature during this time is recorded as its "load" temp. This step was repeated 3 times, once for each of the 3 different operation modes, with the average taken for each setting. I then repeated the process with my Thermalright Ultima 90 air cooler, which is the little brother of the famous TR Ultra Extreme 120.

Accurate idle temps were not possible to gain because my CPU, like most Core 2 chips, gets stuck at a certain temperature so the lowest idle temp the CPU will report is 27'C (anything above this temp is reported correctly); this can be taken as the idle temp though if you wish, as I doubt it would have got much lower than that in the ~21'C ambient room temperature.

Test System
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 4275MHz, 1.32v CPU voltage
Mobo: Asus P5Q Pro @ 450Mhz FSB
RAM: 2x2GB G.Skill PK Series @ DDR2-1080 CL5
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 4770
Case: CoolerMaster Scout
PSU: Silverstone OP700

A real mixed bag of results here. My Ultima-90, which is no slouch when it comes to cooling and is roughly half the price of the Domino ALC, does an excellent job by keeping the heavily overclocked CPU under 50'C during the sustained loading. With the 92mm fan spinning at 1650 RPM it is also inaudible over my other components so I happily run this speed 24/7.

The Domino ALC beats, matches, and loses to the Ultima-90 at the 3 different operation modes. In Quiet mode, the CPU heats up to 56'C, which is still fine but not as good as the air cooler, whereas in Performance mode the ALC brings the temp down to 50'C which is on par with it. Lastly, in Full mode, the ALC really shines and knocks the CPU temp right down to 43'C. Very good result there, however it's at the cost of a very noisy fan speed.

After testing both units, I reseated the ALC in my system to run the stress tests again just to make sure that I hadn't seated it poorly the first time round. Sadly, no improvements were seen.

Conclusion

The important thing to note here is that we have only tested this unit with one CPU, at one setting against only one other cooler. A more diverse test against more coolers at many different CPU settings would certainly produce a different picture.

That said, I was expecting slightly better results from a watercooling system, even a relatively cheap one such as this. Having to sacrifice my eardrums to get the unit to really perform isn't something that appeals to me. Any sane person using this unit would run it on either Quiet or Performance mode most of the time, which means that you would be getting either the same or lower performance of a decent air cooler which costs half as much, on a highly-clocked dual core CPU like mine at least.

The unit does perform admirably, however, once the fan speed is cranked up to insane-o-max levels. It also comes with mounting brackets for all modern motherboards, even LGA1366/Core i7 boards, which not a lot of coolers currently do. Then there is always the bragging rights that come with having technology like watercooling (although any serious watercooling aficionado would laugh you out of town for boasting about having an "all-in-one"), and the pleasant blue glow from the main unit has some definite sex appeal.

So in the end - despite the fact that this unit has received rave reviews and even awards from other sources on the interwebs - I personally am not overly impressed by CoolIT's offering.

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Our thanks to PlayTech for the review sample.