We will be comparing Swiftech's H20-120 against CoolIT's Freezone and Eliminator hybrid TEC/water cooling systems, which we think are targeted to the same demographic as the H20-120 Compact. The Eliminator has a similar price, about $30 more than the Swiftech H20-120. At $320, the Freezone is much more expensive, about $170 more than the Swiftech unit, but we'll include the results for reference anyway.

When we tested the CoolIT Eliminator and Freezone in a previous review, we wanted to concentrate on how they stacked up against a true fully featured water-cooling system. However some of our readers expressed an interest in seeing how these systems compare to aftermarket air coolers, so we will be including Cooler Master's HyperTX 2 air cooler in our benchmarks. Our readers also asked that we use these coolers on higher overclocks, so this time around we're trying the competitors on an overclocked 3.68 GHz e6750 CPU.

The Swiftech H20-120 Compact will run its fan at 12v unless a 7v adapter is used. We tested the Swiftech with and without the 7v adapter.

Testing was done in a Gigabyte Aurora case with two 120mm exhaust fans on the back and a single 120mm intake fan on the front. One of the rear 120mm exhaust fans was removed to test the Freezone, Eliminator, and H20-120 because they had their own fans that required the space.

All testing was done at an ambient temperature of 23.5 degrees Celsius. Load temperatures were measured with a 20-minute run of Orthos.