Analysis
- The Tide Water is capable of reducing the graphics processor temperature by a considerable amount. While the stock cooler keeps the graphics chip at 140-160°F (60-70°C), Tide Water keeps the temperature between 96-111°F (36-44°C) using a Radeon X800XL. As expected, the cooling efficiency is very good. At the same time, Tide Water is noticeably more quiet than the factory installed fan.
- Additional heat caused by an overclocked GPU did not influence the temperature levels much, because the thermal dissipation was still well below the 120 W that is specified by Thermaltake.
- The difference between the low and the high fan speed settings did not have a temperature impact worth mentioning, at least with our graphics card model. However, the high speed setting is noisy.
- The unit can be used with virtually any graphics card that is available today. However, we recommend against using Tide Water on high-end graphics cards unless you take care of cooling the graphics memory some other way. Unfortunately, Thermaltake has simply ignored this issue.
- There is one other constraint, though: the Tide Water requires two adjacent 32-bit PCI slots to be available for properly securing the unit. You likely will not be able to use two Tide Water units for dual graphics solutions, because there simply won't be enough space, nor two adjacent PCI slots available.
- The rubber tubes are fairly skinny, which is why we recommend against running the Tide Water for more than a year (10,000 hours) without checking the coolant level. Liquids do evaporate through rubber materials, especially if the tubes are thin.
- Due to the attractive street price of $75, there is no chance that Thermaltake could have used a high-quality pump - these typically come at purchase prices of $25 and up. Hence, we are sure the company uses an aquarium type pump, which is not suitable for high-end solutions.
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