Asetek Vapochill XE II

Do you think your processor is running a little too hot?
Have you tried water cooling but think it’s a little too weak? Do you want to
push the limits and squeeze the last megahertzes out of your system? Then this
could be a product for you.

Do you think your processor is running a little too hot?
Have you tried water cooling but think it’s a little too weak? Do you want to
push the limits and squeeze the last megahertzes out of your system? Then this
could be a product for you.

Most people today have heard of the company Asetek. If not, you can usually
hear a bell ringing if Waterchill is mentioned, or even Vapochill which was
the company’s original product. At the beginning, Asetek was only offering Vapochill
in their selection. Nowadays they’ve widened a lot and keep many water cooling
products, compete kits and some other compressor cooling devices in their selection.
Today we’re taking a look at their newest creation in phase change cooling devices,
Vapochill XE II, their most powerful solution so far, almost. Actually, they
have a more powerful creation in store, Vapochill Lightspeed, but that’s an
external solution. On this product, everything is mounted in a case and you
only need to put in your components.

In this niche there are no direct competitors. There’s a company that delivers
complete phase change solutions, ECT (Extreme Cooling Technologies), earlier known
as nVentiv, even earlier known as ChipCon (almost a bit tedious, isn’t it?),
though they only have external devices in their product range and only compete
against Asetek’s external solution (Lightspeed). Lack of competition is normally
not good in the customer’s perspective, but you could also think that one
manufacturer is better than none at all. There are matching cases to both Asetek’s
Lightspeed and ECT’s solution, but then you have to put it together on your
own responsibility, which is not the case here, since everything’s already mounted.

First of all we will do a very concise (very concise, since we’re
going to explain phase change cooling more thoroughly in the future here at NH)
summary on how a cooling device based on compressors really works and why it
gives such low temperatures.

We’ll begin by looking at air cooling, the most common method of cooling the
processor, and watercooling, probably the second most common. They have one
thing in common; they use a constant medium, which means that no transformation
takes place (no material changes form from i.e. solid to liquid or liquid to
gas form).



Air cooling
An ordinary heatsink with fan, the most occuring form of cooling. The
heatsink leads the heat from the processor to a larger number of fins with a
significantly larger surface area than the processor itself. A fan blows (in
some cases suck) air over/through the fins that are cooled and hot air flows
out.



Water cooling
Water cooling has a certain advantage. Water is first and foremost
a better medium than air when it comes to transferring and storing heat. We
can use water to transport the heat away from the processor faster, and we transfer
the water to a radiator, a heatsink for the water that can be a lot bigger than
there is space for if you make sure it would have been seated directly on the
processor.



Phase change
Now we’re getting to something here. Here we can get below the room/ambient
temperature, which isn’t possible with air nor water. How is this possible then?
We use the larger amount of energy required to make matter pass from liquid
to gas. Here’s a simple experiment to understand. Wave strong with your hand
in the air. It will get cooler. Put some acetone on your hand and wave. Feels
pretty cool, doesn’t it? acetone boils off pretty fast (evaporates is a more
common word) and when it does (going from liquid to gas form), the acetone uses
heat energy from your hand, which gets cold. It works with water aswell, but
it’s a significant difference with acetone, which feels a bit cold even when
you’re not waving with your hand. In a compressor cooling device acetone isn’t
used, but some different cooling mediums such as R404 and R507, mediums that
have a boiling point in the lower subzero area.

So you “pour” a liquid onto your processor, or more precise in the
cooling head that is fastened to the processor where the liquid boils off and
becomes a gas form. This is the process that cools your processor. For the whole
thing to work in a sealed system you have to make the gas revert to liquid form
so that you can “pour” it again. This is where the compressor comes
in. It compresses the gas under pressure. Under pressure, the gas gets warm
and we cool it off with the condensator (the radiator) which makes it pass to
liquid again which once again goes to the processor. A simplified principal
sketch looks like this:

[Editor’s note: CPU -> Compressor -> Condenser]

Of course there’s a little more than this that makes a compressor cooling
device, like capillary tubes, the proper cooling mediums, effect and so on,
but we’ll stop here and get back to compressor cooling devices in the future.
Enough about the introduction and background information. It’s time to take
a closer look at Vapochill XE II!

That looks kind of nice, doesn’t it? Even though there is no Socket A support
I doubt anyone will miss it, since a cooling-equipment of this caliber and
price isn’t really necessary on an older Socket A system. The main objectives
are instead AMD64, AMD FX and Intel Prescott with socket 939, 775 and 754. The
number of external 5,25” bays may seem few, but really, how many of us
are using more than 3 external 5,25″ bays? Besides, this solution is
mainly for overclockers and such, not as much for modders and gamers, who are
in a bigger need of external bays.

Here’s a diagram from Asetek themselves that shows what kind of
temperatures we can expect with the XE II:

We’ll be testing with an FX 53, it’ll be interesting to see
how well the temperatures on the diagram correspond with our temperatures. But
of course, there are a lot of differences concerning methods, the surrounding
temperature, mounting and so on, but hopefully the results won’t be too far
from Asetek’s diagram.

And here’s the unit at all its glory:

On the next page we’ll take a look under the hood and
see what the Vapochill Extreme Edition II has to offer.