Cool-Computers Athlon K7 Waterblock

SUMMARY: A very nice waterblock that gave me a 100 MHz performance boost.

Craig over at Cool-Computers was nice enough to send us his all copper Athlon K7 waterblock. As you can see from the pic below, this baby is well secured by 8 bolts. The trick here is not to overtighten the bolts; what I do is sight down the connector edge to make sure that it does not bow. The other trick is to tighten all bolts equally – I do it by feel and it seems to work fine.

This pic shows the copper cache-spacers included with the block. Asembling this wedding cake is a little tricky – I found the best was was to start with the 4 end bolts first to position everything, tighten just enough to hold things in place, then add the center bolts.

The back uses small plastic spacers to keep the bolts from shorting the PCB.

I had an ASUS K7M that I was setting up for a friend, so I used that as the test platform. I have an air-cooled Athlon K7 550, 3.3ns cache, that was running at 700, but not much more than that. I used the Senfu radiator, modified for 3/8″ tubing, with the Danner 1.5 pump.

Oustanding temps at 1.85v! Running very cool and 100 MHz better than air-cooled performance. The cache chips and ratio limited performance to 800 MHz – maybe changing the ratio would get a little higher speed, but not much better performance. All told, Cool-Computers has built a very nice product.

NOTE: If you purchase this product and it difffers substantially from what is pictured here, please email me with pictures if possible. I have not received any complaints about Cool-Computers products.

Email Joe