I’ve reviewed a number of watercooling kits and blocks and handled even more, but this would be the first time to review / install a full watercooling set, with all from the same brand.
When we were contacted by Gigabyte to review one of their kits I was thinking “Oh, hell here comes another bogged-up low-quality kit”, but these thoughts turned out to be premature.
When I first got the box I was a bit offset by the color and pictures on the box it was a little overkill of info for me but on the other side it does have all the information about what your actually buying and then some, it just has too much for my personal taste.
But don’t judge a book by its cover, so lets have a little look inside. You can already see most of the contents trough the plastic window in the box, upon closer inspection all the components are securely and safely packaged snugly fitted into a precut foam tray housing all the components.
From left to right, the radiator, pump and reservoir, 2 splitters, top right is the mosfet cooling fan and below that is the cpu waterblock itself, and a bottle with coolant. When removing the foam tray we find all the things needed to install this set, including an instruction manual in 8 different languages.
Features
- Large volume copper-base water-block
- Durable ceramic-bearing pump
- Low water-level protection (LWP) and over-temperature protection (OTP) (Patent pending)
- Transparent LED tank for refill visuals
- Large aluminum radiator with a 4-way water-path design
- Radiator quick-mount
- Multi-purpose Nano-scale GIGABYTE coolant
- 1/2 inch special flexible UV tubing
- Fully compliant with MOSFET cooling (Patent pending)
- GIGABYTE exclusive 4-way splitter valve for cooling upgrades
- PCI rear fan-speed controller
- Memory heat sinks includes
- Optimal chassis options: Gigabyte 3DAURORA series / Triton and Poseidon series
Gigabyte Galaxy II Liquid Cooling System Specifications
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Lets have a closer look at the contents inside the plastic bags we find all kinds of clamps heatsinks screws springs an arrangement of retention clamps hose pass-through PCI slot covers and a pump starting system thing ;) and my favorite a special filling cap for the coolant.
Lets go in detail about the various components, I first want to have a look at the splitter. First thing that comes to mind is WHY? A splitter? The idea isn’t bad if it wasn’t for the fact that water flowing usually goes trough the part with gives the least resistance, now I know the splitters can be used for add-ons for this kit but if there going to decrease the diameter of hose used I can see a bottleneck, personally id rather have seen a few Y or T hose connectors, but you can leave out the splitter altogether like I did.
Next up is the water pump / reservoir, the reservoir itself is made of a hard plastic and it has a filling / bleeding screw cap at the top, all water will go straight to the pump and will be introduced into the system via the bottom fitting.
The floater inside the radiator is hocked up internally to the pump as a failsafe, remember the pump starting system thingy I talked about well that’s where the magic happens ;) the small starter box is connected to the molex plugs of your power supply, you connect your pc case power button lead into the starter box and the other lead of the box onto your motherboards power on connector, leading into a failsafe mechanism, which will switch off your pc when the fluid level drops below a critical point.Which is also very handy if you forgot a hose clamp or anything in that matter. (most early watercooling users know the feeling of forgetting a hose and powering on the pump :X )
There are only 2 things I don’t like about the pump/reservoir combo and that’s is the fact that is has a hard plastic fitting instead of a metal screwing fitting, this just seems more prone to breaking, and the fact that you cant get near the pump without wrecking the reservoir, I always love to get to the moving parts of pumps for maintenance if needed and most important for extra anti vibration padding, as installing this kit I noticed some feedback of the pump vibrating into the case chassis.
Included with the kit is a bottle of coolant and if we follow the descriptions it’s a sort of antifreeze / anticorrosion mixture to prevent any algae and corrosion when using different metals (wich should be avoided at all time).
Funny side note if you read the directions the last line of the product description it contradicts itself I quote “In addition, this product is an environment-protection product, and it is safe to use. Only to discover that a few lines underneath it says “If the product accidentally comes in contact with eyes and skin, please flush the areas with clean water immediately. If the product is accidentally swallowed please seek medical treatment at once” I thought it was safe ?…. darn I was just feeling thirsty ;)
On a side note this fluid is not UV reactive instead the hose used is blue UV reactive.
Next up is the Mosfet cooling fan, this 80mm blue LED fan can be snapped on the cpu waterblock when its installed, to provide some airflow to cool the surrounding mosfets around the cpu socket with otherwise would get some flow by the use of a normal heatsink, now I can hear people saying but wait a minute I got one of those things with my motherboard, well yes so did I but it dint fit… I’ll show you later on in the review.
Let’s check out the CPU block itself. It is a basic copper watercooling block with loads of pins to increase the effective cooling surface. The top again is made of a kind of hard plastic, and again with solid hard plastic fittings running side to side, now again the same remark about the block as I did for the pump, it has no loose fittings, which seems more prone to snapping and cracking when using other clamps than the ones provided. Also the placement side to side looks like something that will bite us in the ass further on. I much rather see the fitting on top like 99% of the rest of the blocks available.
The bottom of the block reveals the cooling surface protected by a sticker to prevent scratches but mainly from fingerprints and corrosion, the surface looks smooth but you can clearly feel scratch marks with your fingernails so it’s not a smooth base it could use some lapping to level it.
And last but not least the radiator itself. Now here is something they thought about… or well… on the housing side that is.
The radiator is housed in a nice shroud that housed a 120mm fan and overall construction is very sturdy. The way this kit is designed is that you can use it without modifying your computer housing, so they have opted to used an extrernaly mounted radiator, using your standard-performing two-pass radiator. If you like you can dismantle the housing and use the radiator internally but you might end up modding your case a little.
Now here is one little big flaw they didn’t think about; they have used an aluminum radiator… which means if your coolant isn’t up to spec (or is contaminated) the copper block and aluminum radiator will eat each other through galvanic corrosion. This will end up in a defective radiator and heavily corroded copper water block. The same thing happened to me on a few older model blocks (see the results here).
Luckily they replaced the old series by new ones with Acetal/Delrin tops preventing the galvanic corrosion.
I haven’t been able to check out the long term effects on this set as it was build in for review purposes but I sure hope that Gigabyte will change the radiators into copper versions as this is a major design flaw in my opinion.
The way the radiator is mounted externally is through the use of a bracket; one side is screwed to the radiator housing and the other side is mounted on the power supply screw holes, you can feed the hoses trough the PCI cover plate provided (which also holds the potentiometer to in or decrease fan speed).
For usage with the socket 775 you need to use a retention backplate. Now I’m not a big fan of backplates for the fact that with the wrong stickers to hold them in place they are hard to remove if you want to get rid of it, but if you’re not as hardware swapping hungry as me then you should be ok, but removing this sucker does take some force.
Anyhow after sticking the plate in place you simply place the cooling block on your cpu and screw in the added screws tightening the springs to about 65% load (or just on feeling ) it’s always a good idea to add the hose to the fittings before installing the block to prevent stress on the CPU and motherboard.
Remember the mosfet cooling fan, and that you might have gotten one with your motherboard? Well this is the reason why you can’t use it, and also a design flaw of Gigabyte by not using fittings that stand upright, never the less they did provide you with a fan to cool the surrounding mosfet`s (or replace the once you got with your motherboard) which would normally get some air from your normal heatsink.
However the design flaw of the fittings might also help to prevent any kinks in the hose, on that side note Gigabyte added any kink springs which do their job very well.
Right so we installed the kit inside the pc housing with the usage of the quick installation guide wich has clear images and good explanation how to connect the various components, so anyone who can handle a set of screwdrivers can install this kit.
When in use it will take about half a liter of coolant so you still have some left to fill it back up when all the trapped air has bled from the system or when some of the coolant is gone, otherwise a good solution is to use denaturalized water or boiled tap water to get rid of impurity`s to refill the system.
So how does it perform? I kept the room temperature at a comfortable 20degree Celsius the system its meant to cool is an Intel Core2 Duo E6600 on an Asus P5W DH DELUXE motherboard running at stock speeds. Intel’s own Thermal Analysis Tool (TAT) was used to monitor the core temperatures using the watercooler and the stock Intel cooler. The Gigabyte Galaxy II was tested using both low and high fan speeds.
All the temperatures provided by Intel`s Thermal Analysis Tool, which reads the internal diodes on the CPU core, providing a much more exact measurement than many motherboard’s temperature sensors.
| Idle Fan High | Idle Fan Low |
| Load Fan High | Load Fan Low |
Gigabyte Galaxy II Liquid Cooler Performance
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As can be seen, the Gigabyte Galaxy II Liquid Cooling System has great cooling capacity and to be honest a lot better than I expected. It effectively cut the load temperatures by roughly 25 degree Celsius! Taking away the design flaws (and the use of an aluminum radiator) this is a great piece of kit, but this isn’t the most silent one out there. It isn’t exactly loud unless you crank up the radiator fan to maximum.
But for an average price of about 200 Dollars (139 Euros) this kit has great value for money as it has all you need to start your watercooling set, and with use of the splitters you can add new components like a graphics card cooler.
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3 Comment
i want know the propertys thermodinamic of water galaxy II
Core i7 45nm intel
I have lots of water cooling because Core i7 Speed heat, so must sure fix well. if not then try diff with bracket fits that all … and aslo keep look if anything will happan on leak! becuase it not support the Core i7 but mine one find becuase i know what i doing with system with size,Nm,Lever water, etc
Thank you for the review.
I have an i7-920 system with the X58A-UD7 mobo
Does this kit support the i7? I heard ppl installed it on an i7 cpu (the bracket fits, they say)
also, the mobo has a built-in NB water cooling support, can i install it to cool both CPU and the mobo or NB? do I need extra hoses?
Please help.. the box says i7 support