Innovatek is a German company which produces watercooling setups for computers, watercooling has become more available and used recently due to the benefits that it has. There are many reasons why watercooling is much better than conventional air cooling setups.
With watercooling your system is almost always more quiet than that of air cooling, your CPU will stay much colder than it ever will with air, and with watercoling you are able to push more voltage into your CPU than that of air cooling because the heat is able to be reabsorbed into the water and released through the radiator.
There are some negative aspects to watercooling along with the many benifts however, watercooling does not come cheap if you are going to get anything that isnt junk and leaks can arise from improper seals or poor quality parts and watercooling is more difficult to install than your everyday heatsink.
The Innovatek set that I recieved from Sharka Corporation was set 2 which will work for socket 462 (A) or socket 370 which means you can use this set with a Duron, Thunderbird, Athlon XP, and Pentium III, you can also order a kit which will work for your Pentium 4 socket 478 CPU. Kit 2 includes everything that you would need to get up and running which is the following.
- InnovaCool rev3.0 for Socket 462 (A) or Socket 370
- one Maxxxpert 120mm radiator with 120mm fan
- one 120mm fan
- one 120mm fan guard
- One Eheim 1046 water pump (79 Gallons per hour)
- One aluminum filling tank
- 10 ft of 8mm ID (3/8″ outside diameter) PVC tubing
- one 3-to-4 pin Molex power adaptor 9) fittings and accessories
The box is cool looking and about the size of a large shoe box, I opened it up and found the instructions and tubing on the top of the foam, because the company is in Germany the instructions are in German which is bad thing because I and most people don’t speak German. This is a very easy thing to fix and I think Innovatek should really take the time, translate it to English and provide both languages. Because of this problem Sharka Corporation has written up an installation guide for the kits which can be found on their site, also this review should be able to help you through the installation procedure.
The kit is really nicely packed inside of a lot of foam which is nice to see because if you are going to be spending the money on expensive watercooling parts you don’t want them to get damaged in shipping. I will take a look at the individual parts in more detail throughout the review but if you are curious as to what is what lets just go over it real quick. The accessories are at the top left of the kit the filling tank is next to that and the waterblock is at the top left hand corner. The fan is right below the fill tank and water block and the pump is right below the fan, and the radiator is to the left of the pump.
The waterblock is called the InnovaCool Rev. 3 it can be used on Socket 462 (A) and Socket 370 CPUs. The waterblock when I first looked at it didn’t look like it would perform so well and it looked like it would be horrible to install but we will see that is not true later in the review. The clip mechanism uses all 6 tabs on the socket so that it can apply a good amount of even pressure over the core of the CPU. The block has a solid copper core which is protected with a piece of plastic so that it doesn’t get scratched to ensure the best contact with your core.
The Innovatek kit comes with a Maxxxpert 120mm radiator which can sometimes be referred to as a cube. This radiator will hold one or two 120mm fans on it depending on how much cooling you want and how much noise you are willing to put up with.
The radiator has the dimensions of 5 3/4″ x 4″ x 4 3/4″ which is not too large and should be easy to fit into almost any case. One thing that I don’t really like about this radiator is that the ends connections don’t have barbs on them its just copper tubing which will make it more prone to leaking if not connected well. The kit comes with 10 ft of 8mm ID (3/8″ outside diameter) PVC tubing which is somewhat small in but it will work for this setup and you get more than enough to setup your system.
You get a Y.S. Tech 120mm fan model number: FD1212255B-2F and a fan grill so you don’t cut your fingers off. The Y.S. Tech fan is 2200 RPM while pushing 92 CFM of air and making 39 dB of noise this is a good fan for watercooling because you should usually have around 100CFM blowing through your radiator for the best results, also the noise level isn’t really too bad with this fan and if you were to hook up some kind of fan control device which I always do you will be able to turn the speed of the fan up and down depending on what you are doing with your computer.
Eheim is the best choice for a pump with a watercooling system even though they are designed for aquariums and such. The reason I really like these pumps is because the push a lot of water, they are quiet, and the barbs are really easy to change even if you are not using an Innovatek kit. The Innovatek set comes with an Eheim 1048 pump which will push 79 Gallons per hour and comes with connections that you need to install to the pump which is designed for Innovatek parts.
The bag of accessories has a lot of stuff in it, it has a 3-4 pin connector with RPM monitoring capabilities, 4 elbow fittings so you can have your tubes run at a 90 degree angle in four places if you need to, 8 fan screws, 10 zip ties to make all of your tubing nice and neat, 2 fittings which are used on the pump and silicone compound which will work but if your going to go with watercooling why not spend a few more bucks on some Arctic Silver 3.
I like that you get all of the accessories that you would expect to get so that you don’t have to buy them separately and end up spending more money that you don’t need to because you will need almost all of this stuff if not all of it to set up your watercooling system.
Installation of this kit will probably take you a little while, especially if you have not ever done watercooling before, but that’s ok, take your time because you don’t want to try and go fast and end up getting a leak. I will not be installing this system into my case as you will probably want to but I will be doing the same installation procedure as you will be doing so you should be able to use this as a guide.
Before you begin shoving everything in your case and cutting the tubing go ahead and unplug your system and take it somewhere where you will have a lot of room to work, take all of your parts out of the box and just see where you want to put them and how they will fit and figure out where everything is going to go before you start installing.
After you have figured out where you are going to put everything inside your case then the fun can begin. Also if you have a small case you may not be able to fit everything into it and will have to have some part outside of the case so don’t worry if it all doesn’t fit in.
You will need to mount the 120mm fan and grill on the side of the radiator with the 8 screws provided, it will probably be best to install the fan on the side without the barbs because it will be easier to install later into the case. You can also always use another fan on the radiator so that one is pushing air through and the other is pulling it out, however this not usually produce any better results than one does.
The pump that comes with the kit is an Eheim 1046 which as I said is made for aquariums and can be either submerged in water or use the tubes that come with the kit. To use the reservoir that comes with the kit you will need to remove the silver housing on the end of the pump because it is in the way of where the reservoir needs to be. To remove the silver housing from the pump all you need to do is basically pull it off, put it back in the box after you do just incase you want to use it later or RMA it.
The pump that you get with your kit may or may not have a fitting in where the silver housing is. If your pump has a fitting on it you will need to take them off because you will need to use the fittings that came with the Innovatek kit because they are designed to fit with all of the other parts.
After you have taken off the silver housing and the fitting which might already be on the pump you will need to take the 2 silver fittings that came with the Innovatek kit and install them to the top of the pump. You will also need the reservoir, to install that to the pump all you need to do is basically jam it on to the end of the pump. The easiest way to go about this is to twist it onto the pump in a clockwise direction. After you have the Innovatek fittings and the reservoir attached to the pump it should look something like the picture below.
Now that you have your Innovatek watercooling parts all setup you are now ready to install them. The first thing I would do is to install your waterblock to your motherboard. Earlier I said that this block looked like it would be a pain to install, well I couldn’t be more wrong. This waterblock is so simple to install I was baffled. All you have to do is unscrew the knob a little bit, place the block on and then tighten it down. There is no need to take your motherboard out and install nylon screws or anything at all which is really cool. Be sure to use some kind of thermal compound I would recommend using Arctic Silver 3 because it is the best thermal compound on the market.
After you have the waterblock installed you should find a place to install your pump inside your case. Placement of your pump really depends on your case. For the testing of this setup I didn’t install it to my case but in my own personal watercooling system at home I have the pump in the front of the case.
With these Innovatek setups it is probably going to be best to install the pump to the front bottom of the case if you have a full tower and if you have a smaller tower you will probably have to put it right next to the motherboard. For the purposes of this review I put the pump outside of the case which you can also do if your case is not big enough.
The radiator that comes with the innovatek is pretty small in comparison to most of the other radiators on the market so it should make installation much easier. The best place for the radiator in a full tower is usually on top of the power supply and if you have a smaller tower you can most likely fit it in the front bottom of the case. It is also good when you have your radiator setup inside of your case so that the fan can be pulling air from the outside of the case into the case and through the radiator so that the radiator is getting good fresh cool air instead of re-circulated warm air. The best place in this case that I am using would be right in the front where it is in the picture but in the case.
When you have the location of all your parts chosen you can then hook everything up. The best way to set all of this up is so that the pump is pushing water into the radiator then out of it to the CPU and then back to the pump. this is best because all of the heat from the CPU that is in the water will be taken out by the radiator and the CPU will then get colder water.
If you are using one of Innovatek’s Graph-O-Matics which are for the northbridge and video card your water will be heated up by them and passed onto the CPU. The most ideal thing if you are going to go all out is to have 2 radiators, one if which is for the CPU and the other for the northbridge or video card. Now that we have all the explanation out of the way lets set this thing up.
I connected it all together and everything went pretty well. I don’t like the fact that the radiator does not have any barbs or good connection device on it to cut down on the possibility of leaking. You are provided with zip ties which could be used for this purpose but barbs or Innovatek’s connection system would have been better.
Filling up the system is pretty easy, you should always use distilled water with any watercooling setup so if you don’t have any run to your super market and get some. You should also use a funnel while filing up your reservoir so you don’t spill all over the place. To fill it up just pour some water in until the reservoir is full and then plug the pump in. This will not be enough water to power the system so continue to fill the system until the reservoir is full and stays full. Now that you have your kit installed it is really important to test it without the system running to make sure there are no leaks.
The best way to do this is after you are all done setting up your system and have it installed go ahead and plug the pump in with the computer off and let it run overnight just to make sure there are no leaks, put a paper towel around or under where the connections are so that you can tell if there is a leak. I tested my system for only about an hour and at that time I did find a leak on the radiator which means I needed to tighten it up a bit so that it wouldn’t happen when I was actually using my computer.
Test bed:
- EPoX 8K3A+
- 256MB Xtreme 3200DDR
- 1.33GHz Thunderbird
- 3DPower Geforce 3
- 80GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD
- Sound Blaster Live! Value
- 10/100 NIC
For the testing of this watercooling setup I used the above test bed and will be using external Compunurse thermal probe for the temperature readings. To get the idle temperatures I booted up the computer and let it idle for about 20 minutes and to get the load temperatures of each speed I used Prime 95 for about 20 minutes. I was really impressed with how well this kit worked, I have a custom watercooling setup and didn’t think that this Innovatek would stand up very well but it was right there with my setup, lets take a look at some numbers.
I started by doing some testing at stock speeds and I got really good results the idle temp was only 23 degrees Celsius and at load it was only 28 degrees Celsius which is really impressive not only because its really cold but because it is basically silent which is something I really like.
After testing at stock speeds I wanted to see what this kit was really capable of, the EPoX 8K3A+ allows for a very high Vcore without having to do any MODs so I went ahead and cranked the Vcore up to 2.00v which without watercooling would be almost impossible. I went for the highest overclock possible and after playing around with voltages, multipliers, and FSB I was able to reach a top speed of 1.5Ghz which is really nice.
After I got everything nice and stable I went ahead and re-benchmarked, I was again impressed to see that the idle temperature was only 28 degrees and the load temperature was only 30 degrees, keep in mind this is also with a 2.00 Vcore!
Conclusion
To be totally honest at first I didn’t think that this kit would perform well because it didn’t look to have the greatest parts. As soon as I started actually installing the kit I was surprised how well it all worked and when I did the testing I was really pleased with the results.
The entire kit is really good, the waterblock doesn’t look like it is good but it is the easiest that I have ever installed and it performs really well. All of the other parts included are also really good and perform well. If you are looking for a cooling solution that will keep your CPU really cold even with a lot of voltage in it and will also be silent in the process watercooling is the only way to go and if you don’t want to put a kit together yourself this complete kit will work really well for you.
The only real negative aspect to any watercooling setup as with this one is the price factor. If you want one of these kits you are going to have to shell out over $200 but the money is well worth it aI guarantee. Overall I am going to give this kit a 9/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval, Sharka Corporation carries almost every Innovatek product so head on over and pick some up.
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