Thermaltake Tide Water Review

Name: Thermaltake Tide Water
Brand: Thermaltake

W1zzard

on Oct 17th, 2005,

in Watercooling.

Manufacturer: Thermaltake

(13 Comments) »

Fan Noise

In order to give a measurement of how loud the fan is, we used an IEC651 Type II sound level meter on the dbA slow setting.

The distance between fan and sound level meter was 10cm. Please note that this is very little, compared to the "standard" measurements, which are made at 1m distance. We had to do this, to get proper readings with our sound level meter, because we obviously can't spend thousands of dollars on audio measuring equipment.

All tested fans were connected to an external 12V lab PSU. 12V is the maximum rated fan speed. Some motherboards/video cards use slower fan speeds and slowly ramp them up with temperatures. This is also the reason, why the X800 series seems to have such a "loud" fan. During normal usage its fan is usually running at 33% to 66%. That is why we also tested the video card fans at 50% (6 V).

The fan noise of the Thermaltake Tide Water is well comparable to that of the stock cooler, but at greatly reduced temperatures.

Value and Conclusion

Thermaltake is selling the Tide Water for $75, quite a step up from the air coolers, but watercooling has its price. However, this is still a lot less than the price of a regular watercooling kit which you can expect to go in the $200 range.

Great performance
Easy to install
Portable
Maintenance-free
Fairly quiet on the slow setting
Wide compatibility

Does not cool memory
Takes up a lot of space

If you are looking to overclock your NVIDIA or ATI videocard some more, this highly innovative cooler is a great solution, especially if you have problems finding the Artic Cooling Silencers in stores. People who have been scared of putting watercooling into their PC can now safely do it. The whole cooler is built very rugged - I see no way of how a leak could happen, except if you intentionally cut the tubing or drill holes in the tank.

The Tide Water's performance is good, better than all other air coolers on the market.
Just to clarify, this cooler can not reach the performance of highly sophisticated water cooling, costing hundreds of dollars (their pumps move about 20x as much water as the Tide Water's pump). However, just reducing temperature may not always give you a considerably higher overclock. If you already have a good cooler like an Arctic Cooling Silencer, you may want to spend this money elsewhere.