Review : Asetek Vapochill Vapor Phase Cooling System

From a quality an functionality perspective, the new Vapochills have a much improved design. Certainly, they are not without a few draw-backs (give us real motherboard tray stand-offs and a slide out motherboard tray please!) but the design is to a point where the average enthusiast need not have an Electromechanical Engineering Degree in order to set the thing up. We have some reservations of what you have to go through to ensure your CPU doesn't have condensation problems (all that thermal paste on the pins was a little traumatic for us) but after a few tries at assembly and disassembly, we became much more comfortable with the setup and long term results. Then there is the aspect of noise level, which is a real strength for the Vapochill. Ultimately, we were able to dial in a setup that gave us top notch cooling performance, that was actually significantly quieter than our standard air-cooled rigs in the lab.

We spent some real quality time with this unit, in an effort to understand all its subtle nuances and niceties. In the end, we were able to crank our 2.8GHz Pentium 4 well beyond it's former air-cooled limit of just slightly over 3GHz. 3.3GHz fully stable and at less than ambient room temp left us feeling that the Vapochill can deliver on it's promise of helping you realize the fastest PC performance on the market today. The Asetek Vapochill Cooling System for the Pentium 4 and Athlon platforms, is a PC Hot Rodder's nirvana... It's cooler, faster and head-turning stylish.