Even More Thermaltake
Thermaltake is introducing a line of products with the LCS moniker that will indicate a “liquid cooling system” is built into the case design and comes with it. The above case is the Armor LCS that has integrated liquid cooling quite well.
The Kandalf LCS stores the radiator and fans on the front door of the case; a very unique placement though quiet fans are required if the case sits out in view of the user during operation. It does make the inside and back of the system much more tidy.
This weird looking piece of machinery is the Discovery FX, an upcoming case design. The part of the case that houses the components is pretty standard, but the bulbous addition on the front is obviously not. That is where the radiator, reservoir and fans are stored. The special feature here is that you can access the reservoir by simply opening up the front door on the case and refill it whenever necessary without a need to shutdown the system or uninstall any coolers.
Thermaltake will be introducing a new line of coolers that will be focused on specific platforms. Instead of buying a single heatsink fan that has 19 different adaptors for each socket on the market, these will be associated with either the S775 socket or the AM2 socket and built specifically for those retention mechanisms.
Thermaltake just keeps on coming, this time with some very interesting water cooling products for graphics cards. The Tide Water series will offer completely enclosed, maintenance free (for at least one year) liquid cooling solutions for GPUs. You can see the basic idea above is to put the reservoir, fan, pump and radiator in an enclosure that fits in a PCI slot and can then expel air out of the case like a slot fan does.
These units will NOT draw power from the motherboard, even though I thought that might be a good idea. Thermaltake doesn’t want these cooling products to in anyway affect the stability of the system, so power will be drawn from the regular 4-pin Molex connectors on the power supply. This Tide Water Plus unit can dissipate up to 200 watts, on two graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire mode. It does require a seating of two PCI slots however, and would take up the remaining space in nearly all SLI/CrossFire systems. There is another unit that cools the same 200 watts with only a single GPU connection and makes the most sense for a single GPU configuration that is highly overclocked.
For standard water cooling setups Thermaltake is also offering a very high performance waterblock for both high end ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. You’ll notice the blocks don’t just cool the GPU, but also the memory as well which is key for today’s high speed memory.
The BigWater 760i is a water cooling unit that fits into two 5.25″ drive bays and is basically self contained from there on out. Interestingly, we heard a rumor that this kind of cooling setup might be a necessity for an upcoming ATI graphics card that is planned to require 300 watts of power dissipation in order to operate, thus requiring a liquid cooler.
