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VapoChill Impressions

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Conclusion

A quick search of google will return quite a few reviews of the VapoChill system and every one of them says about same thing, VapoChill works. You can attain subzero processor temperatures and get about a 20% performance increase across the board. Of course you will need to actually overclock the system to see these gains but for the hardware enthusiast that is part of the reason for buying one.

VapoChill operation was very quiet and as you can see from the screenshot a -12C running temperature will pretty much remove any heat related issues from your processor operation. This won't however guarantee any insane overclocks if your hardware isn't up for the task.

The system as it was tested

Soltek SL-85DR3 i845PE chipset
Pentium 4 2.4B processor
2x256 Corsair TWINX memory
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Maxtor D740X 40gig HDD
VapoChill Premium Edition, S478 Titanium

The highest overclock I could get from the system was 156Mhz FSB, anything higher would render the system unbootable oftentimes freezing at POST. On the plus side the system ran completely stable at 155Mhz FSB with no voltage adjustments at all. Knowing that many Pentium 4 2.4B processors run quite a bit faster than this I can only conclude that some other system component is at fault, I'm going to say the problem is likely the processor or motherboard.

Despite my overclocking issues the VapoChill system really works quite well and for those if you wanting to get the most out of your systems VapoChill might be just the thing you need.

Here is the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.

The Good Things

Subzero processor cooling
Stylish case
Quiet operation
Configurable chill controller

The Bad Things

Cost
Very heavy case
Stylish case
Strange choice for case material
Huge plastic front panel
Did I say it was really heavy?

Ninjalane Rating - VapoChill System

Ninjalane Rating - VapoChill Case

I would like to thank the guys at Misr Corps for helping to make this review possible. Check out their online store for all of your VapoChill needs.

Links

VapoChill Website http://www.vapochill.com/
System Overview http://www.vapochill.com/main/page.asp?sideid=267
Cooling Cycle http://www.vapochill.com/main/page.asp?sideid=200
What is VapoChill http://www.vapochill.com/main/page.asp?sideid=229