Asetek KT03A-SL35 Extreme WaterChill review

The asetek KT03A-SL35 can be viewed in a variety of ways. The obvious and enthusiast oriented option is around overclocking. A huge radiator, 3 fans means tons of cooling and big overclocks. You can also view the asetek KT03A kit as a way to provide excellent cooling for a variety of blocks with very little, if any, noise. For instance you can buy the kit now and then later get a couple HDD waterblocks and start cooling the chipset with no concern over the increase in system wattage. How you view this kit is entirely up to you and as our benchmarks show the KT03A-SL35 excels in all capacities very well.

A couple of things to note about the KT03A-SL35 kit are around the installation of the cooler. As you may have guessed the radiator is fairly large and will not fit in the traditional location. According to our measurements the radiator fits quite well when placed across the top of any standard case, though due to powersupply and drive placement this location may need to be external rather that internal. Another thing to note is the size of the included reservoir; while this won't effect cooling it was rather small and holds as much water as a standard "t-line". Personally we like our systems to have something larger like a bayres or Criticool WaterPlant.

The only real problem we had with this kit is related to power. The asetek relay kit comes with two voltage settings for the built in fan header, 12v and 7v. 12v is a standard setting but 7v is a little different in that it uses one rail from the 12v side and one rail from the 5v volt side. It would seem that when the relay was set to 7v there where times when the system would not start. Moving the jumper to 12v would remedy this and the voltage could be changed once the system was running. It would seem that the added draw from running 3 120mm fans off this header would short out our powersupply and shut the system down. There are plenty of ways to solve this with one of our popular options being the use of a fanbus with a thermally controlled option.

Now for the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.

Top notch cooling capacity
Easy to assemble
Relatively quiet cooling
Great upgrade potential
Not all tops fit all systems

Radiator is quite large, limits installation options
3 fans = 3x the noise
Increased power demands

I would like to thank asetek for helping to make this review possible.