Right on the heels of my video cards dying, I started to hear what I thought was a dying fan or a race bearing on one of the fans going bad, it was getting louder and louder.... and finally I cracked the case open, put on my stethoscope and used it to locate the loud and possibly dying fan.
I had this water cooling solution for my CPU called the CoolerMaster Aquagate S1. Pretty nifty and quiet cooling solution for the Intel Q8600 Quad processor.
Well anyways... the sound was coming from the part of the Aquagate S1 that was attached to the CPU. It was malfunctioning and barely moving the water across the CPU heatsink.
So, I had to take it out and replace it with something else while I got it repaired. Sadly the Aquagate S1 is out of warranty, and is also EOL (End of Life) so the company no longer repairs them or sells them either.
I wanted another water based cooling system, and felt that a quick cooling solution was in order, so picked up a CPU cooling fan also from CoolerMaster called the 'Hyper TX 2'.
It's actually a pretty good design and quiet fan. So I pulled the old water cooling solution out of there, threw it into a box and send an RMA request to CoolerMaster to see if I could get a replacement CPU pump for the Aquagate S1. So far... my request has met with deafening silence...
I was thinking of getting another CPU heat sink called the CM Sphere.
Looking at the thing, it looks like a big copper orange. They should have called it the CM Orange!
But - wasn't able to find it, and really it's a bad design anyways. It takes the fan on top, blows air INTO the middle of it, which then pushes it out. I think it looks cool, but functionality wise it sucks as far as air-flow direction.
The Hyper TX 2 actually works pretty good and pushes air through the cooling fins, and I have another fan just behind it pulling the hot air right out the case from there cooling it much better than the Aquagate S1 did.
I'll eventually replace the cooling fan with another liquid cooling solution, but not until I get another job. For now, its the Hyper TX 2.
