Evga CLC 120 CPU cooler

Mister E

Mister E

2[H]4U
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Sep 14, 2004
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I’ve never water cooled anything before. The other day I get a coupon from evga saying I can get 30% off certain items. Among them is the cooler in the thread title.

So I looked around and found very little in the way of reviews. What I did find suggests this cooler will at least be a tad better than the cheap CoolerMaster air cooler I’m using now. And it would take up way less space. I bought it for 70 bucks shipped.

Why this small single fan & radiator cooler and not a 240 or 280? It’s the only one that will fit my case. It’s going to be mounted on the rear exhaust port after I remove the hard wired 120mm case fan. I should just buy a new, huge and awesome tempered glass case (drool) but this old Antec 902 has one big advantage. It can move a shit ton of air with a reasonable noise level. And I like it. A lot of folks think it’s ugly but I don’t care.

Opinions on this please. I’d like to hear from those with experience using small closed loop coolers. Did I waste my money on this? I’m hoping I didn’t. I’d like to push my chip to the magically delicious 5 gigasquirt g-spot. :woot:

Thank for reading.
 
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Well, honestly you will probably see about equal performance between those two coolers. The benefit of having a CLC is that you will exhaust the hot air out the back of the case. But I wouldn't hold my breath with regards to the unicorn 5GHz. Ymmv of course.
 
You might get 5ghz but I doubt it'll actually be stable unless you can push magically low voltage and you are delidded. I think that system will heatsoak pretty quickly and put you in the same spot as the 212+. Waterblocks certainly can help slow the rise of temps but with the capacity on a water loop like that you're not really going to have better performance in use but you might be able to boot 5ghz and maybe even run a benchmark.
 
Any other thoughts or opinions on this?

In the end if it can do a bit better than the current cheap air cooler I think it’ll be worth it if only for atheistics.
 
Hell for 30% off, I would take a shot at it. Only thing you would lose is the time invested swapping coolers out. Don't expect miracles with single 120mm AIO. Might get somewhat better temps with push/pull, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Give it shot. Worse case scenario, you might shave off a few degrees with less noise.
 
My experience with 120mm radiators is that you get better cooling running with a push/pull fan setup, but when you do that, you have about 75-85mm of overhang over your board depending on the fans and the size of the radiator. With one fan, it probably performs about how a good tower cooler would perform, so you're really looking at it for the aesthetics. Probably need a good chip that doesn't need a lot of voltage or a delid to hit 5Ghz.
 
Thanks for the reply’s. It gets here later next week. I’m going to gut my case, clean it, reassemble, do further cable management and then I’ll post back with the results.

If it turns out to be shit I guess I could return it. It would be the first evga product I ever sent back.
 
Mister E said:
Thanks for the reply’s. It gets here later next week. I’m going to gut my case, clean it, reassemble, do further cable management and then I’ll post back with the results.

If it turns out to be shit I guess I could return it. It would be the first evga product I ever sent back.
Click to expand...

Nice! Be sure to post pics too!
 
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