Watercooling the Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5

by Dark Mantis

Well after building the system and then running the various tests on it to see how it would respond I decided my next endevour would be to watercool it.



This was a bit of a trial as it was only a small testbench case and watercooling calls for a lot more components to be fitted in. Out came the Gigabyte G-Power 2 pro cooler and in went a Alphacool 655 Pump with EK head, Phobya 5.25 single reservoir, Phobya G-Changer 280 radiator with dual 140 mm XIGMATEK XLF fans, Aquacomputer Water Filter, Swiftech XT CPU block and Primochill Primoflex 10 mm Primochill Primoflex black hose.



The Alphacool pump is extremely powerfull and when coupled with the EK head unit I was able to use my preferencial size of Primoflex pipe which is not normally possible on these pumps as they have standard fixed ports of 1/2". I had to turn the pump down to about half it's rated output to run smoothly and silently.



I decided on a Phobya 140 mm width radiator as it made better use of the size and although these are far from cheap they are real beasts and have no real impact on the flow. I fitted two XIGMATEK XLF 140 mm fans with a maximum 63.5 CFM at 1000 RPM. They are attractive fans with white LED highlights that have the desired effect. They seem to be very efficient and this was the first but will not be the last time I have used them. I have them connected to the directly to the PSU as is favourite.



The Phobya 5.25" reservoir fitted nicely above the PSU and was at the top for ease of filling. With a couple of UV LEDs installed it looks the business as well as being supremely functional. There is a choice of three inlet ports and one outlet so it is also versatile.



I connected everything up with the aid of EK Black compression fittings. They just look so much more tasteful than the shiny silver variety and I was impressed by how much extra grip they had on the pipe even before screwing the cap down. They also have a neat little EK logo stamped on them.



The filter made by Aquacomputer is a lovely bit of kit and this is the first time I have incorporated a filter into one of my loops. It was something I always thought was a good idea to stop "gunge" blocking the fine matrixes of the cooling blocks and performance deteriorating because of it. However prior to this filter coming onto the market I had never liked the inline type that were available as they had a much smaller filter diameter and would restrict the flow especially when they became partly clogged as they are supposed. Well that's the theory I will let you know if it works the same in practice!



Of course all this led to the Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5 motherboard with an Intel i5 2500K chip and CPU waterblock by Swiftech the XT which I have modified a little to increase the flow as I found it rather restrictive. I ground down the fine matrix a little to give more free flow at the cost of a small amount heat transfer performance.



Talking about performance I expect you are wondering how the watercooling compared to the aircooling that was fitted previously. So I did some more tests. Firstly I ran the system at stock speeds and took screenshots of both idle and stressed levels. I used Prime95 to load the processor to 100% for these tests. Secondly I overclocked the system to 4.6 GHz and then re ran the same tests and took more pictures. My room had an ambient temperature of 22 degrees for the stock speed testing and then 25 degrees by the time I did the overclocked readings.



Basically the stock temps were ambient 22, Idle 22, stressed 36 -38 degrees. So these have dropped about 3 degrees when idle and 4 - 6 degrees when stressed.



The overclocked temperatures were ambient 25, Idle 30 and stressed at 51 degrees. These have also fallen and now are idle at 5 degrees lower and stressed at about 4 degrees lower. I would like point out here that when I did the original test with the Gigabyte G-Power 2 Pro aircooler the ambient was lower and I did notice that the Prime95 setting wasn't at 100% so if anything the differences would have been greater.