Switech Apex Ultra & MCW60 Review

[madmat]

In computing we have many cooling options. Air, water and phase change being the most common in the enthusiast arena. Today we will be looking at a top grade kit from Swiftech and comparing it to a similarly configured kit from the competition and see if there is a clear winner or loser.

You can read the review here and discuss it here.

 

[werty316]

Damn thats one bad ass WC kit and it looks like it goes great with a TT case like the Armor or Kandalf. Great read.

 

[Jakal]

Hey now that's a nice wc kit! Even the high and mighty Danger Den fell to it's powah!

Swiftech has done very well with their water cooling setups. I guess you pay for performance though. The $260 price tag is a tad much to me, but definitely on par with DD's kits. Speaking of, what's the plans for the previous components?

 

[madmat]

The D.D. kit belongs to Vince who was kind enough to allow me to use his PC as a testbed.

The $260 is the kit itself, the MCW60's tip the scales at $63.00 each but they do include $19.95 worth of ramsinks with each one so that offsets the price back to $44.00 for the block alone. Which you can get them sans ramsinks.

Thanks for the kind words guys, this was a bugbear of a review.

 

[sbrehm72255]

Good read .... Glad to see more people liking the Swiftech stuff, I'm a huge fan of Swiftechs parts if you couldn't tell already.............
Swiftech might not be as pretty as Danger Den (no plexi tops) but I've also found that Swiftech products come with eveything you could ever need to install the kit and their mounting method takes all the guess work out of the install.
Strange that you didn't get both sets of barbs with the kit though, I got both with tne APEX kit when it first came out.

 

[madmat]

The only 3/8" barbs I got were with the MCW60's. None with the kit itself. You do know why Swiftech will never have plexi tops as long as Gabe's there don't you?

 

[sbrehm72255]

I haven't really asked, but I would expect because they do crack from time to time. But other than that, I have no idea...........

 

[madmat]

Gabe says that milling acrylic causes weakening and it's just a matter of time until those weak spots will fail. He doesn't want to have failures with his product line.

Machined Delrin doesn't have that problem so that's why they use Acetal for the Storm. Now that's a block I'd like to get my hands on

 

[sbrehm72255]

I've got a original version of the Storm, but I don't use it anymore. With multi blocks in the loop, I get better temps with the APOGEE/MCW60 combo than I did with the Storm/MCW60 combo. Granted it's not large differance, but it is measreable. The version 2 of the Storm isn't as restrictive as the frist, so maybe it will improve performance in a multi block loop.