A few weeks ago we took a look at the Asetek Waterchill watercooler and liked it enough to give it our highest award (review here). Toke was kind enough to send us the two extra peripheral components, namely the Chipset Waterblock and the VGA Waterblock. With graphics cards getting louder and louder (the 5800 FX will go down in history for all the wrong reasons), watercooling is becoming a more realistic alternative every day. Northbridge chipsets don’t push out nearly as much heat as a graphics card or CPU, but start upping the voltage and MHz and you will be surprised just how warm they get.
Both coolers come in cuboid cardboard boxes containing the copper waterblocks, some instructions and a small polyethylene bag. This contains mounting screws, some plastic nuts and a large sachet of Vapochill compound (review here).
They can be purchased as additional components for the Waterchill CPU kit, as part of a complete kit featuring all 3 blocks, or as a graphics-card only waterblock.
The chipset cooler features two of the same push-lock fixtures as the CPU block, and they are arranged in the same perpendicular manor. It has elongated mounting holes for maximum compatibility with motherboards, although motherboards with Pentium-4 style connectors are not supported. This is a shame, as if anything, the Canterwood chipsets would benefit the most from this form of extreme performance cooling. You can of course epoxy the waterblock onto the chipset itself, or some of the guys on Asetek's forums have engineered a zip-tie method of attatching the block to this kind of chipset.
The copper section of the graphics card cooler is exactly the same as the Northbridge cooler, although it differs from then on. The plastic top section has two holes. One set for ATi cards, including the 9700 and 9800 Pro cards. The other set is for nVIDIA cards, whose mounting holes are further apart.
