Raijintek Atlantis Series Custom Loop Water Cooling Review




/ 8 years ago

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Introduction


Raijintek Atlantis Series Custom Loop Water Cooling Review

Air cooling is big business, with the majority of systems running some kind of stock or tower air cooler to get the job done, and this is perfectly fine as air is more than capable of running a systems cooling needs, at least for most people. Up from that, you’ve got AIO water coolers, offering increased cooling performance that can keep your system running cooler and quieter, as well as giving you headroom to overclock your system. However, today we’ll be going to the top level with custom loop water cooling hardware from Raijintek, taking a look at the latest components in their Atlantis series.

The Atlantis series features blocks, pumps, reservoirs, and liquid, giving you all the core components required for a custom loop cooling system, with the exception of needing to source your own radiators, fans, and tubing, but that’s easily done.

Raijintek Atlantis Series

  • RAI-R10 10CM Reservoir
  • RAI-PM5 Pump
  • GWB-C1 GPU Water Block
  • CWB-C1 CPU Water Block
  • RAIAQUA-T1 Fluid

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Today we’ll be using the latest Raijintek hardware to build ourselves a custom loop, and while custom loop hardware performance can vary wildly based on the radiators, fans and other hardware you use, we’ll be looking for easy of installation, build quality, style and many other aspects here today to make our judgement. So let’s get to the good stuff, open some boxes and take a closer look at what we have.

———————–

A Closer Look – GWB-C1 GPU Block


The GWB-C1 doesn’t have the easiest to remember name but Atlantis GPU Block does have an easier ring to it, so let’s go with that. The GPU block comes in a compact box which contains the instruction book, all the usual mounting screws, some adhesive strips, and the block its self; all come neatly packaged and protected.

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The finish on the block is certainly interesting, with a chrome finished mounting plate and a sandblasted finish block. It’s pretty heavy, which is a good thing, as that tells us there’s a good amount of metal in the block, ensuring it is durable and hopefully helping it handle more heat from the GPU to transfer to our loops fluid.

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It’s a compact block, much more simple than some of the full-size blocks you might have seen, and this has one clear benefit and downside. The benefit is that it’s widely compatible with almost all GPUs, the downside is that it doesn’t cool the VRM, so adhesive heatsinks may be required.

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On the side, you’ll find two pretty standard 3/8″ fittings, where you can fit your barbs and then your tubing for your loop.

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The base plate is very nice, with a large and thick surface to help cover your GPU, and this should help greatly in moving a lot of heat from your hardware through to the water chamber inside the block. Here you can also see the “T” shaped screw mounts on the corners of the mounting plate, these are to ensure compatibility with a wide range of graphics cards.

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The block has a good depth to it, but not so much that it should interfere with any SLI/CF configurations.

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———————–

A Closer Look – CWB-C1 CPU Water Block


The CPU block comes in a small box too, with all the mounting gear, a handy tightening tool, thermal paste, backplate and the block all neatly packaged.

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The backplate is universal for both AMD/Intel CPUs, and it comes with a thick layer of padding on the back to ensure you get a tight fit on the block without causing damaged to the rear of the motherboard.

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The finish on the block is gorgeous, with a shiny chrome surface that contrasts nicely with the black section. There’s a nice angular design to the edges too, giving it a more stylish and refined look that is sure to look stunning on your motherboard.

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Be default, the Intel mounting arms are pre-installed, but these can be easily unscrewed and replaced with the AMD arms should you need them.

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On the top, two 3/8″ screw fittings for your barbs, nice and easy to work with.

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The contact surface on this is huge, ensuring you get a full-cover fit even on larger CPUs.

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The bottom is polished to a mirror shine for better heat transfer, and it’s also incredibly heavy. All that metal means better TDP, and more surface area on the fins on the inside to help move heat from the block to the fluid.

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A Closer Look – RAI-PM5 Pump


Next up we have the pump, which comes boxed in protective foam, with four mounting screws/bolts, and a simple setup guide.

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The design is tailored to allow you to fit your own barbs right into the top but comes pre-installed with a male-to-male barb, allowing you to mount a reservoir directly to the top of the pump. There’a standard fan header for power, but it’s Y-split with a removable power control dial, allowing you to increase/decrease the flow rate to suit the noise/performance ratio you require.

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The pump comes mounted vertically on the mounting block, but can be unscrewed and mounted sideways, which means you can fit it to the sides, rear, or base of your system as required.

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It’s a fairly compact unit, and feels pretty durable too, so should be a welcome addition to your loop. The flow pattern on this pump it in at the top and out at the port on the side.

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———————–

A Closer Look – RAI-R10 10CM Reservoir & Raiaqua-T1 Fluid


The reservoir is nicely designed too, three inlet/outlets; one on the bottom, two on the top.

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They come pre-capped with plastic screws to ensure they’re water tight. This one on the bottom is perfect for directly mounting the unit to the top of the pump.

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While one of these can be used for water-in from your loop, and another for filling your loop.

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We also have the Raiaqua-T1 cooling fluid for this review, which will be used to fill our loop. It comes bundled with a dropper as well as three colours of dye to help us customise the appearance of the fluid.

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You’ll find green, red and blue dye, which should allow us to mix a decent range of colours for the loop.

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———————–

Test System and Methodology


Testing water cooling varies wildly compared to the kind of tests we perform on standard cooling systems, and as such, hardware may require being customised to each water loop we test and can vary further based on the radiators being tested, the kind of pump and more, so we can only give relative performance statistics per build. For this review we will be using the following hardware.

Test System

  • Gigabyte G1 Gaming Z97MX Micro-ATX Motherboard
  • Intel 3570K @ stock and @4.5Ghz 1.35v
  • Crucial 16GB DDR3
  • Crucial 120GB SSD
  • Seasonic 820W Platinum PSU

Additional Hardware

  • Raijintek Styx
  • Noctua NF-F12/NF-F14 (dependant on radiator size used)
  • Mayhems flexible tubing 10/13mm
  • Raijintek Compression Fittings
  • Alphacool 240mm Slim X-Flow Radiator

Testing Methodology:

  • We always use Gelid GC-Extreme thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal paste.
  • Prime 95 is run for 10 minutes and then the average maximum temperatures as recorded by CPUID HWMonitor are noted
  • The average temperature across the four cores is taken on our quad-core processor
  • Fans are mostly left to operate at default PWM profile speeds and with maximum fan speed for reference. If PWM functions are not supported then fixed fan speeds are used and sometimes a low noise adapter if appropriate/provided. If fixed fan speeds or low noise adapters are used it will be clearly pointed out either on the graphs or in the write-up.
  • Pump speeds may vary, but will be detailed in the performance section
  • All default result entries on graphs are for PWM performance unless otherwise specified. A variety of fan speed results are done for a particular product review and then removed from the graphs in future reviews of other products to avoid clutter. If you would like to see more fan speed results for a particular product please check its individual review.
  • For water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts directly from the power supply
  • Delta temperatures are always used (Observed temperature minus ambient temperature) and we keep the ambient at 22 (+/- 1) degrees for all testing. Delta temperatures should correct for any marginal ambient differences between 21-23 degrees.
  • Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled, the hard drive in idle and power supply isolated. These are taken at desktop idle and Prime95 load.
  • The cooling performance tests are run at stock 3.4GHz (with Intel Turbo up to 3.8GHz) and overclocked 4.5GHz (1.35v) settings. Voltages are fixed to prevent inaccuracy between comparisons.
  • All other coolers in the graphs have been tested under identical settings so are fully comparable unless otherwise stated.
  • Each test is repeated 3 times with remounts for consistency of results
  • There is approximately a 1-degree celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW Monitor
  • There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter

Software Used

In all these graphs we may have a few “reference” results of particular products that do not fit into that category for comparative purposes.

———————–

Installation & Performance


First job, we prepare out motherboard for the installation, CPU nice and clean and everything is ready to rock!

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Install the CPU backplate using the included screws.

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Hold it in place with the retention screws, which only takes about two minutes to do.

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Apply thermal paste, the block and hold it in place with the four large thumb screws.

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Once that is done, simply add your barbs; we’ve used some compression fittings which were supplied by Raijintek.

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Then it’s time to do other side jobs, such as install radiators on fans, apply screw caps to the radiators, pumps, etc, where required.

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The pump and res screwed together with ease, no tools needed and it only took a few seconds to do.

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Next, we need to screw all major components into the system. Our pump screwed onto the bottom of the chassis easily enough, motherboard in place, and it was just a case of fitting some tubing.

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All tubes in place, you can see the hardware fit easily enough and is already looking good. We’ve even fitted some extra tubing to the res for filling our loop.

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Using an external PSU and jumper to power the pump, it’s time to leak test the loop.

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All passed with flying colours, which is obviously a good sign for the Raijintek hardware, as nothing went wrong first time; definitely a good sign!

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The loops flowing beautifully, and the system is now being powered up as normal, still no problems. The first thing we played around with here is the pump, which has a speed controller dial to tweak the performance. This is a small loop, so 10-20% power seemed to put quite a lot of flow through the setup with the least amount of noise from the pump. Dialled up to max, the pump was quite loud, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to push it so hard. We clocked the pump at 44dBa at max but found it had great flow when dialled down to 38dBa.

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The good thing here is that the pump is the only audible part of the loop. There will be fans required too, but if you make the right choices for good quality fans, that’s not going to be a problem and good acoustic performance can be easily achieved.

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Now to tailor the design a little bit. We’ve opted for the red dye in the Raijintek box, and you can see we’ve added it directly to the top of the reservoir.

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Power up the system and it mixes through the system very quickly, which is another solid indicator that our water flow rate is very good; helped partly by our short tubing runs, as the longer they are the more pressure you require.

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The red certainly looks nice and matches up well with our components. Of course, with other colours in the box, you can easily customise them to your liking.

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Overall, we’re a little bit in love with the Atlantis kit. The blocks look great, the installation is straight forward and as we’ll get to in a moment, the performance is spot on too.

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As I said earlier, the performance depends on the CPU, the volts, the fluid used, the size of the radiator, the fans, and so many other factors that it’s hard to compare this unit to say, an H110. We’re here to review the Raijintek hardware, not the Alphacool radiators and Noctua fans (but we will another day). With this block and a simple loop, with a slim 240mm radiator and two fans in push configuration, we clocked the CPU at +22c stock, +28c overclocked, while both have an idle of +7c. These are certainly good temperatures for such a low-noise cooling system and beat the pants off any AIO system for overclocking. Although I must stress again, these results simply tell us the Raijintek hardware is doing its job, and doing it very well I might add, but there are so many ways to alter the cooling performance of this loop; increasing fan speed, bigger/more radiators, etc.

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Testing the GPU was a little trickier, as the huge PCB of the Sapphire 270X wouldn’t fit inside our build, but that’s OK, we can get creative here. First things first, install the mounting place, by adding some screws through the back of the card.

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A perfect fit, didn’t even have to take off the backplate!

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Thermal paste in place, screw the block down onto the GPU, this was honestly much easier to configure than I expected.

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Now that the card is ready, time to plug it into our loop. As you can see, the card already has some good cooling on the VRM, but I’d like to see good airflow in a chassis before using a block like this that doesn’t cool the entire card.

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We stuck the card on our usual cooling test bench, as we’re not testing gaming performance, just relative stock vs water cooled temperatures when stressed. I plumbed the card into the same points in our loop that we have the CPU on, that way it uses the same pump, radiator and fan configuration we used above. Air cooled, the card was knocking out +29c idle and +57c load, not bad, but at 54dBa, it’s getting a little noisy. With the water flowing, we literally cut that load temperature in half! Just a smidge under +29c and we destroyed the acoustic performance, dropping it down to 40dBa, as the only noises were the quiet pump and the two Noctua fans on the radiator.

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———————–

Final Thoughts


Price

The Raijintek Atlantis hardware is a buy as you need setup, which means each item has to be purchased separately. All prices are from OCUK unless otherwise stated.

  • RAI-PM5 Pump & Stand – £53.99
  • CWB-C1 CPU Water Cooler Block – £36.95
  • GWB-C1 VGA Block – £41.98 (Watercooling UK)
  • RAI-R10 Reservoir – £25.99
  • RaiAQUA-T1 Water Additive – £8.99

Overview

We’re very impressed with the new custom loop water cooling hardware from Raijintek, and given that the custom cooling market is so competitive these days, we’re glad to see that Raijintek is delivering the quality and performance we had hoped for. Sure, there are some really great looking components on the market from equally well-established brands, but as many of you know, their prices can border on crazy for even the smallest parts of the build.  With Raijintek delivering these lovely products at a price range that puts them within the reach of more consumers, there’s a clear reason why this is the hardware you may want in your next build.

Working with these components was a breeze, I’m no custom-loop professional, and I managed to put it all together just fine and got a great looking build. I suffered no leaks, which isn’t to say that you wouldn’t, but it also means no components were damaged, no seals were broken and everything fit together easily enough first time, and there’s a good indication of overall quality. A 24-hour leak test held tight, and while I did the testing a few days ago, I can confirm that three days later, the build is still on the desk, and is still holding all its fluid just fine.

The pump is incredibly powerful, likely more powerful than most builds will ever require, but since you can dial down the power and noise levels using a simple dial, finding the right balance for your loop is something that will only take you a few seconds. When it comes to cooling performance, the GPU and CPU block did a fantastic job, and the heavy duty quality of each certainly helps move some serious heat. I love how easy it is to install the GPU block too, and it’s a great way to quickly water cool your card. Just keep in mind that some cards may require extra VRM coolers to prevent them from becoming unstable, as this isn’t a full-cover water block.

Pros

  • Great design
  • Easy to work with
  • Very competitive prices
  • Excellent build quality
  • Compatible with common fitting sizes
  • Great availability

Cons

  • None

Neutral

  • Some GPUs may require additional cooling pads for VRM when using the GPU block
Raijintek Atlantis Series Custom Loop Water Cooling Review

Raijintek Atlantis Series Custom Loop Water Cooling Review

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