Intel's latest processors have some amazing overclocking headroom, reaching well into the 6 GHz range when cooled to extreme temperatures using coolants like liquid nitrogen. These exact same processors can rarely break 4 GHz with Intel's stock coolers however. I have long been on a quest to find just where the happy middle ground lies, and finally came back with some very interesting results.

Most enthusiasts will tell you tales of a cooler we call the TRUE. This stands for Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme, and it was the king of all coolers for several years. It stood head and shoulders above just about anything out there when mounted on the Core 2 Duo platform. It was so good that it could even come very close to the first liquid cooling kit that I ever tested, the Asetek Low-cost Liquid Cooler. After testing that device, I stated clearly that "I'm just not sold on water yet." It did not provide lower temperatures, did not cool better, and also did not help with the temperature of the components in the rest of the case.

One thing that Asetek told me when testing that cooler was that I would really need to crank up the wattage to see it shine, and that once Core i7 came to be, I would be coming back to them. Needless to say, I did not come back to them for Core i7, because I would need to see much more than a few degrees difference on the CPU to make up for its other deficiencies. They were right about one thing though: I would want more cooling to handle Core i7 at 4.0 GHz and above.

So I recently caught up with Swiftech after I saw some articles about their watercooling kits, especially the Ultima XT with their new Apogee XT block. They showed that this kit could reduce temperatures as much as 20C over high-end air cooling on Core i7, so I didn't mind the price premium if it really worked. Today, I'm hoping to show you that it does, and that this water cooling kit is right for your next Odin or Thor.