Comdex 2002

Written by Harry Lam and Edward Chang

November 25, 2002

ThermalTake

The ThermalTake booth was primarily showing off their new Aquarius II water cooling system, which basically is an easy to setup commercial style water cooling system.

Nice and simplistic

Aquarius II:

The Aquarius II is ThermalTake's self contained water cooling system, basically a DIY kit that takes minutes to install.  The entire system only puts out 29dBA of noise and is rated at 0.24℃/watt.  In addition a back-up receiver hangs on the outside of the case, to ensure that there will always ben enough water in the entire system.  It's a pretty nifty system, something that I was extremely impressed by, their website has more information about the entire thing.

Watercooling goodness

ActiveCool:

The first thing I noticed at Comdex was the ActiveCool thermo-electric (peltier based) cooling system.  Thermaltake doesn't manufacture this product, but actually distributes it for ActiveCool (it's ThermalTake product name is SubZero4G).  Basically, this is a commercial peltier based system that requires no preparation work (most peltier based coolers suffer from condensation, so steps must be taken to insulate your motherboard and cards from water damage).  Basically this unit works off of a temperature diode to keep the CPU temperature at a constant 26℃ (it switches the peltier on and off as needed).  The product requires a PCI slot to function correctly, but the power supply is via an external power cable, not through the computer's PSU (which means the current required for the peltier won't be a drain on your PSU).  Their example unit had the temperature monitoring functions to disabled to demonstrate the peltier technology (however, this will not be an option to the end user).

Peltier goodness