 This video is brought to you by our trusted graphics partner NVIDIA. Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme! This is different from the big water SE that was my first water cooling kit. So I'm actually going to take the approach with this unboxing of comparing the Water 2.0 Extreme to how far Thermaltake has come in like the last eight years in terms of their pre-done liquid cooling kits. Because let me tell you, the big water SE was no easier to install than a custom loop. It didn't really perform that well, but it looked really cool. It used quarter inch tubing so it was like not performance parts. I mean the water block on that thing was like it had a channel like this and that was like it. It was still way better than air though and it got me, it was like sort of like that first hit that gets you into something like school. Which is obviously what we were talking about. So let's have a look at what Thermaltake has to say for themselves first. Top of the line liquid cooler equipped with power and performance, no refills needed. There! Advantage over big water SE which came with like jugs of coolant and you had to actually like fill it and then drain it and then refill it and top it up and stuff like that. 240 millimeter radiator doubles the cooling surface. I can tell you it more than doubles the cooling ability versus the big water SE because that one was 120 mil and it had the worst radiator design I've probably ever seen in a liquid cooling unit. I'm not trying to rag on Thermaltake, it's an old product at this point, but man that thing had one tube that went through like this. So the flow restriction of that radiator was terrible. It also had like one of the densest fin arrays that I've ever seen and this one does not have that. Universal socket compatibility, okay that the big water had, but the mounting mechanism wasn't too great. High performance copper based plate accelerates the heat conductivity, high reliability, low profile pump based on an Asetek design so you know it's not going to die or anything like that. Pre-filled coolant reduces the liquid replenishment hassle, low evaporation tube reduces the loss of coolant and the high tech sealed circulation system prevents leaking issues. Double okay, high reliability pump, high efficiency radiator, powerful cooling fans, there are two and fan control software included which is nice to see. Inside the box we have a manual which is in a bajillion different languages including mode d'emploi, I don't know, my French is kind of rusty. Fan control software version 1.3, very nice to see. Thermaltake fans, Thermaltake's been doing fans for a while so I figured they probably know a thing or two about it. PWM fans, so PWM control is always nice to have especially if you're going to be programming fan control curves or whatever else like that because voltage fans, voltage control DC fans can be a bit of an issue. If you set a very low fan speed they might not start for example, so PWM fans always are running 12 volts through the fan but it just sends it in bursts so that it has enough torque to start the fan pretty much no matter what. Mounting hardware included, ASETEC has done so much of a better job on the mounting hardware versus previous generation products. This clip right here is like the magic clip because it used to be you had to take the block, what's this, product warranty policy, okay good. Oh this looks like it uses a thicker radiator than most of the other 240 mil products out there. That's kind of interesting. I'm going to be back in just a moment here with a Corsair H100i. Where is my H100i? It's over here somewhere. Here we go. I think it uses a thicker radiator and a thicker radiator would go a long way towards increasing the overall surface area because guys liquid cooling is not magic. It's just the liquid more efficiently moves the heat away from the CPU and towards the heat dissipator or the radiator. So in this case you can see, ah like this, okay. So the Big Water 2.0 which, no I'm doing that, the Water 2.0 has a very very very loose fin arrangement which is great for quiet operation compared to the Corsair H100i which is more dense. So if you did ramp up the RPMs of the fans this kind of design would start to pull ahead of this kind of design where you can see the water channels are spaced more closely for more effective heat conduction to the fins themselves. But check this out. The Water 2.0 has a significantly thicker radiator than the H100i. That means that even though they are both 2x120mm water cooling units, this one is probably, I mean that must be like at least 20-30% thicker which won't give you quite the same advantage as for example a dual 140mm radiator but it'll fit in more cases because it's 2x120 although some cases will have trouble with it because it is thicker. If you have any clearance issues with your MOSFET coolers or anything like that, that might be a problem. But it gives you more surface area. So that's good, that's something I didn't know about the Water 2.0 until I opened it up here. I'm just going to put that away. Where were we? Right, the mounting mechanism. So it includes a high quality thermal compound on the base here and all we're going to do is remove the cover. I'm going to show you guys what's so much better about this. So you used to have to just take this thing and like hold it on to the retention ring and then like thread some screws through it and all that. Now you just take this guy, clip it on. Oh I'm really excited about this cooler now. I was excited before but now I'm really excited. I was all nostalgic about my big Water SC. Now I'm all like, oh I don't need that anymore. Just use a Water 2.0 which is like better with thick radiator anyway. The point is that if you have two hands and you're not trying to sort of lean over like this to do it, you just clip this piece on here, then you take all of the mounting screws, clip them through here with the included plastic brackets. The instructions will cover all this and it is quite straightforward. So you don't have to hold everything in place while you're fumbling around with it inside your computer case because a lot of people do upgrade existing computers with these pre-done liquid cooling kits. In terms of connectivity, you're going to find pretty much what you'd expect. So the CPU block slash pump unit itself has, here we go, a USB connector. So this is how you access the fan control software or that's how you interface with the unit through the fan control software. It has two black harnesses coming off of it for the two 4-pin PWM fans. These are all using black wires which is going to look way nicer in your case than the older generation products that did not use all black wires. And finally a 3-pin connector for the fan pump itself which is inside the water block unit. I don't know if I mentioned, I don't know if I showed the thermal compound that is pre-installed so that looks like the same kind that pretty much everyone uses. It's really good stuff. I've actually tried replacing this with aftermarket stuff unless you're using really high-end aftermarket stuff you're not going to see any temperature improvements. So I always use the pre-applied one on the first installation. I think that pretty much covers it. It's using quarter inch tubing. Although I'm not entirely sold on 3 inch tubing making that much of a difference in terms of performance. We actually ran the H100 versus the H100i and we only saw, what was it, like a two degree difference or something like that? I think it was only a couple degree difference using the same fans which could have just as easily been improvements to the CPU block and not necessarily any improvement from going from 1 quarter inch to 3 eighths inch tubing. I mean the 3 eighths inch tubing looks baller but it actually doesn't have quite the same tight bend radius as quarter inch tubing does. I think that pretty much covers it for the Water 2.0. Make sure you're subscribed to Linus Tech Tips so that you see our performance review where we're actually going to take the Water 2.0 and find out how much of a performance advantage that thicker radiator gives it when we put a high quality pressure optimized silent fan on it. 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