 This video is brought to you by our trusted partner Intel. For a limited time only with the purchase of any unlocked Core i5 or Core i7 Intel CPU, get a free Intel beanie with a chance to win an Intel snowboard. Valid for Canadian and US customers only, some restrictions apply. For complete details, visit IntelGamingPromo.com Welcome to Linus Tech Tips. Today's video is our video review of the Water 2.0 Extreme. Now I want to spend a little bit of time explaining our testing methodology before we go any further. All coolers we test are inside a closed case. This is a Corsair C70. We also collect our ambient temperatures at the time of monitoring any CPU temperatures, and then we offset and correct everything to a 20 degree Celsius room temperature. We never use the fans included with a cooler because the way we see it, there's a couple of different ways to evaluate these coolers. Number one is with the included kit, which is what everybody else is doing, and it gives you a certain amount of information, but not necessarily the story about the cooler itself, because it throws an additional variable in. So you've got sound as a variable, pressure as a variable, CFM as a variable, and the cooler itself as a variable. You have too many variables. You can't tell what's going on. So we have standardized our test bench on only NF-F12 and NF-A14 FLX fans from Noctua. These are pressure optimized fans, and will actually give every cooler available to us the opportunity to perform its best. So the Water 2.0 uses quarter inch tubing. It uses an Asetek platform, so you've probably seen this mounting hardware before, but what makes this guy unique is it's thicker than normal radiators. So you can see that most radiators are actually about the same thickness as a fan, whereas this one adds probably another 20-30% to the thickness. That contributes a real-world performance difference to the Water 2.0 compared to its lower performing dual 120mm brethren. Now, how much of a difference you might ask? Well, here, let's... Oh yeah, the system, right. So the system inside here is a 3930K that is overclocked, so it's a 6-core processor. We keep a GTX580 in here, and we run FirmArch when we're doing our load tests, just to let you... or Combuster, rather, that's kind of the same thing. But we run Combuster just so that the system is generating what would be sort of an unrealistically high, but an extreme use case scenario load, and then we always use our single 120mm exhaust, and the two 120mm intakes that are right here, stock on the C70. We have created this test bench because it represents what we consider to be an optimally cooled and still very quiet gaming system. Well, that's what I think, anyway. Slick thinks it could be louder, but I don't, so whatever. Alright, so let's move on to performance. We take idle performance at the desktop, we let it heat up and achieve equilibrium, then we take load performance with Prime95 Small FFT running... must be 12 threads on that CPU, and Combuster running in the background. So here we go, water 2.0 extreme. So here are... these are the two columns that you guys want to look at right here, and you can check the link to this graph in the video description, but the water 2.0 extreme beats out the H110 even. So remember, guys, cooling is all about surface area. However, it should be noted this is sort of within margin of error, like we can safely call that pretty much a tie, but the H110 and the water 2.0 extreme come out ahead of everything else. Our Kraken, we think there must be something wrong with it, so we're going to try and get our hands on another one, because it should perform pretty much the same as the H110. Okay, so why does the water 2.0 extreme perform the same as a 2x140mm cooler, which has more surface area because of the larger fan? Simple answer, because we're using pressure optimized fans, which we do for all of our test benches. That means that adding thickness to the radiator doesn't hurt as much as it does if you're not using pressure optimized fans. So that means adding an extra 20 to 30% of thickness gives us the same effect as adding an extra 20 to 30% of wideness. So there you go. Thank you for checking out our overview of the Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more of our boxings reviews and other computer videos.