Performance
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In order to improve the ventilation inside the PC there is a duct between the fan and the radiator, as you can see in Figure 8. This approach created a 10 cfm airflow towards the chipset and the voltage regulator, helping cooling these components. Adding this duct decreased the radiator airflow by only 3 cfm, so losing 3 cfm on the radiator to gain 10 cfm inside the PC is a really great tradeoff.
Figure 8: Intel water-cooling system airflow analysis.
All the examples given were for ATX cases, which Intel thinks it is more appropriate for overclockers. But nothing prevents the use of Intel Advanced Liquid Cooling Technology in BTX cases, as you can see in Figure 9. In this case, however, it replaces the TMA (Thermal Module Assembly), which is located in front of the case, not on its back.
Figure 9: Intel’s water-cooling solution on a BTX case.
A plastic duct covering the system is used to improve cooling from other parts, such as memory and chipset. Intel’s water-cooling solution installed on a BTX system provides a 101 cfm airflow to the PC (against 64 cfm using Intel’s reference design, i.e., regular fan) and provides a 470% airflow improvement towards the system memory and a 8% airflow improvement towards the chipset.
Figure 10: Intel’s water-cooling solution performance on BTX systems.
By the way, Intel Advanced Liquid Cooling Technology specs state that this system should provide a noise level below 4 BA, so it is a really quiet system.
