Cooling Hardware and Noise
As you can see, you get a length of flexible (thank your chosen deity) tubing, Eheim pump, 120x120mm radiator and matching Papst fan, reservoir and pump (they fit together) and a bag of bits and bobs to connect everything up. The bag contains spare barbs, power splitter, fan power connector, thermal compound.
It's a simple kit, enough to create a loop with enough heat capacity to deal with what's produced by the BlackPearl at full load, over extended periods. Indeed, the radiator has a heat exchange ability that's probably good enough for two of them, in SLI. Putting the kit together is a piece of cake. I wrote some decent words for our investigation of the Gainward CoolFX Powerpack! Ultra/2600, here, so I'll reuse some of them if that's alright with you.
Setting it up
Firstly, place the graphics card into your system and remove the two end caps on the inlet and outlet ports. Connect the pump and reservoir together, using a twisting motion to allow the pump inlet to slip into the reservoir outlet.Then attach the fan to the radiator using the push plugs. They're quite hard to get purchase on, the rounded heads making them slippery, and they require superhuman force to push through the fan into the radiator, at least on the review sample. I used the barrel of a watchmaker's screwdriver to help me out.
Then you want to cut the tubing to length for each section of the closed loop in the CoolFX system. From graphics card to reservoir inlet, from pump outlet to radiator, then finally from the radiator back to the graphics card. It's really simple, only three cuts of tubing needed.
Attaching the tubing to the ports is simple. Unscrew the cap, place the cap over the tube end in the right direction for screwing back down, pop the end of the tube over the barb, screw the cap down finger tight on the barb thread. Do that for each section of the loop.
Then you simply need to connect a spare Molex connector to the pump, before you can start filling and leak testing.
Filling and Leak Testing
Filling it is simple. Disconnect everything from your PSU apart from the pump. That includes main ATX power to your motherboard, since you need that connector to prime the pump and fill the system. Attach the PSU starter block to the main ATX power cable on your PSU. All it does is short the starting pins on the PSU, causing it to automatically spring into life when you turn on your mains feed. Since it's only connected to the pump as this point, everything is ready for filling.Mix up a litre of coolant using 250ml of the supplied Innovaprotect and 750ml of distilled water. Open the screw lid on the reservoir and fill it up with coolant until it's just under the rim line of the reservoir, where the cap screws back in. Raise the pump up so it's the highest part of the loop, even if it won't be in your case, then apply mains power so the pump activates, sucking in the water in the reservoir and pumping it round the system. Stop once the water has been pumped, refill the reservoir and then pump the new coolant into the system. Repeat for as long as it takes to fill the entire closed loop with coolant.
Air bubbles will no doubt get trapped in the system during filling. Air will rise to the highest points in the system, most likely in the radiator, so tilt and twist the radiator gently during filling, to allow any trapped air to migrate round the system to the reservoir.
It only takes around ten or twenty minutes to fill the entire system, and that's with taking your time. Easy stuff.
Leak testing can then be performed. Without any other components connected to the PSU, bar the pump, turn the PSU on so the pump is active, moving coolant around the system. I usually place small bits of absorbant kitchen or toilet paper around each inlet and outlet port at each part of the system, so that if any part of the system is leaking, the paper will catch it, keeping it away from your motherboard and other components as long as it doesn't leak too much. It's also a nice little visual indicator if something is wrong, the paper obviously wet. There shouldn't be any leaking however, provided your tube connection was done carefully.
Leave the pump going on its own for an hour or two, just to be sure there are no leaks, before hooking up the rest of your PC to the PSU, removing the PSU jump-start block and hooking up ATX power on your motherboard.
Summary
It's no more involved, in terms of what you have to concentrate on, than fitting a normal air cooler. Provided you are careful, methodical and patient - all the things you should be when fitting any kind of cooler to any part of your system - things will be fine.With the fan on the radiator what adds noise to the system when using a BlackPearl 512MB, this is the place to comment on the noise it makes. As expected from a watercooled setup, it's quieter than the air cooler it replaces. However what surprised this reviewer more than anything was the complete lack of noise from the fan, even at full speed. The full performance is delivered with the fan making less noise than the CPU cooler in the test system, making it really hard to hear.
It's that, along with any extra performance available from cooling the GPU and memory modules better than the reference air cooler, that appeals with the BlackPearl 512MB. It's super quiet, to the point of questioning, "is the fan even spinning?".
So for the power user with dinero en mano, who wants power without the grating annoyance of something like the Radeon X1800 XT's reference cooler assembly, the BlackPearl 512MB is worth considering on that merit alone.
