Alphacool Watercooling Starter Kit

Alphacool Watercooling Starter Kit. Ready to get wet?

Take a PC full of expensive, complicated, electricity-driven parts, add about half a litre of water in aquarium tubing and plug it into the mains electricity supply. Up until a few years ago many would have laughed at such thoughtless bravado, quoting the school-taught fear of lethal electrocution. Nowadays most enthusiasts are familiar with the concept of watercooling, but the sheer complexity of the systems and their installation can be mind-boggling to say the least.

As some of you may have seen from our IDF coverage, watercooling seems to be progressing from the hardcore enthusiast niche to positively encouraged by the likes of Intel. With the unit cost of the Intel prototype possibly dipping to below US$50, you might be asking yourself if there still will be a market for "build your own" kits. Let me assure you, that as long as there are enthusiasts, there will be competition to design/build/test/show off a vast array of watercooling blocks and configurations, both by large companies as well as individuals.


Before wading in all the way into these extreme solutions though, most of us will like to dip out toes in first (sigh) - to see if liquid cooling is really what we want. When Paul at thecoolingshop.com asked us if we wanted to take a look at Alphacool's Starter Kit, we jumped at the chance. Having recently reviewed the Coolermaster Stacker 830 we were looking for a chance to see if we could silence the beast even further. This kit is aimed at the beginner as it contains all that is required to get you up and running.

As this kit is targeted at the less experienced of us, I'll include a little more detail about functionality of the products included, just so you are not completely swamped (groan - last awful pun, I promise) with jargon and complicated terminology. So without further ado, let's open the box and take a look at what you get for £105 and change...