[PLUS] 10 water cooling pumps in the test

Put under pressure

PCGH looks for the fastest CPU and GPU almost every issue, the best product from other markets at least once or twice a year. But there are exceptions and water cooling is definitely one of them: We last looked at pumps for modular circuits 75 issues ago. However, this segment also lacks the dynamics of the graphics card market: Six years later, ten of the old test candidates are on the market without a successor, only one has at least been significantly improved. And even 80 percent of our new test participants, including the winner, use a mechanism that we tested back in 2014 as a basis.

In addition to radiators, pumps are the most static element of the already sluggish water cooling industry. There are some new offers, because water cooling is now also following various optical trends. But the underlying technology, like the GPUs on graphics cards, is mostly bought and only a few products from even fewer companies meet the quality requirements for use as PC cooling. After all, it is literally about everything: While a failing fan “only” reduces the performance of its heat sink to its passive capabilities, when the pump is stopped all components of a water cooling circuit are suddenly uncooled. In fact, lack of reliability, even before annoying noise development, have pushed many newcomers back into insignificance and concentrated the market on two basic models of one brand: The D5 and DDC, formerly developed by Laing and now produced by the Xylem subsidiary Lowara, drive six out of ten even in our deliberately diverse test field subjects.

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You will find the following products in the test:

• Alphacool ice station VPP incl. ice pump VPP755 V.3
• Alphacool Laing DDC310 Complete Edition Ice Sheet silver/Plexi
• Aquacomputer Aquastream Ultimate
• Aquacomputer D5 Next with Ultitop D5
• Corsair Hydro X Series XD5 RGB
• Eheim Universal 300
• EK Water Blocks XRES 250 SPC PWM Classic RGB
• EK Water Blocks Quantum Kinetic FLT 240 D5 PWM D-RGB Plexi
• Raijintek Antila D5 Evo RBW
• Watercool WCP D5 vario with Heatkiller D5 top

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