Thermaltake Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit Review

[pompeytom247]

Thermaltake have launched a new D.I.Y water cooling kit into this ever growing market, and I have been asked by Thermaltake to review the new Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit from a case modders point of view.

I’ve been water cooling PC’s right from the infancy of water cooling. When it was only possible to obtain a water block! The Radiator, Pump, hose & fittings were all sourced by your own means. E.g. Fish pond pump, brass water or gas fittings, laboratory hose & any kind of heat exchanger you could lay your hands on! How things have moved on from those early days, there are now many different manufacturers producing a wide variety of water cooling kits & components.
Thermaltake’s Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit consists of everything you will need to install a CPU water cooling loop into your system. Taking a closer look Thermaltake have really given this kit some thought. I for one have always been very dubious of closed loop & water cooling kits; however I’ve been presently surprised with this offering from Thermaltake.




I’m going to look at each of the component parts briefly before assembling the Pacific RL240 into a Thermaltake Suppressor F51 chassis.

The Thermaltake Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit contains
1x Pacific W1 CPU Water Block
1xPacific PT40-D5 w/Silent Kit Reservoir/Pump Combo
1x Pacific RL240 Radiator
2x Luna 12 LED Red Fan
6x Pacific 1/2” ID x 3/4” OD Compression Fittings (Chrome finish)
200cmV-Tubler ID 1/2” 3/4"OD hose
1x Red Coolant 1000ml

[pompeytom247]

CPU Water Block:- Firstly the CPU block is made from copper, which comes as a relief to be honest & a good start in my opinion. The contact side of the block is nickel plated & has been polished to a high mirror finish. The supplied fitting kit covers all known current Intel & AMD CPU sockets. The tech spec, the copper fins of the block are also nickel plated & the internal construction has a 0.15mm micro-channel fin, apparently this will help to disperse the heat more efficiently?



PT-40 Pump / Res Combo:- There are plenty of good pump / res combo’s available for the D5 & this one from Thermaltake is pretty good. It offers a couple of mounting options with all the hardware included to fit this. Usual G1/4 ports & a D5 pump, which is nice to see in a water cooling kit. I found the pump set to speed No.2 & have left it at that setting in a hopeful attempt to keep it as quiet as possible?



RL240 Radiator:- Thermaltake have used zinc alloy as a main material. The manufacturing quality is at a high level. An exceptional manufacturing process using high temperature brazing at 1022℉/550℃ sets the Pacific RL Radiators in a class of their own (better than copper). This technique allows for any impurities to be kept out of the brazing process and ensures that the full strength on all the connected areas is achieved. The radiators are baked through a controlled atmosphere brazing line. The materials melt into each other to accomplish optimal thermal transfer from the tubes to the actual fins in order to attain better heat evacuation. Thermaltake is using brazing process to get uniform heat transfer of this radiator.
The first thing to note is that it’s “thick”, to say the least! I must say that your case choice to mount this radiator in the top will be limited. Also, another point is the choice of motherboard. When I took delivery of the kit I promptly ripped my media centre PC down and decided to use its components for this review / test, Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2-DVI micro ATX, once the motherboard was fitted to the chassis there was no room to fit a fan on the underside of the radiator, as it clashed with the memory slots. Anyway, having said all that the radiator is well constructed offering a variety of different G1/4 ports. The rad is made from a zinc alloy and has a tight fin arrangement. Thermaltake have a very good manufacturing process in place for the range of radiators produced.




Fans:- The fans at full speed are noisy, like most 120mm LED fans around, these are supplied with a knockdown resistor which does help to reduce the noise. The radiator offers a fair amount of resistance & does increase the noise of the fans slightly even with the resistors in the 12 volt line. Apart from that the fans have rubber mounting points to help with vibration.


Fittings:- These are ok, or reasonable in appearance & functionally. They are made from brass & have been chromed. These are for ½” ID ¾” OD hose, high flow system. I used to be a big fan of the bigger bore hose but now think it looks kind of clumsy in appearance compared to 3/8” ID 5/8” OD hose. However for the single water block setup its completely fine.


Hose:- Usually most water cooling kits offer low quality (real crap) hose, this one is different & the hose is flexible (not quite Tygon) but manages a reasonable bend to reach the water cooling components. It reminds me of Clearflex hose to be honest.


Coolant:- Well without going into the chemical makeup of the coolant all I can say is there is enough to fill the system once hosed up. The supplied bottle with filler does come in handy as I decided to use the kit only without opting for my own funnel & any water cooling tools / aids.

[pompeytom247]

My test rig or raped media centre components used for this review / test are as follows,
Motherboard:- Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2-DVI micro ATX
CPU:- Intel i3 3240 3.4Ghz - socket 1155
Memory:- 8GB DDR3 Kingston Beast
Graphics:- Sapphire R285 Compact
PSU:- CoolerMaster M1000
Chassis:- Thermaltake Suppressor F51
Fitting the Thermaltake Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit into the Suppressor F51 chassis went very well apart from the radiator mounting problem as mentioned earlier in the review. I was forced into fitting the radiator into the front of the chassis due to my motherboards memory arrangement. There were plenty of mounting points for the radiator in the front of the chassis. Fitting the pump / res combo was also hassle free in the Suppressor F51 as again plenty of mounting holes in the chassis floor were available. Within one hour I had completely hosed the system & was filling it with coolant! After bleeding the cooling system and leak testing for an hour I was confident enough to switch the system on. All booted with no issue & I was happy to be back to where I was 2 hours previously, with a fully working but now water cooled PC.

















Conclusion:- I must say that I’ve been very impressed with Thermaltake’s Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit. The cooling performance of the kit has proved itself against what I know I can build myself from off the shelf parts. With an ambient air temperature of approx. 21c the kit idled at approx. 22-28c. I decided to give it a bit of a hammering so set Prime95 running & walked away. 10 minutes later I took note of the current temperature approx. 48-50c, after one hour the system was still holding a full load temperature of 48-51c. This is also with the fans running at 50% / 800 R.P.M ish & the D5 pump set at speed position two. I’m sure by increasing both the fan & pump speed the temperature would decrease slightly, but for me it’s about finding a happy medium between noise & performance.
Pro’s:- Quality radiator, pump /res combo & water block. Very versatile, expandable & ease of fitment into chassis.
Con’s:- Not many! Only the size of the radiator could be a problem with some chassis’ / motherboards.

[dturtill]

Not sure if i just cant see it but whats the RRP

[pastymuncher]

It's for sale on Amazon for £307.49 which is fairly steep for a cpu only loop. It's a big step up in quality from their previous efforts though.

[pompeytom247]

It is cheaper elsewhere at approx £257 & @pastymuncher, it is a good kit & far better than any of the previous efforts for sure.

TBH once you buy a D5, res/pump combo, radiator, CPU block, hose, fittings & fluid you could exceed the Thermaltake kit price.