Intro

I've watched the development of the PolarFLO line of waterblocks with great interest ever since the first one was sent out for evaluation. I had a chance to play with that first block, and let's just say that it needed a few design adjustments in order to be competitive. The crew over at Horse of Iron (the company that produces the PolarFLO) listened to the feedback then, as they still do now, and continued to improve the design over the last couple of years. Since I had a chance to watch from PolarFLO's beginning, I almost feel a sense of pride to see how the company has expanded and how advanced their waterblocks have become. Besides, who doesn't root for a patriotic small-town Montana-based company? The block I'm testing in this review has an additional tweak to the PolarFLO TT line, they pulled one of the barbs out and plugged the hole to change it from a 3 port block to a 2 port block. Is this an improvement? We'll see.

The Block

The PolarFLO TT Series waterblock is designed for performance, but aesthetics are also kept in mind. The TT Series is offered in Red, like the one I received, and is also flavored Blue, Black, or Chrome; you just need to pick the color that best fits in with your case theme. The mounting method is ingenious in that there is no need to switch out the mounting plate for newer boards. The block will fit on Intel socket 478, 603, and 604 boards and AMD socket 754, 939, and 940 boards without having to change the mounting plate. There is also a kit available if you want to mount it on an Intel 775 socket T board. Horse of Iron (damn, that's a cool name) also included a chipset block with the TT, but unfortunately it wouldn't quite fit on my Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard. One of the screws that mount the waterblock got in the way by about 1/8th of an inch. I could dremel it to fit, but I'll leave that for another day. This board uses passive cooling and even running a 450FSB doesn't heat it up very much so the chipset cooler would be overkill.

The copper base on the PolarFLO TT is huge, but still manages to be relatively smooth. There are still a few machine marks in the copper that a little bit of lapping would take care of; you can just barely see them in the picture near the top of the base. The advantage of having such a large base is that you get complete coverage of the CPU die and heat spreader, and as we all know, copper is great for heat absorption so the more the merrier. The copper used inside the block to transfer heat to the water has one of the strangest designs I've seen, as you can see in the pic I ripped from the PolarFLO website. The more I studied it though, the more I can see how it works. It's designed to keep the water in contact with the copper for as long as possible; initially the water will run along the 3 prongs in the center as it enters the block. Then it will spread into the grooves where most of the heat transfer will occur. As the water exits, it has to climb over the lip first so it can absorb still more heat before it heads out. Once again, an innovative design that seems to work.

Install

Mounting the block was child's play, I just had to remove the heatsink cage from the top of the board and pull the backplate, insert 2 screws with some nylon washers and nuts, and tighten evenly. It took me all of about 5 minutes to do everything. The mounting plate on the waterblock has a bit of flex in it to compensate for over-tightening. One of the more unique aspects of the PolarFLO TT waterblock is the ability to rotate the top of the block so you can get a better orientation for your water lines. As far as I know, no other waterblock has this capability. The PolarFLO TT is purposely designed to be low profile so that it reduces interference with other gear and airflow. Shows you how much thought was put into the design of the waterblock. You can see where one of the exit barbs is removed and plugged in the profile picture.

Testing

Now for some testing. I'll recap the system I used; Asus K8V SE Deluxe with a Newcastle 3200+ CPU, ThermoChill 120.1 radiator with a pair of Sunon 120mm's, a DangerDen round reservoir, and the Laing 12V pump (best pump I've EVER used). The two blocks I tested the PolarFLO TT against were the 3 port DangerDen RBX and the port DangerDen TDX. The inserts I used for both DangerDen blocks were the #4. Everything on the system is set up at 1/2 inch. Here's what I got:

If the graph above isn't clear enough, here are the numbers again:

Of course, all temps were taken in Celsius. The ambient temperature was 28C for all tests. I used MotherBoard Monitor along with a thermal probe to correlate results. In the Prime95 testing, I selected Torture Test and used the In-Place large FFT's to generate the most heat. Each test was run for 30 minutes with a 1 hour period in-between where the system was turned off.

I was very surprised to see that in all of the tests the waterblocks stayed within 1 degree of each other. The DangerDen blocks are well known in the watercooling community to be exceptionally good, and the PolarFLO TT hung right in there with them. The TDX performed the best, but only by a degree here and there. Any of these waterblocks installed in your rig would bring a smile to your face when you looked at the temps. One caveat to the readings above...the PolarFLO block came with 3/8th inch barbs so I had to step my lines down a bit for entry and exit. This may or may not have affected the outcome. I'd sure like to try it again with a block that has 1/2 inch barbs.

Conclusion

So, what do I think of the PolarFLO TT 2 port design? I think it's an improvement over the 3 barbs. I've always thought that the two exit barbs doesn't allow the water enough time inside the block to facilitate the transfer of heat from the base into the water. But that's just me thinking again, I would get a lot of arguments that the 3 port is better. The PolarFLO TT performed very impressively against two of the best blocks available, and as a bonus you can color coordinate, rotate the top to adjust your lines, and it has a low profile. If you are running a rig that the PolarFLO TT works with, you won't go wrong by choosing it as your waterblock. Because of the good performance and innovative design, I award the PolarFLO an 9 out of 10 and yes, it is PimpRig Pimp Gear.

PimpRig Rating //
(9 pimp hats)

Thanks to Horse of Iron for providing us with the PolarFLO TT waterblock to test, it's available from www.polarflo.com for $59.99 or $85.99 for the Chrome version.

 

(Special thanks to DangerDen. Through a series of events I ended up with this review, but I had given away my water rig a long time ago when I went to phase change cooling. So I had a block to review and needed gear quickly. I had done some work for DangerDen a while back and Rokk had offered me a waterblock for my trouble. I didn't take him up on his offer then, but now I needed a block to test against so I shot him an email asking if the offer was still good. Rokk and the folks over at DangerDen are truly a class act and I appreciate their help with the parts needed to run this test as they donated an extensive amount of parts.)