Wintsch Labs is a new company to the cooling scene and they are targeting a very select part of the market. They are after the high-performance Thermo-Electric Cooling crowd. Well, perhaps crowd is a bit over the top, but there are guys out there who just love Peltier Cooling. Peltiers, or TECs, are small devices made up of an array of thermocouples. When electric current is passed through them, the resistance creates heat, and the design of the devices capitalizes on what is called the "Peltier Effect". Essentially, all the heat produced is transferred to one side of the device making one side hot, while making the other side very cold. The TEC acts as a heat pump taking on the CPU heat and passing it from the cold side to the hot side of the device. Then a secondary cooling solution must take the combined heat burden of the CPU and the TEC, and remove it from the system. The early pioneers to TEC cooling used TECs to cool processors like the venerable Celeron 300a. They were able to use small 72watt TECs and modified heatsinks fans to achieve excellent results. Of course, as simple as this sounds, TEC cooling is anything but simple. Today's processors produce much greater heat then the celerons and need much more powerful TECs to achieve these same results. They require more electrical power for more powerful TECs which also means greater risk of condensation, and much greater requirements for cooling. The TEC is a heat pump and the old HSF units can no longer cope with the combined heat burden of the CPU and the TEC itself. Water cooling is the only sound approach.

Enter Wintsch Labs. Wintsch Labs is certainly not the first company to produce and market water-cooled TEC products. Companies like Swiftech and Danger Den both offer current solutions. Where Wintsch Labs differs from these others is the degree of solution that they are offering. Let me be clear; the Wintsch Lab's Arctic Web, which is on my test bench today, is the most extreme design offered in TEC cooling to date. I have referred to it as a monster, and it is certainly every bit the title and more. No other cooling solution on the market today, short of phase change cooling, can rival it. Here is the Arctic Web.

Package and Contents

The Arctic Web arrived in a fairly small brown cardboard box with a Wintsch Lab's shipping label. The only thing remarkable at all was that it felt like I was holding a box that weighed four times what it should have. I opened the box and the Web was packed carefully inside surrounded by neoprene. It looks even more monstrous in person and there is nothing at all about the device that looks weak. Also included are the specific mounting hardware required for your selected CPU form factor and some additional materials like Dielectric Grease and insulation required for successfully operating the device. Arctic Silver products Arctic Ceramique was supplied for thermal paste.

I have provided some information below from Wintsch Labs outlining additional information about their product. Wintsch Labs doesn't make many claims about what their product can do, and as you will soon see, most of what you can expect from it comes not from what the product can do, but from what you are willing and able to do with it.

"The Arctic Web Standard is an extreme water cooled thermal electric unit which utilizes a 437watt Qmax peltier device. It uses four barbs to deliver quad path flow across a dense matrix of copper pins. The Arctic Web's 437watt Qmax TEC unit is a 62mm module where current blocks utilize 50mm module. This larger footprint allows for greater heat pumping capability and lower temperatures during idle and load conditions.

The Arctic Web can also be utilized with a 50mm 226watt module. Since the Arctic Web is designed to dissipate the greater heat generated by a 62mm module you can expect great performance if your needs require a 50mm module".