Water cooling is a method of heat removal from components. As opposed to air cooling, water is used as the heat transmitter. Water cooling is commonly used for cooling internal combustion engines in automobiles and electrical generators. Other uses include cooling the lubricant oil of pumps; for cooling purposes in heat exchangers; cooling products from tanks or columns, and a bit more recently, cooling of various major components inside top-end personal computers. The main mechanism for water cooling is convective heat transfer.
It looks like finally a motherboard company has listened to enthusiasts’ actual needs, however there’s no word on the warranty situation, or how it performs without being plugged into a water supply - the pipes are empty after all.
MSI claims up to 20 percent more power efficiency and up to six times longer life because of the continually reduced component temperature. We expect this also means there should be some better potential overclocking too - providing the BIOS (and new X48 chipset) is up to it.
A tentative and early price of €379 may put a lot of people off, but if you’re serious about it consider how much it costs for an entire watercooling kit in addition to finding a non-heatpiped board to fit it. From the pictures below, the awesome professional CNC milled piece might say enough to watercoolers to spend the money. Even if you’re not a watercooler, we’ve discovered that MSI is working on its own kit to work in conjunction with it, but is remaining extremely tight lipped as to how this is progressing.
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