Features Continued

     The overall impression of the Vapochill LS gets a thumbs up from us! The workmanship is carefully thought out, and has been refined ever since the first Vapochill debuted not too long ago. Asetek took awhile to come to terms with the fact that a lot of overclocker's own AMD processor's, but in the end their new clamshell mounting mechanism is much easier to use. It takes about 30 seconds to take the Evaporator head off your processor in case you want to upgrade, and better yet, it wont smash the core of your CPU if you take the heat plate off.

     I can say that we had problems using a Winchester AMD CPU, and am still puzzled on to whom to place the blame on. After a week of failures getting our 2500 Winchester to run, we found a guy named Dennis who graciously shipped his own 3500 Newcastle to us. This solved all our issues such as freezing BIOS,  that we had previously thought Asetek had overlooked. After a lot of research we found out that most of the blame lies on AMD since they never had any kind of technical resources released with their newer Winchester core. This placed a huge dilemma on motherboard manufacturers, and cooling companies such as Asetek that we are quite sure of. Lesson learned!. If you are running a Winchester CPU under -10C, consider yourself extremely lucky!

     The first impression upon POST are those wonderful temperatures! You can actually use your PC's power button to obtain some extra options that aren't described in the Vapochill's manual. For example if you press the button down long enough you can change the boot up Evaporator temperature. The LCD can also be configured to name your website, describe your system, or even the name of your system. This is configured through the chill control GUI once its installed in Windows. We're quite sure that if you are so inclined that you could even write your own custom LCD display configurations.

Chill Control

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     This is the very first window that you'll see once you access the chill control software in windows. AS you can see there are 4 blank temperatures that can be displayed on your LCD. Also notice the fan speeds which can be logged as a file. Take note of the CC version since Asetek often updates the firmware. This is a neat feature which helps in identifying what rev you have so you don't have to look at the PCB to find out.

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     The second tab gives you the options you need to adjust the fans, heat management, start/warning/shut-down temperatures, and LCD contrast and backlight. We found that the 75% fan RPM setting was an excellent all-around setting for our setup, although for our top overclock we used 100%. More on this later.

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     This is were you can observe your system stats. You can also have this displayed on the LCD of the LS. Notice the vcore and speed on the first try of testing our 3500 Newcastle.

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Here is where you can input characters to your LCD display, or you can choose from a few options. You can also rename your sensors and inputs.

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     The last tab allows you to select your loging which could prove useful to keep track of your setups. For example if you have your fans set down to far while benchmarking you could refer back to a log you made when that setup worked and change your LS's fan RPM perimeters.

Testing and Overall Impressions

     We seriously flogged the LS during our testing, so much in fact that we blew its fuse up and had to replace it. If this same thing happens to you the chill control controls red and blue LED won't emit and the LS display will just sit there. We aren't sure if this is a common occurrence, but it is a nice safety feature. We had originally thought that the LS was DOA, but using the Asetek forum's we were able to get an idea of what really happened. This actually happened during the problems we observed trying to get a Winchester to work, so when we obtained a Newcastle and repaired the fuse it didn't happen again. Just to be safe we grabbed some extra fuses though.

     So far the LS has been running for 12 HRS without any sign of condensation or problems. For those of you not familiar with phase change we'll have to mention that it is one of the most reliable ways of overclocking, and with the chill control unit constantly controlling the communication between the PC and the LS we can pretty much say in confidence that once you're up and running you shouldn't have any of those common problems like environmental temperature, air in your water blocks, or temperature variations that cause lock ups. Sure it takes some fine tuning, but the LS is a really neat piece of hardware that is an absolute must have.

     We wanted to give you a good idea of what the LS is capable of but our current setup is lagging in the kind of options we need for vcore and the kind of FSB that will yield use something wroth mentioning. A fresh OS install is also direly needed, but since we have some great stuff from DFI and Connect 3D we decided to divide this review into two parts. For now we obtained a top speed of 2856mhz with our 3500 Newcastle. Better yet we have good idea of what the LS is all about and once we have some supporting hardware we will graciously add a second part to our review. For now our Vapochill, even though it is hampered by our testbed gets a must have and ClubOC recommended!

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2856mhz on 1.5vcore is an excellent result given that similar phase change setups are running in upwards of 1.8vcore for this kind of speed.