Coolermaster Viva Duo SLI VGA Liquid Cooling System

Introduction:

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of testing Coolermaster's Aquagate Viva which won our best Innovation Award for it's design, quality, and dual purpose application. The Aquagate Viva works on either a graphics card or a single core processor. It did surprisingly well on the graphics card and single core processor with some room to overclock. The Viva is also very adaptable to fit whatever graphics or CPU cooling configuration you could need.

The difference between the Viva and Duo Viva is in the name. While the Viva is a single liquid cooling block design, the Coolermaster Aquagate Duo Viva has two liquid cooling blocks especially designed to keep today's extremely hot graphics cards cooler than their stock heat sinks can. The installation and design haven't been changed so much as the number of water blocks. Now that we've got both, let's take a look and compare the two and see if the Duo Viva is capable of cooling two graphics cards.

Specifications:

Here are the specs and features the new Coolermaster Aquagate Duo Viva has in store. One thing worth noting as you check out the specs is the noise level that the two 70x70x15mm fans create and the amount of air they move at the same time. Otherwise, the quality of materials are the same as the original Viva aside from the excellent polished cooling blocks.

Front

Back

Illustrations

Specifications

Features

• VGA liquid cooling system for SLI and CrossFire application.

• The safety alarm will be automatically triggered when there is an abnormal operation.

• Pure copper water block and larger radiator dimensions provide higher heat transfer efficiency.

• Patented pump design saves space.

• Black tube is designed to reduce evaporation.

• Flexible assembling applications provide interference-free installation.

Closer Look:

If you are familiar with the VIVA GPU Cooling Kit from a few months back, you can't help but wonder if the unit is capable of running on both a CPU and GPU at the same time. Or perhaps, you are wondering if the unit is capable of cooling two processors. The original Viva managed to cool the AMD AM2 3500+ perfectly fine under load and even managed to allow some variance for overclocking. I was able to get the 3500+ up to 2.8GHz from its stock 2.2GHz and my 7900 GT to a new maximum GPU core frequency that ran steady for hours on end. The Aquagate Duo Viva isn't intended for processors this time around.

Viva VGA/CPU System

Viva Duo VGA SLI System

The good things I can recall from my experience with the Viva is that both units use very flexible black rubber tubing that bends and twists about as perfectly as possible. This kind of elasticity is perfect for any kind of case that might require odd twists and turns that would normally kink any other kind of tubing. And another great feature is the guarantee that their won't be any leaks even at the connections due to the type of tubing and the clamps used to secure them.

Package

The System

Mounting Kits

Black Tubing

There are still three major installation procedures that followed the original. You can install the Duo Viva radiator on the case's side panel, inside any one of your drive bays, or mounted and placed inside one of your vacant PCI sockets. Attached to the PCI card, it basically becomes one large PCI Radiator Card. Due to the hard drive and PCI card installation methods, it still gets the Innovation Award in my opinion.

Radiator

Back

Fans

Side Mounting Holes

The original Aquagate Viva Cooling System block wasn't very well polished or lapped. Now, there are some who would suggest that a rough, yet flat lapping makes little or no difference where cooling performance is concerned depending on the heat output. The same thing is true on the other side of the argument that more surface area contact means better thermal conductivity. If it means dropping the GPU or CPU temperature at least a couple of degrees, then why not?

Fortunately, Coolermaster heard the masses and has completely revamped, polished, and lapped the cooling blocks. They are still made of very solid good quality copper that have a great mirror finish. Even the top of the blocks have a mirror like polish. No one really cares what the top looks like if you can't see it under a mounting component. Since the cover plate intended for the block isn't necessary, Coolermaster opted to polish it just in case you leave it out.