Even prior to receiving delivery of the Reserator I was vaguely thinking over what I could do to improve its performance. Some of the reviews left me in no doubt this was quite an average performer as it stood. For my XP3200+Barton and 6800GT however, which kicks out only around 150W of heat, this was no problem at all and Reserator is easily adequate.

Max temps of 40’C for the CPU and 48’C for the GPU in the midst of gaming was a good improvement over air and, importantly for me, silently done too.

My intention is to upgrade to 939 soon though with a more powerful CPU and GPU combination which potentially will produce up to 250-300W of heat. This is the motivation then to enhance the Reserator with fans and a larger pump in the hope of offsetting some of that double loading to come.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, above is the stock Reserator1 Plus as it comes from Zalman and is the basis of my cooling system. Don’t let the perspective fool you, this thing is huge at over half a metre tall and 15cm diameter!

Despite some criticism of the supplied blocks I’ll not be looking at alternatives this time and these will remain. The water tubing bore is another area I’m leaving for now. These two are not dismissed out of hand, just deferred for consideration later.

For now I’ll be looking at the fans and bearing in mind I really want a silent system they’ll be running at the slowest rpm possible.

Design

I had some fun with this and lashed up several ideas. For example just using a little string gave me this to start with.

The interesting thing with this was the angle of the fans which by spreading the airflow along the length of the fins gave a 2’C reduction straight away. Most radiators have fans mounted perpendicular to the face which I tried initially with a 1-2’C result. In this case it clearly wasn’t appropriate with the rounded shape and height, and roughly 45 degrees was better.

My next idea was a disaster really but I include it anyway.

I had the fans top secured from the bottom edge of the lampshade shaped cowl with their bases tight against the radiator body. This effectively gave the upward 45 degree angle I was after. My aim was to guide the turbulent air more directly towards the fin surface with the cowl. Well it didn’t help and I think enclosing the radiator was an obvious mistake as it just restricted the airflow.

It took ages to make from card and wire so I kept it for a few days but it was rubbish really.

A 2’C reduction was poor anyway but it was flimsy, half arsed and frankly looked awful.