friend of mine who is a regular here (Hi Kevin!) told me about this review and asked me to put in a few words, since I had that product for a few months now.
so rather than commenting on a review itself I will simply list my own findings.
first off, I knew right away that eliminator has issues, simply because so many people on the boards were moaning and groaning despite generally positive reviews. I was planning to do some heavy duty modding and was sure that I could overcome any problems the factory setup had. (this turned out only partially true).
anyway, on with the show...
out of three settings eliminator has (low/medium/high) low and medium cannot keep up with a 2.8GHz CPU (overclocked E4300). With a 100% TAT load it takes about 15 minutes to overheat it and get to a point when system just shuts down. In terms of noise these settings are somewhat acceptable, even though far from what I'd consider a quiet system.
When you switch it to High, Eliminator can keep up with 100% TAT load on 2.8GHz overclocked E4300. It is very noisy though and I don't consider 2.8GHz a good overclock, so something needed to be done.
I took everything apart (bye-bye warranty) and replaced that noisy 92mm SOB with a 120mm Delta GFM fan (its very, very noisy...) that I had from a previous project. It can put out about 160cfm. I basically just wanted to see how far eliminator can go with a real blower on it. Well, it could sustain steady 3GHz overclock, but 3.2 will make it crap out in about 15 minutes. Again, I don't consider this to be a good overclock for a watercooler.
So at this point I wanted to see why is this silly thing cools so poorly - I took a t-balancer from my main box and wired it up with sensors. I got temps from waterblock, coolant (at one of the pelts), radiator, air inside of the box, air exiting the radiator, and, obviously, good old Coretemp to give me an insight at what's happening with CPU.
After spending an evening testing, here are my findings.
At idle Eliminator cools great
. It can take a coolant and a cpu block to about 16C from 25C ambient in under 10 minutes. (Then again, at idle E4300 barely produces any heat).
Things change when you put it under real load. I found that because water loop is so tight (it's probably about 150ml of coolant altogether), and has realtively little inertia, pelts can be easily overwhelmed by even a modest overclock. It goes like that - you start at 16C idle, and watch the coolant temperature climb slowly to about 30-31C when CPU shuts down due to overheat. It takes 15 to 20 minutes to go through this cycle.
You can help it by keeping a radiator very cold (I stuffed an ice pack inside just to see what will happen). Yes, that helps. With a radiator being ice-cooled peltiers could handle 3.4Ghz (well, for 10 minutes). Except this is, of course, stupid.
Overall I find radiators design so poor that even a Delta fan did not make as much difference as I was hoping for.
Anyway, long story short - kinda ok pump, pretty decent waterblock, but puny peltiers and a really bad radiator design make this unit a NO GO for overclocking. It's OK if you need to cool a stock CPU, in particular if you are in enviroment with high ambient temperatures. For $150US, though... I don't know.
So here's what I ended up doing with my Eliminator:
1. I dumped its 92mm fan. It's a joke anyway, in terms of cooling capacity per noise produced. Right now I have 120mm Panaflo with 92-120mm adapter attached to it. It's controlled by Speedfan.
2. I plugged the pump where fan connector used to go, on that little control board. Now I can control waterflow with Hi/Med/Low settings. It's set on Medium.
3. I powered pelts with 16V from an old power supply I found in my parts box.
overall it can do 3.2GHz now, at 100% TAT load. It's not great but you know, whatever, you've got to stop at some point. When/if I find a cheap and decent water radiator I'll probably add it to a loop, then it'll be something worth having.
Hope this helps.
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