Introduction
Being a computer enthusiast and loyal CustomPC reader, I have constructed a few air/water cooled PCs during the last few years, and being a University student meant that I have some spare time here and there to indulge in this fascinating hobby.
My first contact with Vadim is on the front cover of CustomPC, Dream PC 2006 Edition. With the understated look of the black Lian-Li case with the beautifully crafted internals, it was clear why it won the Dream PC contest amidst strong competition.
At the time, Vadim was a distant and beautiful dream indeed. However, as fate will have it, the funding came through, allowing me to configure a custom Vadim to my heart’s content.
Specification & Thoughts
After putting through my order, I then perused to consult the Vadim’s and other forums on some parts of my configuration. Was too trigger happy to click on the confirm button! After having made my final configurations, with a final cost of £7392.56, Russell proceeded to start the construction.
Custom Fusion-LQX-Intel-775G2
1 x Lian-Li V2100B Plus Black CASE (NO PSU)
1 x Blue-LED fans
1 x Precise Machine-Cut Flames for meshing
1 x Plain Precise Machine-Cut Window
1 x Supreme Cable Management and UV Modding - Green and Blue
1 x LiquoCool Antarctic TXX (CPU+2xChipset+2VGA+2xMosfets)
1 x Coolermaster Real Power M1000W Modular PSU
1 x ASUS Maximus Formula (Intel X38 - 1600/1333 FSB)
1 x Intel Core 2 Quad QX6850 Extreme Retail (4x3.00GHz 1333FSB 8Mb)
2 x OCZ DDR2-1150 2x1024MB FlexXLC Edition Dual Channel Kit
4 x 32Gb Samsung 2.5" ATA SSD Drive with SATA converter
1 x 500Gb Samsung SpinPoint T166 HD501LJ 7200 16mb Cache SATA II
1 x BFG Nvidia 8800 Ultra OC 768Mb PCIe HDCP
1 x SONY-NEC Optiarc AD-7173A 18x DVDRW Black OEM
1 x Sony 3.5" Floppy Drive - Black
1 x Creative 7.1 X-FI ExtremeGamer Fatal1ty
1 x Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit DVD OEM
1 x Safe Stable Overclocking (3-40% - CPU/Memory/VGA)
1 x Standard Build (5-15 working days)
1 x Deluxe 2 Year Collect and Return-Onsite Warranty
1 x Aluminium Custom Trunk (Full Towers - 80x80x40)
1 x Vadim Computers Baseball T-Shirt (S)
Dell 2407WFP TFT Black (24"-6ms) Widescreen x2
Logitech G9 Laser Mouse
Additional Customisation:
Vadim Logo water-cut into front door + LED Mod
Akasa amber fan on radiators
Repack Cooling 5.25" with UV LED reservoir for second loop
Black-Out film on the case window acrylic (Was not implemented)
Water-cool RAM modules
The Coolermaster Real Power M1000W Modular PSU was selected for its quiet operation. ASUS Maximus Formula for its quality and overclockability. RAIDed Samsung SSDs for its quiet operation and uncompromised speed. Floppy Drive because it is useful for updating BIOS, and there’s already Flash card reader on my monitor. OCZ DDR2 FlexXLC Edition memory for its easy integration into the water-cooling loop. Repack Cooling Bay reservoir simply for its aesthetics, as I always felt having a bay reservoir is a beautiful addition in a water-cooling setup.
The Vadim - External Appearance
The Vadim (from now on) was delivered on a Saturday evening, and was to my understanding under construction and through testing procedures up till the time it was dispatched from Vadim in Harrow. It arrived 90 minutes after the call from Russell, confirming the dispatch.
The Vadim arrived inside the Custom Aluminium trunk as specified:
It was packed safely in expending protection padding on the corners, and the computer itself was inside its own box, held in place with polystyrene. The internals was protected by stuffing bubble-wrap in all the spaces inside to protect it from bumps and drops during the delivery.
And here it is - TADA!!
The front – with the “Vadim” cut-out
The back – you can see the modification to the PSU mount, so that it can fit on its side
Front door opened – The bay reservoir, DVD-RW, 12cm outward-blowing fan, FDD, and the LED light mod
And the top – 4 12cm blowholes, the clever space between the second and third fan allows the radiator underneath to be fitted without blocking the airflow of the third fan
Internal Appearance
Now the juicy bits...
The front side – very neat cable management, the fans underneath looks fitting for some kind of wind tunnel setup
Fan array – orangey spinning goodness, all wires neatly routed
Internals – The paths of the water-cooling system is clearly laid out
Aqua-Computers VRM water block
Swiftech Apogee GTX CPU & XSPC X2O Chipset water block – the digital thermal censer became unstuck to the CPU water block retention clip
Blastflow GPU and Swiftech MCW30 chipset water block
Here are a few quick shots of the machine with all of its shimmering glory (more at the end of the review)
Cables and general build quality, customer service
Vadim is renowned for its excellent build quality and attention to detail, and quality is what went into this system. I won’t spend too much time on this section, as the praises are endless and other online review has it spot on. Just want to say that all cables are well routed, and all the visible sections are wrapped with cable management kits.
Customer service... what can I say? I have been through a rough patch in Vadim’s history, the whole restructuring fiasco, I’m happy to say that the PC is well worth the wait. There can never be enough good compliments to the dedication of the Vadim Team. Just reading the forums and you will feel that they might as well plan your wedding for you if you ask nicely. My contact and PC builder Russell was friendly and informative throughout the building process, whilst expertly constructed my system.
Window Optimisation
The system arrived unharmed, I and was able to boot into Windows.
The first thing you notice, apart from the Vadim wallpaper being in serious need of some Anti-Aliasing love as it wasnt designed for my screen resolutions, is that the Windows sidebar is turned off, and some bells and whistles from Windows Vista are gone. Some strange disappearances of useful functions, such as "Maintain aspect ratio" and "Crop to fit screen" options missing in the wall paper menu, caused some annoyance. I think that the end user should be able to decide whether they want their Windows to be optimised or not, at least when you select the option and find something you don’t particularly like, you can’t complain.
The LiquoCool Antarctic TXX Water-Cooling Package
This, is what this system is all about. It’s Vadim’s (not so)secret weapon. It’s the heart and soul of the PC. It is the bubbling blood and life of the monster. It is why I choose Vadim. Without it, in my opinion, it is just a VERY expensive calculator backed by VERY good customer service.
The cooling loop consists of the following components, linked in order:
Loop 1: Swiftech MCP655 (D5) silent pump > Quad Extreme radiator > Swiftech Apogee GTX CPU > Double Radiator > BlastFlow VGA > Reservoir flowing via 1/2" ID BlastFlow Tubing.
All of the connections on loop 1 are secured with Jubilee clips. The Second Loop tubes are secured by screw connections. Even the connections on the RAM are fastened with UV blue Zip-ties to ensure leak-free operation!
They used Zalman coolant with UV dye for the second loop, making my bay reservoir look too inky.
I decided to get my hands dirty, so I proceeded to purchase a litre of innovatekProtekt IP, and attempt to drain, then dilute the liquid.
After a litre of new fluid, and a little light modding, plus voiding the waranty of the second liquid loop, here’s the result
Just realised that the UV Blue innovatek tubing is actually see-through!
A closer look at the cooling mesh, black as the whole case.
Other then these minor details the whole water-cooling system looks absolutely FANTASTIC!!!
Temperatures
What’s a liquid cooling review without the temperatures??
Overall the temperatures are very good for a liquid cooled PC, although the result for the CPU is quite surprising, rising around 30 degrees during load, with just 1.425 volts, at 3.76Ghz.
Last edited by eternal_fantasy on Thu Nov 08, 2007 9:00 am; edited 2 times in total
The Temperature in the Vadim is regulated via the mCubed T-Balancer bigNG smart fan controller.
This little gadget is the key ingredient ensuring the silent operation of the Vadim PC, while cooling it down when needed. It has some intuitive fan control settings, and an easy to use interface.
When I first received the Computer, the T-Balancer was already preset by Vadim. I spent some time looking at the system, familiarising myself with the settings, and which temperature sensor controls which fan. I found it weird that the fan on the cool “loop 2” radiators was spinning very fast while the fans on the hot “loop 1” radiators was slow. I must admit that i was pesting them every few days to get the system ready for me to have asap as due to the restructuring i just couldnt wait any longer and the numerous changes of the components requested by me down to even the bay reservoir. as i wanted specifically a repack cooling or Aqua Computer one instead of the XS-PC one that is offered as standard in the TXX cooling.
Anyway, they place 4 sensors arround the PC - Digital sensor 1 was placed on the “retention mount” of the CPU.
(The sensor was loose when it arrived, and it was stuck back into position before turning on the PC.)
Digital sensor 2 was attached to the aluminium memory block on the BlastFlow GPU block. Because of the nature of the BlastFlow System, the aluminium memory block’s temperature fluctuated a lot depending on the graphics card’s load. It can get as high at 60˚C or more. Using this sensor to control the fans on the already cooler second loop is puzzling.
The setup needed some tweaking, which obviously was my fault as i rushed the guys to get it delivered last weekend with less than 24 hours of testing that they do as they had to obtain another reservoir from one of their competitors instead of using the XS-PC one they use as default in their options and tweaking is what I did. I insulated sensor 1 with some tubing, then set it to control both loop’s fans. The insulation provided better readings, and the temperature now range from 32 to 42 degrees. Now that there’s some room to play with, I constructed identical fan response curves, with the second loop’s fans 5% slower than the main loop, and streamlined the curves. Now it runs quietly when I’m doing low load tasks, and speeds up when I’m gaming.
I suggest some of the more advanced users can play around with the settings on the excellent T-Balancer, as it is actually quite fun and it rewards you with a very dynamic cooling system.
Overclocking
Having received the system pre-overclocked at 3.7Ghz, I couldnt wait to see how much more juice that can be squeezed out of this beast. Finding the highest stable CPU clock, followed by the highest FBS, then dropping the voltage until it becomes unstable, I achieved a very stable system overclock with a relatively low voltage, of which the details can be found below.
The GPU was Overclocked using both nVidia’s nTune, and RivaTuner Ver. 2.06. The overclock settings was tested visually using the “Forest “ level of 3DMark06, looking for artefact and corrupt images, then clocked back 15Mhz as the final setting.
My BIOS settings, to whom it may interest
System Setup
My “other” PC
My component torturing device.
Vadim (with safe and stable overclocking)
The system as I’ve received it.
Vadim (home stable overclocking)
The same system (of course...) just tweaked for much higher clock. 2 instances of Orthos 12H stable.
Vadim (extreme CPU overclocking)
Tweaked to the max. Just stable enough to run the CPC benchmark.
Benchmarks
The Benchmarks consists of 2 different tests. 3DMark06 is a product of FutureMark Corp., and is mainly for synthetically testing your graphics card’s ability to render 3D images, using DirectX 9.0c Shader Model.
The second benchmarking software I will use is the Custom PC Benchmarks Suite 2007. It consists of 3 different tests; image editing, video encoding and multitasking, and the point from each is averaged to give the final score. The score is calibrated against a reference PC consists of a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6750, 2GB of Corsair XMS2-8500 DDR2, 250GB S-ATA II Samsung SpinPoint P120 hard disk and Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP motherboard running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. The reference PC scores 1000 points, so if a score of 1200 is obtained, that particular PC is around 20% faster on those tasks relative to the reference PC. Its 2D oriented nature is a good indication of your PC’s performance in everyday tasks.
Graph
Putting over 1.55V through a £700 CPU just got me in to the 15th place in the CustomPC’s Benchmarking Leaderboard, all whilst running on Windows Vista, 4 sticks of ram and early motherboard BIOS, which all contributes to penalise the overclocking ability of this machine.
The results show that there are plenty more potential in a Vadim PC if you dare to explore, at lease when selecting the safe and stable overclocking option when customising your PC.
Conclusion and final thoughts
So, you finally see the light at the end of this essay of a review.
Having spent a small fortune one of the best computer system on the world, do I regret the decision? Hell no! Although, even Vadim is not perfect, and there are areas that they can obviously improve on. The placement of sensor is one that comes to mind, and some quick adjustments on Vadim’s side will sort it out in no time.
Overclocking the system had been great fun, and very rewarding to come within range of other optimised system setups ran on the bench on CustomPC’s score leaderboard. With a more mature BIOS, I am certain the Vadim will move up a few more places.
The looks of the system is awe inspiring. It just to show what you can get when you are prepared to pay a premium over the cost of the list of components. You know it was a Vadim system just by the characteristic look of the PC, even after customising it to your heart’s content.
I will refrain from giving a score, as it will be meaningless because there’s nothing you can compare the score or the machine to, but in my mind, it is just shy of a perfect Dream PC.
Hopefully you, the reader, be a potential customer, a Vadim employee, or an interested forum member, have found this review interesting and informative. Please do ask questions if you have something on your mind in this review, and I will do my best to give you a reply.
~Jeffrey Lee~
And some more tech porn for your viewing pleasure~
No Computer enthusiast should live without
And I leave you with a cherry
Credit goes to Vincent, who made this review possible by keeping the thread clear while I uploaded the post, and helped me edit it at 1 o'clock in the morning!!
Last edited by eternal_fantasy on Thu Nov 08, 2007 10:13 am; edited 1 time in total
It's good to see some close up pictures of a TXX cooling setup, all I need now is for some kind soul to post a picture of a TX2 setup and I'll be a happy bunny.
Great pictures by the way and very detailed review, I'm impressed!!
Thanks for putting in all the effort to get this done, it will help prospective customers like myself get an idea what work goes into these wonderful machines
Great in-depth review and wow, your machine looks spectacular.
Shame I don't know the first thing about over-clocking and water cooling - my Vadim is a powerful business machine, though with a fair bit of gaming capacity I just went for the safe, stable over-clocking option, left everything to their discretion and all is fine.
But I did wonder, when you mentioned about moving temperature sensors, whether if a buyer didn't have your expertise, they would have had any problems if they left the machine exactly as Vadim supplied it?
Or did you make the changes mainly because you were going to push the system to the absolute limits?
Hay Paul, you shouldn't worry about the temperatures on your system. Vadim's settings accomendates a wide range of systems, I just like to customise mine so that it is quieter when there is not too much heat within the system, and cools well when there are. Watercooling setup is a little different compared to an air cooled setup, being that the heat source is not actually expelled locally.
Actually I'm fine about the temperature on my system - it is literally cold to the touch which is amazing considering it has 4 raptors and a fifth backup drive!
I was really thinking about someone who wanted the best machine possible, like you've got, but didn't know half what you know - would they have had to change anything? I'm really just asking on behalf of the less technical person who still wants a kick-ass machine like yours.
By the way, I'm was amazed when you said you weren't a native to these shores - if English is your second language, you sure had a good teacher!!
Thanks Nasher, If you would like to go through the "Temperature Regulation" section again, you will find that "The setup needed some tweaking, which obviously was my fault as i rushed the guys to get it delivered last weekend with less than 24 hours of testing that they do as they had to obtain another reservoir from one of their competitors instead of using the XS-PC one they use as default in their options and tweaking is what I did."
That review was perfect, better than the mags I think. You didn't leave anything undone, even critisised yourself, and gave Vadim some suggestions and said what you don't like. The photo's were magic and I truly enjoyed the whole review
One question when youve got time, scuse me if it seems obvious to you and everyone else, but on the 15th piccie down is that an ups, OR a seperate power supply, or does an ups act like a power supply??.
In a couple of weeks or so when youve played for a while, would you please give your honest opinion on Vista 64 any problems, Blue screens, does it work with the internet okay? Thanks
You are correct, that was the Belkin 1500VA "UPS", thanks for pointing that out and avoid confusion for other readers.
Actually I have already used the 64-bit Windows Vista for over year. I installed it as soon as it was available in the shops.
Because I do not own a printer, I cannot comment on its compatibility with 64-bit Windows Vista. The operating system has come a long way after a year of abuse by the public, and personally, I think it is very much stabler then Windows XP. Blue Screen OF Death only happens when there has been a bad overcloking attempt. There wasn't any problem connecting to the internet from the get go, so you don't need to worry about that.
There has been some incompatibilies though, even after a year, but are slowly improving as more users are adopting Vista, and especially the 64-bit edition, and companies are writing better 64-bit drivers.
Noticeable incombatibility now for me is that I cannot use my computer to sync with the iPod Touch, and that some older games' copy protection system don't play nice with the 64-bit OS.
Having the OS recognising the whole 4GB of RAM is something I now cannot live without. Games load much faster, and populated MMORPGS, such as World of Warcraft no longer lag when entering a heavily populated city.
Windows Vista is now as good as ever, and I will never use an older version of Windows if I had the choice.
Last edited by eternal_fantasy on Thu Nov 08, 2007 4:22 pm; edited 1 time in total
It's good to see some close up pictures of a TXX cooling setup, all I need now is for some kind soul to post a picture of a TX2 setup and I'll be a happy bunny.
Great pictures by the way and very detailed review, I'm impressed!!
Thanks for putting in all the effort to get this done, it will help prospective customers like myself get an idea what work goes into these wonderful machines
Very nice review eternal_fantasy!!!
I agree with you rattyjunk, maybe someone at Vadim can do that?
After this review I am defentatly getting a Custom trunk, I was put off getting 1 when I saw it when you customise your system in the Packaging bit, as it looks like their is a extra bit on the top? maybe Vadim should change this picture.
I just went for the safe, stable over-clocking option, left everything to their discretion and all is fine.
