Assembly and Installation Tips

You can download the detailed assembly and installation manual from the official company web-site (1.9MB file). Overall, the procedure is pretty simple and requires minimal efforts. At first you have to determine the location of the cooling system. If you read our Aquagate Review attentively enough, you should have noticed that there were no retentions for the radiator to be installed outside the system case. Yes, the new liquid-cooling system is designed to be placed inside the system case in a way like the illustration from the manual suggests:

So, the power supply unit should be located at the bottom and there should be enough room at the top inside your system case for the radiator of this size to fit in. computer case makers have been offering solutions with this particular internal structure lately. For example, Cooler Master COSMOS case is exactly the case like that:

If you have a case with different internal organization than the one on the picture above, then you will have to think of a way of attaching the radiator with the fans outside the system case. Of course, it will take some extra space on your desk or floor and may not look its best this way, but it will certainly improve the cooling efficiency.

And once you have made up your mind about the place for your cooling system main components, you can go ahead and proceed with installing the CPU water block. It needs to be fastened with screws to the backplate on the reverse side of the PCB:

As I have already mentioned above, if you are installing this water block on AMD K8 processors, you should use a different pair of retention brackets, however, the installation principle remains the same. Water block screw fastening provides highly secure contact with the CPU. The block will never shift or rotate on the processor heat-spreader.

When all the components are in place, you can start connecting the tubing. The vinyl chloride polymer tubing included with the Aquagate Max system is long enough to satisfy all your needs. Actually, we had over 1.5m of tubing left when we completed connecting the components. As you may have already understood, I didn’t have the case with the necessary internal structure available, and I didn’t have the chance to buy an expensive COSMOS. So, all the components were placed the following primitive way:

Yeah, I don’t think I could put up with this mess for a long time, but for testing purposes, it was quite OK. The case side panel remained open for Aquagate Max as well as its only opponent during the entire test session. Also, take a look at the thermal sensors inserted into the tubing. They should allow the main block of the cooling system to control the coolant temperature and adjust the rotation speed of the radiator fans accordingly. However, in reality, nothing like that ever happened, even though I checked multiple times the connection of the thermal sensors with the main block, as well as the fans. The fans were always running at their maximum rotation speed of ~2400RPM. It is hard to tell whether it was a strange defect or peculiarity of this cooling system sample.

Now that all system components are connected with the tubes we can fill the system with cooling solution. To make this solution you have to mix the coolant concentrate with distilled water as 1:3 and pour the solution into the main water block:

Strange as it might seem, but they didn’t include such cheap and useful accessory as a funnel with Aquagate Max, so I had to use a third-party funnel. I hope folks from Cooler master will not be offended :)

After filling the system, checking the connections containment and plugging in all the cables - including the USB one – to the mainboard, we can get started. Aquagate Max turns on automatically, when you power on your system case – this is what the USB cable is for. The system comes with no additional software, and there is also no software monitoring of any kind. If you assembled the system without any problems, then you will see green highlighting of the coolant level control window and coolant movement indicator:

The fans will also glow green:

The tubes and coolant inside them glow in UV light, so the system case with Aquagate Max inside should look very attractive and even breath-taking. I would like to add that you will have to turn the system on/off a few times at first, adding coolant solution to the expansion tank every time.

At this point, if I missed any technical details, the next section should definitely make up for that.