HardwareGeeks.com - Review: CoolIT Domino ALC

Brought to you by:

Posted by: Michael on Thu, Dec 18th, 2008

Today CoolIT has announced the availability the Domino ALC a liquid cooling unit which has won the CES 2009 Innovations award. The Dominio ALC is probably the cutest looking and most compact, I say cute because that is the word my female friend used when she saw it, also the easiest to install and affordable liquid cooling unit on the market.

CoolIT CEO Geoff Lyonn said “With the price point of the Domino, I think we’ll see it as an integral part of the “Under $1000” PC and like most technology advancements, this just makes the combined system better… for less.”

For about a week we have had one to test out and I have to say I am impressed, Impressed because it only took me 5 minutes to install the unit on my AMD system. All I had to do was remove the HSF and its support bracket. Then I just screwed in 4 risers and installed the Domino ALC. It was so easy that I second guessed my self and thought I did it wrong. I even uninstalled it and reinstalled it to make sure I didn’t miss a thing, and I hadn’t, I installed it correctly the first time.

Little note though, Intel users will take a bit longer to install as you will have to remove your motherboard to install a bracket under the CPU, and AMD users with Gigabyte boards or any board that uses plastic plugs to secure the HSF bracket in place will not be able to use the Domino ALC unless CoolIT comes out with a bracket for you.

Once I got the Domino installed in those quick five minutes I fired up my system and the first thing I did was run some benchmarks. I had already run the benchmarks on the system prior to installing the Domino and there were substantial increases in both PCMark Vantage and 3DMark vantage. Due to an NDA on the processor I am using I can’t release the scores or the CPU model until early next year during CES so I will update this part of this review then. If you subscribe to our RSS feed you should be alerted to the update.

After a few days I wanted to check what my average CPU temp was, I knew it would be cooler than the CPU temps prior to the Domino being installed which averaged 93 degrees when idle and 115 while under heavy use. So with the Domino ALC set to it’s lowest speed I checked my CPU Temp. It averaged 68 degrees F while idel and only 87 when under heavy use. I don’t know if it was the cold blowing in from my window, but i literally could feel a chill on my legs.

So you probably wondering how many speeds does the Domino ALC have? Since I mentioned I tested my temps at it’s lowest speed. It has a total of three which are slow medium and fast. But you don’t need to even have it on medium or fast for the Domino to cool your CPU effectively, in fact I wouldn’t recommend putting it on fast unless you were doing some hard cord gaming on a steamy day. Plus Fast is too damn nosey unless you are gaming and can drown it out with the sound from the game.

I would recommend keeping it on slow if you are in an air conditioned room or medium if you aren’t. I would only recommend fast if you have overclocked your system and are gaming.

The Domino ALC has a built in LCD that tells you how fast it’s fan and liquid pump is moving, the temperature of the coolant, the speed and it alerts you of any problems. I think it’s a pretty cool feature, I just need to get a sidepanel for my case that will allow me to view it.

I mentioned how the Domino ALC is affordable, and while I have no clue what the price will be I am just going on what CoolIT has told me and I am guessing sub $150, it doesn’t feel as if it was made with low quality products, in fact it feels like it was made to last.

Udating to let you guys know the Domino ALC will cost you $79.00.

Overall the Domino is a Kick Ass peice of equipment and we award it our 5 Star Kick Ass Award. For more information on the Domino ALC visit http://www.coolitsystems.com