CoolIt Eliminator CPU Cooler

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by Greg King on February 16, 2007 in Cooling

CoolIT has followed up to their successful Freezone cooler with a more affordable solution called the Eliminator. It has the same technology under the hood, but does its cooling ability aide it in being worth the asking price?

Page 1 – Introduction


Last month, Rob and I made the journey out to Las Vegas for CES. While there, we met with CoolIT and went over the latest news concerning their products and partnerships. It seemed that the entire week leading up to CES was filled with one news release after another about their partnerships with OEM system builders.

For those of you that might not have heard about CoolIT, they are the first company to bring peltiers into the mainstream with their Freezone CPU cooler that we reviewed last November. In that review, we found that the Freezone kept the Intel E6600’s temperatures well below ambient and if you factor in the ease of installation, it was/is the best cooler we have ever worked with. This includes air and water.

What makes the Freezone so unique is that it uses a factory sealed water loop, is driven by a pump and is cooled off in a radiator. While this sounds exactly like any self contained water kit, what makes it unique is the use of peltiers. While the peltier effect is a rather simple concept, I will let the experts do the talking. For more information on this, please check out the wiki on the Peltier-Seeback effect. What CoolIT did was take the Freezone’s radiator and line peltiers along the top and the bottom.

This aggressively chilled the water running through the radiator and from there, went onto the custom built water block. The results were core temperatures well below anything we have seen outside of the realm of phase change. While we were left extremely excited about the Freezone and the capabilities it had, we were left a bit uneasy with the price. At $300 (US), the Freezone is worth every penny but at that point, it is placed well out of the range of most PC enthusiasts.

Answering the call for a less expensive model, CoolIT has delivered the Eliminator. Using the same technology that the Freezone uses, the Eliminator is priced around the $200 range and features a few different approaches to style and functionality that the Freezone didn’t. One saying that I often go by, and more often than not it plays out true, is that you get what you pay for. I am not saying that $200 is cheap, but is there a $100 difference between the Eliminator and the Freezone? If so, which would we personally recommend to you, the end user? One thing is for sure, if the Eliminator can perform half as well as the Freezone, the PC enthusiast crowd is in for a treat. Without testing the unit, we can’t make this call at this time but by the end of the review, we should have a good idea of how well it stacks up against its bigger, more expensive brother.

Packaging

Reaching our office in it’s retail packaging, the overall appearance of the box in positive. Colorful and informative, with a clear front to show off the design of the Eliminator, the packaging was well done by CoolIT.

As stated earlier, the front of the Eliminator’s box is clear, allowing any potential and/or lucky buyer to see what exactly they are getting themselves into. With their slogan running along the time, “Target the hear… kill the noise,” I can’t help but chuckle. One of the few problems with the Freezone, if you can even call it a problem, was the noise when the unit was set to high. Like I said, not really a problem, but something I found humorous.

Moving to the back of the package, we see a long list of awards and comments, as well as a brief description of what the Eliminator does. Sadly, no quotes from the Techgage Freezone article could be found. Can’t win them all I suppose. CoolIT gets a pardon from us this round…

The box goes onto share performance statistics and while they are colorful and well done, we will omit these in favor of our own to be found later in the review. It would appear that I have taken the editorial reigns and ran with them. Seriously, the packaging was well done and most importantly, easy to open.

Speaking of open… Once we had the unit out of the box, we see that it comes packaged not in Styrofoam like the Freezone did, but rather a foam type material. Soft and secure, the Eliminator appeared to survive delivery.


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