The design of Kandalf was made with both the radiator and water-pump integrated into the case in order to reduce the space taken up by the entire system. It works very well for the intended purpose, leaving enough room inside the case to put in larger motherboards and expansion cards and keeping the case size from being too large or too tall. The 360mm tall aluminum radiator pre-installed at the front of the case is cooled by three 120mm fans and has enough cooling capacity to handle graphic cards and motherboard chips by using optional VGA water block or chipset water block. The air blown through the radiator is directed vertically more than horizontally toward the inside of the case, which reduces the amount of dust being collected inside the case.

The 12V 500L/Hr water-pump draws power from a 4-pin Molex plug and features a 3-pin CPU fan plug to send the pump-speed data to the motherboard to monitor it in case of failure. The water-pump operates very quietly and has an attached 350cc reservoir which can be rotated to accommodate different mounting positions. It is small enough to be put inside the case but can also be placed outside the case if desired. However, additional tubes may be required if the graphic card and motherboard chipsets are to be cooled with the pump outside the case. The case comes with green UV color tube and two 500cc bottles of green coolant. One 500cc bottle is enough to run the entire liquid cool system.

In actual installation, I found out that the water-pump has to be positioned under the reservoir tank for the initial bleeding of air from the tubes. The tubes themselves are the most troublesome part of the system to install, mainly because they need to be cut in correct length to prevent crinks and needs to be rotated in the fitting to match the direction of the next component the liquid will flow toward as the tubes come pre-bent. Not that is was extremely difficult, just requires more care and precision than the rest of the system. Two 19mm open-wrenches are required for installation of the hoses.

The rest of the system requires much less effort to setup. The CPU cooling block comes with a backing plate and screws to firmly secure it. The bracket supports 7 different types of heatsink mountings including AMD Sockets 754, 939, 940, AM2, F and Intel sockets 775 ATX and BTX. While it is not mentioned by the ThermalTake website, the bracket can also support Intel sockets 478, 479 and AMD Socket A (462) on motherboards that come with mounting holes. It is a two-piece block with a copper piece on the bottom and a clear plastic piece lit by a blue LED on top, giving the view of the coolant flow to indicate residue build-up as well as to look cool. The water block sent for review has a very smooth polished surface on the bottom but was damaged during the shipping and dents can be seen in the picture.

Test Setup

• Core 2 Duo E4300 (1.8GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB, 65nm)
• Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (1.9GHz, 2x 512KB L2 Cache, 65nm, 65w)
• Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H

• 2x 1GB Kingston 800MHz DDR2
• XFX GeForce 8500GT 256MB DDR2
• 320GB Western Digital SATA 3.0 Drive 7200rpm

Despite the slightly damaged cooling block, the cooling performance was very good and able to reduce the CPU temperature significantly on an over clocked Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800Mhz FSB (L2 revision) running at 2.88GHz. It was able to drop the idle temp @ 1.92Ghz from 39'C on stock cooler to 31'C with Kandalf LCS. Under full load @ 2.88 Ghz Kandalf LCS truly shows its potential over air cool systems by dropping the core temperature from 68'C on stock cooler to 53'C in a room temperature of 27.5'C (81'F).

On the AMD system with no overclocking involved, The Kandalf LCS was not able to make any noticable difference over the stock cooling. Idle temperature was only 21'C and under full load the temperature was 34'C.

Since there were no VGA or chipset cooling blocks sent along with the system for review I was not able to test how the optional components would add up to the cooling system.

The ThermalTake Kandalf LCS is a very well built liquid-cooling system with pre-installed parts that helps make the installation much easier than otherwise. With that said, the whole setup still takes close to 2 hours to complete, mainly due to the number of parts involved. There was little need for back tracking but installing the coolant tubes may require trial-and-error for the first time. The lack of fans with speed sensor really doesn't fit in with a system made to run quietly, although it is not very hard to replace those fans. The last issue is the weight of the completely assembled system being close to 60lbs, requiring considerable fitness to lift and move the system without hurting ones back. Although ThermalTake put warning labels on the coolant bottle there was no warning label about the system's massive weight.

All in all the system would rank a deserving A- for the great performance and finish it has, with only the weight keeping it from an A.

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