Watercooling began in earnest several years ago as more and more enthusiasts were seeking the magic bullet to get their 300a Celerons past the 500 mhz barrier. Since water is much more effective at transferring heat than air, homemade watercooling rigs began popping up everywhere. There were, and still are, a variety of do-it-yourself approaches to getting the water close enough to the cpu to soak up the heat. PVC pipe caps, home-drilled copper and aluminium blocks, electrical conduit junction boxes, copper pipe caps and more have all been adapted to serve the purpose. As the popularity of water cooling grew, commercially made waterblocks began to appear. Some are crude, some are not so crude, and a few are very sophisticated.

The Innovatek Innovacool, manufactured in Germany, carries on the tradition of technically advanced finely finished products established by manufacturers such as Zeiss, Leica, BMW, Mercedes and others. The block itself is an unassuming aluminum cube with a thick black anodized surface. Set into the block at the top are two chrome plated compression fittings for water inlet and outlet. Turning the little cube over reveals the heart of the device, a highly polished and very flat copper circle set into the base for transferring heat from the cpu to the water.

When I first examined this copper circle, I was impressed by the quality of the finish but otherwise underwhelmed. A copper disk set into an aluminum box did not seem to me to have much cooling potential. However, a quick twist on the inlet and outlet fittings revealed that my initial impression was wrong. Just like a tootsie roll pop – or a number of other things that need not be examined here – the best part is on the inside. If you peer inside the block with the fittings removed, you can see that the disc on the bottom is just the tip of the iceberg.

The copper circle is the bottom of a cylinder that projects into a larger circular cavity in the block. Add a little light and you can see that the cylinder is not smooth, but has indentions machined into its circumference. Someone who is decent at math could certainly calculate the surface area of the cylinder that is exposed to the cooling water. Someone who is a little bit better could probably calculate the surface area that is exposed by the serrated cylinder that results from the machining. Having no ability with formulas or functions, I will say this about the area of the copper heat slug exposed to the water – it’s smaller than the White House lawn and larger than most of the waterblocks out there.