SilverStone Tundra TD02 Liquid CPU Cooler Review

We’re almost to the results, there’s just a few more things to look at first!

The water block itself is all aluminum, except for the integrated copper contact plate. You’ll probably notice there aren’t any screws that mount the copper to the rest of the water block/pump assembly, as it is soldered directly to the rest of the block. The finish is sufficiently smooth, although it isn’t a mirror polish.

Some of you that are familiar with properties of different metals might be wondering how good of an idea it is too attach a copper plate to an aluminum block. Since each metal has a different electrical potential, if they come in contact either physically or through an electrolyte ions from one will “migrate” to the other, resulting in eventual corrosion of the metal acting as the anode. I asked SilverStone how they mitigated this problem, and they were more than willing to explain how.

To prevent corrosion, SilverStone didn’t just coat the exterior of the block in nickel, but the inside as well which has the effect of “neutralizing” the charge between the metals and therefore inhibiting the process of galvanic corrosion (it brings the anodic difference from .40V down to .05V). The copper base has been coated with an anti-oxidation coating, and to further minimize the contact the nickel-plated aluminum has with the copper base the water block uses a plastic shroud and rubber bushings to direct the water through the fine copper fins in the base-plate. Since the TD02 is sealed from the factory, they were able to pH balance the liquid and add the right amount of corrosion inhibitor to the fluid used in the system – so don’t try to open it! SilverStone backs the TD02 and TD03 AIO liquid coolers with a five-year warranty, which should tell you they understand this issue and are confident enough to stand behind their product. Of course, any time you put a metal in water, you’ll experience some corrosion eventually, but you shouldn’t run into any problems with the TD02/03 for as long as most people use a CPU.

Installation is pretty straightforward, although you may still want a helping hand if you’ve never installed anything similar before. The universal back-plate is easy to assemble – make sure to read the manual though, so you know if you need to use the loading block! The four posts press into the back-plate, but a way to secure these even tighter would be nice as they have a tendency to fall out when trying to mount the water block. Since the screws to tighten them are spring-loaded, you’ll find yourself needing to press on the back-plate a bit as well to get the first bit of the screw threaded. This was the only part of the installation I felt could use a little improvement.

The back-plate and through-motherboard mounting screws are actually held in place by plastic spacers (on the AMD and LGA1155/50 sockets) that serve to retain the plate in position, but in practice the spacers didn’t quite grip hard enough to hold the screws in place trying to get the threads to bite.

Here’s where the installation for the TD02 parted ways with the TD03. I’ve added a 200mm top exhaust fan to the NZXT H630 I use for testing these coolers. Normally, the 240mm coolers I install in the “floor” of the case, with fans intaking cool air from the bottom/front. Of course, the only 240mm cooler I’ve tested so far has been the Swiftech H220, which comes with pretty long hoses as standard (since they can be adjusted to size on that model). It quickly became apparent that most AIO coolers are designed to be mounted in the top/rear of cases, as the hoses on the TD02 didn’t reach to the bottom of the H630. I still tested it in that orientation to keep the test-bed as similar as possible, and those are the results in the chart on the results page. If you’d like to see a comparison between the H220 and TD02 in their “normal” locations (above the CPU), stay tuned for a SilverStone KL04 case review!

While this picture displays the unique fin layout of the TD02’s radiator, it also displays the fit of the 8-pin AUX CPU header – that cable (look for the yellow) doesn’t have much room.

With the TD02 installed in the top location, the center-aligned fan mounts on the NZXT H630 came pretty close to blocking that 8-pin CPU header on the Asus M5A99FX PRO 2.0. You’ll definitely want to make sure you plug this cable in before installing the TD02 in the top of your case – it measures about 70mm with the thickness of the radiator plus fans, so measure your case to make sure it’ll fit.

It bears repeating here that no heat-sink will work effectively unless it transfers heat from the CPU. To do that, it needs to be in contact with the CPU heat spreader or die, with the greater the contact surface the greater the potential for heat transfer. One of our own writers here at Benchmark Reviews has done a lot of work in this area, and it is certainly worth the time it takes to read (and re-read) the discoveries he made during the famous 80+ thermal paste tests (I still see Newegg reviews reference the discoveries made therein).

I mention this because I still see this as a major source of misinformation – most end users will use far too much thermal interface material when switching CPU coolers. Possibly through little fault of their own – I’ve read official repair manuals stating to use the entire tube of thermal paste when replacing a CPU and heat-sink. This is, in almost every case, FAR too much – to the point of being harmful in most cases. So do yourself a favor and get acquainted with CPU Cooler Preparations and Thermal Paste Application.

Processor and CPU cooler surfaces are not perfectly smooth and flat surfaces, and although some surfaces appear polished to the naked eye, under a microscope the imperfections become clearly visible. As a result, when two objects are pressed together, contact is only made between a finite number of points separated by relatively large gaps. Since the actual contact area is reduced by these gaps, they create additional resistance for the transfer of thermal energy (heat). The gasses/fluids filling these gaps may largely influence the total heat flow across the surface, and then have an adverse affect on cooling performance as a result.

The only reason for using Thermal Interface Material is to compensate for flaws in the surface and a lack of high-pressure contact between heat source and cooler, so the sections above are more critical to good performance than the application of TIM itself. This section offers a condensed version of our Best Thermal Paste Application Methods article.

After publishing our Thermal Interface Material articles, many enthusiasts argued that by spreading out the TIM with a latex glove (or finger cover) was not the best way to distribute the interface material. Most answers from both the professional reviewer industry as well as enthusiast community claim that you should use a single drop “about the size of a pea”. If there was ever any real advice that applies to every situation, it would be that thermal paste isn’t meant to separate the two surfaces but rather fill the microscopic pits where metal to metal contact isn’t possible.

After discussing this topic with real industry experts who are much more informed of the process, they offered some specific advice that didn’t appear to be a “one size fits all” answer:

1. CPU Cooling products which operate below the ambient room temperature (some Peltier and Thermo-electric coolers for example) should not use silicon-based materials because condensation may occur and accelerate compound separation.
2. All “white” style TIM’s exhibit compound breakdown over time due to their thin viscosity and ceramic base (usually beryllium oxide, aluminum nitride and oxide, zinc oxide, and silicon dioxide). These interface materials should not be used from older “stale” stock without first mixing the material very well.
3. Thicker carbon and metal-based (usually aluminum-oxide) TIM’s may benefit from several thermal cycles to establish a “cure” period which allows expanding and contracting surfaces to smooth out any inconsistencies and further level the material.

The more we researched this subject, the more we discovered that because there are so many different cooling solutions on the market it becomes impossible to give generalized advice to specific situations. Despite this, there is one single principle that holds true in every condition: Under perfect conditions the contact surfaces between the processor and cooler would be perfectly flat and not contain any microscopic pits, which would allow direct contact of metal on metal without any need for Thermal Interface Material. But since we don’t have perfectly flat surfaces, Thermal Material must fill the tiny imperfections. Still, there’s one rule to recognize: less is more.

CPU coolers primarily depend on two heat transfer methods: conduction and convection. This being the case, we’ll concentrate our attention towards the topic of conduction as it relates to the mating surfaces between a heat source (the processor) and cooler. Because of their density, metals are the best conductors of thermal energy. As density decreases so does conduction, which relegates fluids to be naturally less conductive. So ideally the less fluid between metals, the better heat will transfer between them. Even less conductive than fluid is air, which then also means that you want even less of this between surfaces than fluid. Ultimately, the perfectly flat and well-polished surface is going to be preferred over the rougher and less even surface which required more TIM (fluid) to fill the gaps.

This is important to keep in mind, as the mounting surface of your average processor is relatively flat and smooth but not perfect. Even more important is the surface of your particular CPU cooler, which might range from a polished mirror finish to the absurdly rough or the more complex (such as Heat-Pipe Direct Touch). Surfaces with a mirror finish can always be shined up a little brighter, and rough surfaces can be wet-sanded (lapped) down smooth and later polished, but Heat-pipe Direct Touch coolers require some extra attention.

To sum up this topic of surface finish and its impact on cooling, science teaches us that a smooth flat mating surface is the most ideal for CPU coolers. It is critically important to remove the presence of air from between the surfaces, and that using only enough Thermal Interface Material to fill-in the rough surface pits is going to provide the best results. In a perfect environment, your processor would mate together with the cooler and compress metal on metal with no thermal paste at all; but we don’t live in perfect world and current manufacturing technology cannot provide for this ideal environment.

Probably one of the most overlooked and disregarded factors involved with properly mounting the cooler onto any processor is the amount of contact pressure applied between the mating surfaces. Compression will often times reduce the amount of thermal compound needed between the cooler and processor, and allow a much larger metal to metal contact area which is more efficient than having fluid weaken the thermal conductance. The greater the contact pressure between elements, the better it will conduct thermal (heat) energy.

Unfortunately, it is often times not possible to get optimal pressure onto the CPU simply because of poor mounting designs used by the cooler manufacturers. Most enthusiasts shriek at the thought of using the push-pin style clips found on Intel’s stock thermal cooling solutions. Although this mounting system is acceptable for casually-used computers, there is still plenty of room for improvement when overclocking.

Generally speaking, you do not want an excessive amount of pressure onto the processor as damage may result. In some cases, such as Heat-pipe Direct Touch technology, the exposed copper rod has been pressed into the metal mounting base and then leveled flat by a grinder. Because of the copper rod walls are made considerably thinner by this process, using a bolt-through mounting system could actually cause heat-pipe rod warping. Improper installation not withstanding, it is more ideal to have a very strong mounting system such as those which use a back plate behind the motherboard and a spring-loaded fastening system for tightening.

Heat-pipe technology uses several methods to wick the cooling liquid away from the cold condensing end and return back towards the heated evaporative end. Sintered heatpipe rods help overcome Earth’s gravitational pull and can return most fluid to its source, but the directional orientation of heatpipe rods can make a significant difference to overall cooling performance.

The following is retained word for word from the source article, but note that not every CPU cooler will be or can be tested in a horizontal orientation. Please refer to the testing methodology on the next page or the pictures in the article to see how each specific cooler was tested.

For the purpose of this article, all CPU-coolers have been orientated horizontally so that heatpipes span from front-to-rear with fans exhausting upward and not top-to-bottom with fans blowing towards the rear of the computer case. This removes some of the gravitational climb necessary for heatpipe fluid working to return to the heatsink base. In one example, the horizontally-mounted tower heatsink cooled to a temperature 3° better than when it was positioned vertically. While this difference may not be considered impressive to some, hardcore performance enthusiasts will want to use every technique available to reach the highest overclock possible.

The CPU coolers tested were installed in a computer case in its normal, upright orientation (a NZXT H630). A 200mm top/rear exhaust fan was added to the enclosure to aid in cooling VRMs and most of the front drive cages were removed to clear the path from the 200mm intake fan. The GPU remained installed during testing. All fans were set to 100% to remove that variable from the results (motherboard fan control was disabled). In the case of liquid coolers, they were mounted in the rear exhaust location if possible (otherwise, as in the case of the Swiftech H220 and the TD02*, mounted in the “floor” of the H630 as an intake). This is how I would assume most enthusiasts would set up a similar case while overclocking a similar platform.

All tests were performed using the AIDA64 Extreme Edition System Stability test, using 100% fan settings on an Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 (PWM/motherboard fan controls were disabled for testing). The test was allowed to run until temperatures plateaued, then I recorded the ambient temperature of the intake air and began logging temperatures over the next minute. After an initial warm-up run, I ran each test at least three times (more if I received inconsistent results), and recorded the ambient temperature again. Once I had “good data,” I dropped the best and worst results and subtracted the (average over the test) ambient temperature from the median result to arrive at the delta T temperature you see in the chart.

Each time a heatsink was swapped, the Tuniq TX-2 thermal interface material I used for each application was cleaned off of the contact surfaces with Arctic Silver’s ArctiClean two-step TIM remover, and an appropriate amount of TX-2 replaced for the next heatsink. Due to the nature of applying TIM and mating two surfaces, I would like to adopt a 3% margin of error – even though my thermometers and the built-in thermal diode measure temperatures down to one-tenth of a degree Celsius, it could be assumed that temperatures within a degree of each other are essentially the same result.

*The SilverStone TD02 was oriented and tested in the same location as the Swiftech H220, but the hoses were not long enough to actually mount the radiator to the chassis.

• Motherboard: Asus M5A99FX-PRO R2.0 w/ 1708 BIOS/UEFI
• System Memory: 8GB (2x4GB) GSkill Ares 1600MHz DDR3 CL8
• Processor: AMD FX-8320 Piledriver, 4.6GHz/1.428V
• Audio: On-Board
• Video: Sapphire Radeon 7950 3GB 1000MHz Core, 1300MHz mem
• Disk Drive 1: OCZ Vertex 2 240GB
• Enclosure: NZXT H630, +200mm exhaust fan (top/rear)
• PSU: Rosewill Lightning 800W Modular 80+ Gold
• Monitor: 1920×1080 120Hz
• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit w/SP1

And now, the results you’ve all been waiting for…

…and it looks like SilverStone’s confidence was not misplaced, as the TD02 easily supersedes the all-copper construction and powerful pump of the Swiftech H220. After the powerful cooling exhibited by the 120mm TD03, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. If you’re looking for pure performance from a stock cooler (without adding/changing fans, etc.), well, it looks like the TD02 should be at the top of your list.

Keep in mind all of these coolers are tested without fan control (max RPM), so the TD02 was noticeably louder at full bore than the tuned for silence H220. Using PWM and under normal scenarios, either cooler allowed for a cool and quiet computer. In fact, the quieter pump on the TD02 remained almost undetectable while the Swiftech’s powerful 3000 RPM pump hums away – it isn’t unpleasant, but you can hear it. I only provide anecdotal observations of sound, as any sound results would depend entirely on my specific system AND the room it is contained in – but the fans on the TD02 DO get loud at 100%. There’s obviously a lot of cooling potential here though, and you should be able to find a fan curve that balances performance with noise. The point remains though – for a simple AIO liquid cooler, the TD02’s performance is at the top of the charts.

The TD02 is a refreshing addition to the growing and popular AIO liquid cooling market. As with the TD03, the extra touches and attention SilverStone spent on the water block and radiator really set it apart from the competition, and the performance wins out over every cooler I’ve tested so far.

My conclusion for SilverStone’s TD02 240mm water cooler will be very similar to the smaller TD03 – it’s almost the exact same product, just a little bigger, so I suppose that makes sense! Reading through my previous observations of the TD03 it’s no secret that many of them apply directly to the larger TD02.

I’ll reiterate that appearance is the advantage the TD02 has over the competition. That all-aluminum (nickel plated) water block is beautiful, and would really fit well with some of SilverStone’s enclosures (or anyone that likes the look of brushed aluminum). I still think they missed an opportunity by not trying a completely different angle with the hoses (tell me braided stainless lines wouldn’t look amazing with that water block!), but that’s about the only misstep in an otherwise “premium” looking product. It certainly stands out among the other AIO coolers on the market.

Of course, the extensive use of aluminum means the TD02 is constructed well and feels solid when you’re installing it into your rig. The radiator fins, due to their unique design don’t seem to bend or dent as easily as other aluminum radiators, and feel stiffer overall. I think the appearance and construction of this product go hand in hand – the nickel-plated aluminum isn’t just for show, it definitely results in a more solid-feeling product. I encountered an issue mounting the fans to the radiator though, I ended up taking the fans off using one screw to clear out all of the threads on the radiator as the screws would just not want to bite otherwise. I’ve encountered this on other radiators, and it’s usually due to the paint covering the threads (and looked to be the case here as well). It’s an easy fix, but it could cause some cross-threading and stripped threads if you aren’t careful – none of which you want on a premium CPU cooler.

I might argue here that the TD02 is a little less functional than smaller water coolers, namely due to the larger form factor. With a 240mm double-thick radiator, you begin to run into some compatibility issues even on cases designed to accommodate them. If anything, space is at a premium so make sure the rest of your build is tidied up before installing the TD02! Once it’s in, it has no problem dealing with the heat from an overclocked FX-8320. I suppose you can’t ask for much more functionality than that – that’s the whole point right?

I felt that the TD03 was a good value, and the TD02 is necessarily more expensive. As of October 2013, the SilverStone SST-TD02 was selling for $118.99 online $118.99 (NewEgg / Amazon), which again is right in the ballpark of what you would pay for a 240mm AIO liquid cooler. Of course, with the TD02 you get a 240mm cooler that outperforms kits that cost $20-$30 more! That value changes a little if you want quieter fans, but once you throw the metal construction of the custom water block and unique radiator (resulting in some impressive performance) in the picture, I still say that’s a fair price. If you have the room, can deal with the hard plastic kink-free hoses and have an extra hand to help with installation, you’ll probably be pretty satisfied with the SilverStone TD02.

I gave the smaller TD03 a Silver Tachometer award because I felt like there were still some improvements to be made. I think the mounting system could be rethought to make installation a little easier. I also get the feeling that while the choice of hoses makes sense and doesn’t affect performance, it still seems to be the “weak point” to the Tundra series. Thankfully, that weak point is pretty weak, as that’s purely cosmetic – and maybe I’m way off base here! I’d be interested to hear your comments on this – are you okay with the hoses? Would you prefer a different material? Am I alone in wanting stainless steel braided lines or some similar version?

If anything, spending this much time discussing hose material just shows how much SilverStone got the AIO cooler formula right with the TD02. It’s the best performing water cooler I’ve tested so far, it looks great, and installation isn’t any trickier than most other aftermarket cooling solutions. I don’t see how the TD02 can be the top performer in this category at an equal or lesser price than other cooling solutions and not earn a Gold Tachometer award. Even with some of the little quirks that could be addressed, the point remains – SilverStone raised the bar in the AIO liquid cooling segment with the Tundra series, and the TD02 is the best performing CPU cooler I’ve reviewed.

Pros:

+ Premium, unique look
+ Impressive performance
+ Silent pump
+ Stays quiet with less aggressive fan profiles
+ No software to install/configure, runs off of motherboard PWM
+ + + Best performing AIO cooler to date

Cons:

– The stiff hoses will make installation more difficult than other options
– Hoses may be too short for full tower cases and may limit your mounting options
– Plastic spacers for holding back-plate screws could grip tighter
– Fans get loud at full RPM

• Performance: 10.00
• Appearance: 9.50
• Construction: 8.50
• Functionality: 8.50
• Value: 8.50

Excellence Recognition: Benchmark Reviews Gold Tachometer Award.

COMMENT QUESTION: Do you prefer liquid or air cooling on your CPU?