

The market for closed-loop water coolers for PC builders just got a little more competitive as venerable PC cooling company Thermaltake released their WATER2.0 closed-loop cooling system today, with both Performer and Pro models ready to ship. The difference between the two systems is in the radiator size. The Pro’s radiator is 150 x 120 x 49 mm while the Performer’s is 151 x 120 x 27 mm. The Pro is basically double the thickness on the radiator:

Closed-loop water systems are not designed to be performance leaders. Rather, they are a unique solution for situations in which people want less noise than air cooling while still benefiting from good cooling. Also, they provide similar performance to big air coolers using a smaller profile. For tight system builds, the much-reduced size profile of a closed-loop watercooler is a big benefit, especially if the system has RAM with large heatspreaders.

Thermaltake’s Ramsom Koay puts it like this:

WATER2.0 is not a direct replacement of air cooling solutions. The all-new WATER2.0 is an improved performance-driven solution that offers added benefits of simple installation, no-maintenance and extreme reliability to the traditional liquid cooling kit. After a long period of research and development, we came to a point where WATER2.0 has reached the performance standard that Thermaltake has set forth while ensuring a fluid user experience from installation to actual operation. Now is time perfect time to discover an all-new performance-driven alternative CPU cooling solution

There’s a third model we haven’t mentioned yet: The WATER2.0 Extreme, which supports a double radiator (240mm). That will retail for $129.99 and be available in July.

The WATER2.0 Performer is going to run you $69.99 (available now from Newegg and Amazon) while the WATER2.0 Pro is in at $99.99 (also available from Newegg and Amazon). We’ll have a full review as soon as our samples get here.