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Danger Den Socket A TDX


Date
: 10/12/04 – 12:42:26 AM

Author
:

Category
: Cooling

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer
: Danger Den

Price
: ~$60

Danger Den has been continually making a stronger presence in the computer enthusiast market with its high quality products. More specifically, DD's waterblocks have given Danger Den their well known name amongst enthusiasts. Today we will take the TDX waterblock from Danger Den for a test drive.

According to Danger Den:

Let's take a closer look at it.

Page 2 : Package

Package:

The TDX arrived in a tiny box from FedEx, opened up and, woohooo peanuts!!!! Err, sorry. There's just something with me and peanuts :)

Ok so it says I have a TDX, with 1/2" barbs, and a Lucite top. Good good, let's open it.

Inside we have a bag of mounting accessories, and the TDX.

A closeup of the TDX, from the side:

A closeup from the top:

This is what the inside looks like, according to Danger Den:

Sure enough, it appears to match the description:

The mounting accessories include:
- 4 Threaded Stainless Steel Hold Downs
- 4 Tensions Springs
- 4 Thumb Screws
- 4 Thick Plastic Washers
- 12 Thing Plastic Washers
- 8 Nuts

Page 3 : Specifications

The following information is from Danger Den:

Overall dimensions of the TDX including the barbs is 2.88" long x 1.8" wide x 1.63" high.

Page 4 : Installation

After looking at all the different pieces required for mounting, this installation looks like it might be somewhat difficult. The TDX itself did not come with directions, let's check out Danger Den's website . . . thankfully they have some instructions online.

Well it doesn't seem that bad after reading the instructions. Let's take a shot at it.

At the same time, I will be installing a Hydor L20 water pump, as well as a 5.25" bay reservoir.

Things needed for my installation:
- Hose Clamps:

I guess these are not really required, but I don't like to take that chance with my equipment :) DD did not include any, but they are only about 60 cents at your local hardware shop.
- Reduction barbs:

These were a pain to find, my Thermaltake radiator uses 1/4" tubing and the rest of my equipment uses 1/2". I could not find any adapters, but these threaded 1/4" barbs look like they might do the trick!
- 1/2" Tubing

Let's get started!

The leg bone connects, to the hip bone, the hip bone . . . oh sorry. Caught myself singing that! Well connecting the pump, TDX, reservoir, and radiator are about that way! Pump connects to the radiator, radiator connects to the TDX, TDX connects to the reservoir, and the reservoir connects back to the pump! It's not rocket science here folks.

The first thing we had to do was assemble the reservoir. The CrazyPC reservoir I bought came with gaskets and teflon tape to aid the process.

First was to put the gaskets on, and also find the necessary tools to tighten these things down:

Next we must wrap the barbs with the teflon tape to prevent any leaks. I just went two revolutions around, that should do it.

Then, using the adjustable wrench, snug them down into the reservoir.

I am not sure if it matters where on the reservoir you chose to put them, but I chose a symmetrical look.

The case I own uses rails to mount 5.25" devices, so next we need to mount these onto the reservoir.

These work perfectly because the reservoir can slide out for easy access to the fill hole (which does have a plug also)

Next thing to do is prepare the pump

After looking over the pump, this is a submersible pump! Man, I need one that uses both intake and output with tubing, but wait! What's this?

Ahh sneaky people :)

It's convertible! After pulling it apart, just screw in the included barb.

Next we start installing some tubing! The first thing we should do is position everything where it should be in our case, or at least close to it. Then measure out your tubing, cut, and repeat! After a couple minutes, it starts to look like this:

Now comes the tricky part to my install. I have a radiator that was used with my Aquarius II watercooling system from Thermaltake, that I want to continue to use. But it uses 1/4" tubing! Let's see how we can fix this with those barbs I bought:

Aha! Look! Now they are reducers! I took the barbs that I purchased, and cut a small piece of 1/4" tubing to connect into the radiator, then the 1/4" tubing connects to the 1/4" of the barb "reducer". This way the 1/2" tubing can connect to the other side!

Remember anything that is THREADED needs teflon tape! Now rigged reducer, meet uber water cooling setup!

Once everything is hooked up and double checked for clamps, time to test.

I chose to fill with only 100% pure distilled water this time.

You should always test your water cooling setup first for a couple of hours without any equipment. It is a good thing I did! Houston, we have a leak!

Turns out I didn't make a complete 2 revolutions with the teflon tape on one of my rigged adapters. Re taped, reconnected, and its been running for almost 24 hours without any problems!

After running the water system for a while, and there are no leaks, its time to attach that nice waterblock to your motherboard. Danger Den has provided a set of instructions online, however the waterblock itself does not come with any. These instructions are straight forward, and I followed the exactly.

First step is to put a washer and a nut on to the threaded standoffs, like so:

Next we take these and put them through the motherboard mounting holes (your board does have these. . . right? :) My first board didn't so I had to go buy a new NF7-S, oh darn! Another solution to this problem, is to use the TDX Socket Block Hold Down that is also made by Danger Den.

Once you get all four through, it should look something like this:

Next we mount the waterblock onto the threaded standoffs, however, when doing this, since I had already put thermal grease on my processor, I made sure not to put the TDX all the way down onto the processor just yet. That way, you do not mess up the thermal grease that you took so long to do perfectly on your processor. You did follow the instructions for thermal grease didn't you!?

Once the TDX is in place, we put the tension springs on the standoffs, followed by another plastic washer, followed by the thumbscrews as instructed by the Danger Den destructions. It will end up looking like:

Once the thumb screws are in place, we can begin tightening them down to push the TDX snugly onto the core of your processor. Danger Den's instructions recommend starting at one corner, tightening just a little bit, then moving diagonally across to the opposite corner, tighten the same amount, then move down to the one below that, tighten same amount, then across again, etc. I would also highly recommend following these directions and to be sure you do not overtighten one more than the others. This will cause not only the TDX not to be sitting flush on your processor's core, but also the possibility of cracking your core. Danger Den's instructions say to compress the springs down to about 10mm (or 1cm), this seems like a decent amount of tension to me.

About 15 minutes and a pair of sweaty palms later, viola! You are all done!

Let's fire it up. I'm getting good at pulling my system apart :) Booted right up the first time!

And a couple closeups of the installed TDX:

Now let's see what this block can do.

Page 5 : Benchmarking

The test system is:

After going in and tweaking my BIOS to get my AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Mobile up to the right speeds I pushed this chip right up to 2.5 ghz with a multiplier of 12.5, a front side bus of 200, and a VCore of 1.6.

After letting the system hang out for about a day, so the thermal paste could cure, I started recording temps and computing their averages. Drum roll please . . . . the results!

As you can see the TDX setup blew my previous Thermaltake Aquarius II watercooling setup out of the water (no pun intended)! With temperature differences as much as 10 degrees Celsius this waterblock definitely deserves to let its adjacent microprocessor's timing be altered more. After playing around with the settings in the BIOS I could not get this setup to POST with a FSB over 200mhz. With the help of the Overclockers Online community I was able to evade this barrier and slowly but surely get this Athlon chip up to 2.8ghz with a VCore of 2.05v. This is a dramatic and quite successful overclock from the AMD Athlon 2500 Barton's stock speed of 1.8ghz.

At 2.8 ghz, temperatures were running a bit on the high side for my liking, with an idle of 50C and a load of 57C. So I found a happy medium at 2.71ghz with m idle temperature dropping down to 45C and my load temperature down to 53C.

Page 6 : Conclusion

The TDX being able to keep my AMD Mobile Barton cool, even with my ambient temperature quite warm, that is a feat in of itself. There are other things that have the potential to make this an even better watercooling setup and that would be the introduction of a better radiator. My 80mm fanned radiator is trying it's hardest to cool this system. If you were to upgrade to a 120mm fan radiator or even a dual 120mm fan radiator, I imagine you would get much cooler temperatures.

Even though the setup of watercooling is often straight forward, if you do not plan out the installation before hand you can often get into a pinch. I did exactly this, and since I wanted to test my setup before installing the TDX onto my motherboard I went ahead and hooked everything up. Once you have all the hoses running through your case, it is difficult to attach the TDX to your motherboard, although not impossible. This was the only challenge posed by setting this system up since the TDX did require the use of the mounting standoffs, springs, screws, and such. Although not only just a TDX con, since many other waterblock manufacturers use the same mounting mechanism, just be sure to plan your steps before you begin attaching things and adding water.

Water cooling is the only way to go if you want top notch overclocks or even just a quieter running system. Combining water and electronics may make
some nervous, and I'll admit I was very nervous at first. But after testing, re-testing, and continually checking on it, comfort begins to set in
when you see a nice overclock running at a cool temperature. Danger Den took an already killer design in the RBX and simplified it by making it 2
barbed rather than 3. At a very competitive price this waterblock deserves the trophy prize of sitting right on your processor – perhaps one of the most prestigious places in any overclockers mind.

Pros

- Great cooling ability
- Eye appealing design
- Competitive Price

Cons

- No instructions included
- Final install to motherboard can get difficult depending on the order of the steps you take on the rest of your watercooling setup

Thanks to Danger Den for making this review and their patience with Overclockers Online.