Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System Review

Installation
One thing you can tell from the moment you unbox this AIO is that Swiftech designed it to make sure that it was very simple for you to use.  This is evident from the way the fans come mounted to the very simple 8 way PWM splitter they’ve included.

As I mentioned in the packaging section we received a reviewers kit.  As such it was plain packaging and unfortunately no manual.  A good thing for me, Swiftech designed a product that is fairly idiot proof and I was able to get it installed with little trouble in spite of having no direction.

Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System

As I mentioned this kit comes about as put together as it could be.  There were only a few steps to getting this AIO into my case.  First you will need to back the screws out of the back plate and remove it.  There are two sets of little plastic washers here.

The one set has little tabs that are meant to hold the thumb screws in the bracket.  Unfortunately the little tabs on the inside of ours were mostly broken off and useless.  Luckily it was not very hard to keep the screws in place without them.

The other set of washers, I placed in between the backplate and the motherboard to prevent the backplate from accidentally shorting the board.  For us (socket 1150/1155) the posts on the backplate were already in place.  There are of course three other sets of holes to move the posts to in order to match your socket type.

Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System

With the backplate in place I applied a grain of rice size dot of thermal paste directly to the CPU and attached the pump/block to the CPU.  I was successful in getting all four screws started by hand, but needed a screwdriver to get them all the way tight.  By designing the arms on the block with elongated holes it is simply a matter of sliding the screws forward or backwards to match your hole pattern.

Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System

Now that the block was in place I knew how far I could mount the rad away from the CPU without guessing.  Fortunately there was just enough length in the tubing that I was able to front mount the rad in our new test case, the Nanoxia Deep Silence 1.

Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System

Using the supplied fan screws I was able to easily attach the rad to the front of the case by the frames of the fans.  Positioned this way I would be drawing in air direct from the outside blowing through the radiator fins and into the case.

Swiftech H220 Water Cooling System

The next step was to install the fan splitter.  There are two input connections on the splitter.  One you plug into the CPU_Fan Header on the motherboard.  The other is a molex power plug that you plug into a spare male molex adapter from your PSU.

With the splitter inputs covered, simply plug the pump into the set of pins marked CH.1 and the fans into any of the remaining 7 headers.

Amazingly that is it for the basic install of this AIO.  I would say an estimated install time of 1 hour or less depending on how much prepping your case will need to accept the 240mm radiator.

Stay tuned to ThinkComputers for an in depth look at the expandability and performance of the H220 using other water cooling components.