Verdict: Three times the price of a good HSF, and worse at cooling.

The Siberian Tiger is the largest cat in the world, and lives in cold, snowy mountainous terrain, so it would appear to be an ideal name for a high-performance water-cooling kit. You can therefore imagine our dismay when we opened the box and discovered that the NorthQ Siberian Tiger is simply a rebadged Asetek LCLC (Low Cost Liquid Cooling), the same system found inside the disappointing HP Blackbird 002 LC system (see Issue 54, p34).

The Siberian Tiger comprises just two components - a combined CPU waterblock and pump, and a radiator. The pump sits on top of the waterblock, which is attached to the CPU via a surrounding ring held onto the motherboard by four push-pins. As this only takes moments to install, the Siberian Tiger is by far and away the quickest and easiest water-cooling kit to install we've seen.

The combined waterblock/pump is connected to the radiator by two pre-installed tubes, which are filled with an unspecified coolant and surrounded by an outer shield to prevent kinking. The radiator has a single variable-speed 120mm fan and is designed to be installed in the 120mm fan mount closest to the motherboard at the back of your case.

The only glaring omission in the 12-page manual is its failure to specify whether the fan should pull or push air through the radiator, so we tested in both configurations. With the fan pulling in air through the radiator, the CPU temperature rose quickly, and after 38 minutes of stress testing, one instance of Orthos crashed.

We left the system to cool down for an hour, and then tried again with the fan pushing air through the radiator. However, in this configuration, the CPU temperature sky-rocketed so quickly that Orthos crashed after just five minutes.

As the Siberian Tiger was unable to keep our test CPU cool enough to prevent programs from crashing, it clearly isn't suitable for a heavily overclocked and overvolted processor. If you're in the market for a low-cost liquid cooling kit, the Swiftech H2O-120 Compact (see p81) will serve you much better.

• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008

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