I am impressed. As many readers will know, I manage water cooling products at NCIX, which includes CoolIT systems. I’ve been following the performance of their past coolers with what I would call “distracted interest” because the technology is really cool, but I felt it wasn’t really there performance-wise.

The Boreas turns that all around. I’m very impressed with the performance of this unit. It can keep a stock Q6600 below ambient at idle, and it can hold a 3.4GHz Q6600 at 40 degrees under full load. I’d be interested to see how it performs with a chipset and a couple graphics cards in the loop, but there’s no doubt in my mind that for a CPU-only loop, the performance is there.

I guess my only concerns are the cost of the unit and the noise level of the unit. The cost is close to a phase change solution, but as long as the noise level is okay (not really covered in depth in the HWC review), then I think that the Boreas would be a better solution for someone like me than a phase change cooler.

Check out the HWC review here.