[lizard]

Originally Posted by BalefireX

Lizard - thanks for coming and talking to us (in a civil manner too - maybe paper journalists ARE more respectable than web ones)

Thanks for your compliments. We would much rather work together with you guys (readers and the web community) than against you, hence why I'm here on the forums. Once the Custom PC website has its new forum software in place maybe we'll see some of you guys there, who knows...

I won't comment on the last bit as I don't want to start a flame war re print vs web journalists.

But in point of fact we use a lot of web journalists as freelancer writers in Custom PC.

One thing that stuck out in your explanation was that you did three tests of the Swiftech System, and averaged the results. Were these numbers close (+/- 1C) or widely varied? Cathar raised the point in another thread that if someone left the fill/bleed valves in the wrong position, this could severely impede flow and therefore cause a big performance drop. If the three tests were seriously varied (say, test 1 and 2 were 20C over ambient, and test 3 was 12C over ambient) and you averaged them, that would be giving a skewed report of performance (but perhaps making a statement on the relative complexity of installation)

Okay, I see your points. The temperatures recorded across the three times we tested the Swiftech kit were all very close. From my notes they were -4C, -5C and -5C again, which averages at -4.67C, hence why we printed -5C in the review. So we still stand by the test results.

As I'm sure you can imagine there are only so many times we can test any piece of hardware before we have to make a judgement call on its performance. But to be honest even if the Swiftech kit had performed better, it still would not have got a particularly stunning review because as we feel it is harder to assemble than other kits, an important consideration for a watercooling newbie.