Next on the list since I had the GT tested and the drive was based around the GT design, I figured the apogee drive was a good comparison.
My initial thought when I saw the Apogee Drive come out was, why bother wasting your money on that thing, you'd just have to throw it away if you wanted to upgrade. Little did I know the motor is completely upgradeable and performance turns out to be alot better than I expected.
First I would like to thank Linus from NCIX.com for providing me this sample to test, I believe it was his own personal and just wanted me to review it because there is so little information out there on it.
Thanks Linus!
On to the review:
If you want all the details and pictures I have them on my site here:
http://www.martinsliquidlab.com/Swif...ve_Review.html
But I'll spare you some of the boring stuff and just give you the executive summary here:
Here is the block/accessories package that you get, (Also a nice guide I forgot to include in the picture).
When you break it down this is what you'll find:
Even further, here is the flow chamber half on top of the base, the flow is spread over the base nicely.
And the most important part, the pump motor is a genuine Laing DDC3.1 and can easily be modified to a DDC3.2, put a pump top on it and now you have one of the strongest pumps around..
Now for some thermal testing, as tested it was producing 1.4GPM on my test setup, which is about 1GPM less than my GT setup:
And here is how it stacks up to the thermal performance (hottest of 4 cores)of an Apogee GT bowed with a DDC3.2 with XSPC res top.
It's performing every bit AS GOOD as the Apogee GT + DDC3.2 + Top combo. That's good and I think this is a really good option for those folks that are on a really tight budget ($100-$150). You could buy this combo along with a $20 bonnie heatercore and get some great cooling and more importantly the pump motor is "Upgradable", so if later you decide to buy another block, you can just get a pump top and have separated components then without throwing the pump away..
For $89, it's almost like you get the block for free and you're just paying for the pump motor.
Cheers!
Martin
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