CoolIT Boreas MTEC Chassis Review

Boreas Up Close and Personal Con'td

To transport this low-tech fluid from part to part in this fairly complicated loop (which gets a heck of lot more complicated if you have dual GPUs being cooled as well as the optional Northbridge and Southbridge blocks) CoolIT has once again opted for neoprene tubing which appears to be exactly the same as the Pure and Elite model's tubing. It may seem overly restrictive but our past experiences with the Elite has disabused us of this notion.

Could it be bigger than ¼ ID? Yes, it certainly could but if past experience is anything to go by, this should not make a noticeable difference to this unit performance; and at the end of the day this all that matters. On the positive side, and once again just as with the Elite and Pure models, CoolIT has wrapped the tubing in anti-kink wiring so you can rest assured that unless your really work at it you won’t kink it while trying to mount the CPU block. Also on the positive side is the tubing is (once again like the PURE and Elite models) held in place with heavy duty steel pinch clamps.


The heatsink of the Boreas is a much larger and better appointed affair than the one we saw on the Elite. However if you squint your eyes and tilt your head you can see the family resemblance. In a nut shell the Elite’s heatsink is about 1/3 the size of the Boreas’ unit but shares many of the same underlying characteristics and engineering pedigree. Unlike the Elite which was for all intents and purposes a half moon style heatsink with a fan stuck over the opening, the Boreas is a long tube of circular metal strips which are spaced evenly apart.

The circular opening at both ends is the perfect size for a 120mm fan and this is exactly what has been placed at each end. The 4 TEC housing units which are evenly spaced apart (90° apart to be precise) are mounted to the outside of these strips (with a TIM-like material between the two to increase surface contact) and as the TEC's hot side (which is facing the heatsink) heats up, these metal rings in turn heat up and conduct heat away from the TEC. The beauty of this setup is the two fans are both sucking air out of the heatsink and thus are forcing a huge amount of air past those heatsink metal rings (in excess of 200CFM). In fact so much air is moving over them the Boreas does not require and heatpipes to keep the TEC housing units downright frosty. This really is damn fine engineering as there is nothing flimsy to bend or break and the TECs themselves are the only real weak link (and with 12 of them you could lose a couple and not notice any difference in your CPU temps!).


The only possible downside to the Boreas setup is the fans have to be pretty heavy duty with as high a static pressure as possible. Luckily, CoolIT once again went with the exact same part as seen on the Elite.

The fan that they chose is none other than the Panaflo FBA12G12H-1BX. This hyrdo-wave bearing fan is rated to move over 104CFM (CoolIT states it's more like 110 but when you get into numbers that big who's counting?) at its rated max speed of 2500rpm. More importantly than this impressive CFM is the amount of Static Pressure this 120x120x38mm fan produces; what we are talking about is a nominal .267 inches of H20 of static pressure (that is a jaw dropping 6.78mm h20).

This is all well and fine and is certainly impressive but what truly makes this fan a winner is the fact that it is speed adjustable. When CoolIT's coolant is comfortably at or below its coolant zone (say THAT three times fast), the fans can idle at only 40% of their rated capability. This makes the Boreas both extremely powerful when it needs to be and yet be very well mannered and quite quiet for most of its power curve.


The base of the Boreas’ CPU water block is not only perfectly flat but also perfectly polished. Yes for the first time we were actually impressed with the polishing level on a CoolIT product. In fact this is polished so nicely and so professionally you could actually use this thing as an emergency mirror and get your “shave on” at LAN party (or alternatively momentarily blind that griefer three stations over).


On a side note this block comes with TIM already pre-applied in a nice thin and even layer; however to keep things as even as possible for the testing phase of this review we removed this TIM and used only Arctic Cooling MX-2 on all CPU cooling solutions.
All in all this was the icing on top of the cake and perfectly highlights why the Boreas is their flagship product….now if only they started polishing all their products as well!