This is a continuation in evaluating ways to cool our popular DDC series pumps. While requesting a sample of the Apogee XT CPU block, Swiftech offered to send me a sample of their newly released heat sink the Swiftech MCP35X-HS. A special thanks to Stephen & Gabe from Swiftech for providing the sample to review.
As part of my pursuit to better understand heat within these pumps, I previously completed the DDC3.2 Heat Scoping blog to prepare for testing such as I’m doing here with this heat-sink. This heat sink is compatible with any DDC series pump that has two holes in the base. This includes both bases with cast feet as well as the newer bases that come without the spread foot base. The heat sink is intended to serve in both cooling capacity as well as pump decoupling for improved noise response.
Packaging & Accessories
Being a heat sink, the parts are fairly basic and limited. The package comes in Swiftech’s typical black box with a white printed label.
Upon opening the box, the heat sink itself is wrapped in a layer of paper that is also wrapped in a bubble wrap bag. Everything else is nicely put away in individual bags.
Taking everything out of the protection bags reveals the contents as you can see below:
In the above photo, the blue thermal pad is to the left, lower left are the lifting legs (foot post), lower middle are the rubber feet that attach to the base of the legs(rubber bushings), and the lower right are the four machine screws that attach the rubber bushings to the foot posts. The two remaining screws are used to attach the heat sink to the base of the pump. Assembly only takes a few minutes and does not require opening the pump. The thermal pad doesn’t even have to stick to the pump as the bottom. Blue side facing up is not sticky, white side down sticks to the heat-sink.
Assembly is very straight forward and simple. Not shown, but the thermal pad has a blue side which faces up (Non sticky) and a white side that is stuck to the heat sink.
This is what the heat sink looks like mounted to a MCP-35B pump without any fan installed. This wasn’t the pump I tested on since it was only a 12W motor (less heat than 18W motors), but it’s a nice looking top which compliments the heat sink black theme and represents what the heat sink would look like on either the MCP-35B or the MCP-35X pumps with black delrin/acetal tops.
There is a bit of extra space down below without a fan installed, but this also helps allow a nice amount of case airflow to whisk away the heat better. Also notice how the rubber feet serve in decoupling the entire unit.
