Thermaltake's Water 2.0 Performer is a self contained liquid cooling system for Intel and AMD CPUs that's ready to go out of the box - no mess, no fuss. The only requirement you need to worry about is whether your PC case has a 120mm fan opening at the back of the chassis for the heat exchanger to attach to. Thermaltake actually make two watercooling units that look identical, the 'Performer' we're testing out in this review which uses a 27mm thick heat exchanger, and the 'Pro' model Frostytech tested here which uses a 50mm thick, 120mm-sized heat exchanger. Both Water 2.0 Performer and Water 2.0 Pro use the same waterblock/pump and 120mm fans. The thicker heat exchanger on the Water 2.0 Pro model means it does cool a bit better than the Performer.

The Thermaltake Water 2.0 Performer ships pre-filled with a distilled water/anti-freeze based coolant which circulates through 11mm diameter 'low evaporation' rubber tubing. The small fluid pump operates at 2800RPM and is housed along with a reservoir and thin copper water block in the package which mounts atop the processor. For the sake of efficiency, the copper waterblock uses skived copper fins and a thin elastomer gasket to directs water flow through the resulting channels.

The aluminum heat exchanger is sandwiched between two 120mm PWM fans that operate at 1000-2000RPM, moving roughly 80CFM of air apiece. The heat exchanger alone measures 150x120x27mm and attaches to the inside back panel of the computer chassis.