The Kühler H20 1250 is the latest in Antec's run of liquid-cooling setups. It's a bulky, 240mm, closed-loop water cooler with a single water pump sitting atop each of the radiator's fans. They reckon that doubling the water pumps should boost the cooling performance and increase the efficiency of that radiator.
I checked out the predecessor to the Kühler 1250 earlier this year in the paper edition of PC Gamer. The Kühler 920 suffered from a combination of issues, including awkward CPU mounts, buggy software and weak cooling performance. The biggest problem for the 920 was the length of time it took to return the CPU to its idle temperature - four minutes instead of the five seconds of the impressive Cooler Master Seidon 240.
Fingers crossed that's exactly what the redesigned fan and pump mechanism of the Kühler 1250 is going to change. Being able to shift the coolant around the radiator quicker should hopefully be able to get the temperature back down quicker.
It won't help with the installation problems I had. There's a different CPU mounting mechanism which looks a little simpler, but that's not going to be the issue with the Kühler 1250. The problem is going to come once you try and mount the radiator/fan/pump setup into a chassis and expect to have a motherboard in there too. The extra height that the twin coolant pumps add on to the whole array is likely to cause some problems with some of the more aggressive heatsinks you get on today's more performance-oriented motherboards. The raised heatsinks on the likes of Asus RoG range is probably going to make installation a bit of a pain.
If the cooling performance can make up for the niggles in installation then that wont be too much of an issue, but if I have the same cooling, installation and software problems with the Kühler 1250 as I did with the 920 then I'm going to be a sad panda.
