The Tundra

Packed in a quality black shiny box, the Tundra is well packaged. The box explains the design brief, and all the normal specs and details that you’d expect retail packaging to tell you.

Inside, the Tundra sits snugly in polystyrene. There is a box of goodies on top of the actual base unit itself, which contains mounting clips for Intel LGA 775 and AMD 754/939/940/AM2, two 0.5l bottles of thermal fluid, thermal paste, the expansion bracket pass thru, a small power cable, tubing, the tube nuts, and the manual.

It’s nice to see that there is thermal fluid provided with the Tundra, as its always annoying having to buy de-ionized water just to use your new toy. The fluid also contains anti-corrosive and anti-algae solution which turns it to an acid blue colour, which would look pretty good in a well lit case.

The unit itself is a unibody design, which means that the frame of the TD01 is one piece of aluminium extrusion. This is a very difficult process but it does mean that the final product is of a higher quality. The unibody design includes the piping that runs around the perimeter of the unit, connecting to several ridges.

The whole reason behind the Tundra’s large size, is because it is designed to be uber quiet. The only noise that it should make during operation would be the twin pumps in the reservoir, and as they are submerged, this noise should be kept to a minimum. The large size means that the whole thing works as a large radiator, with the unit providing an enormous surface area for heat to escape from, negating the need for fans.

The Tundra has been designed to look like a piece of your hi-fi equipment, and to be something that is nice to look at. This is so that the large size doesn’t matter, as you don’t want to hide the TD01. The front gold-plated analogue temperature gauge adds a little more eye-candy to the Tundra.

The top of the Tundra can be taken off to allow refilling of the pump by removing the hex headed screws with the provided ‘spanner’. Internally the Tundra looks quite empty. In the middle sits the reservoir and twin pumps which straddle the large tank. The reservoir/pump unit has thick clear plastic ends which allow you to see how much coolant is present. The middle of the reservoir is made of aluminium with a large Silverstone logo in the middle. The cap is made of aluniumum and has a nice weight to it, unlike other plastic caps. There is a scale with ‘min’ and ‘max’ on the side of the reservoir, allowing you to easily judge whether you need to refill the unit.

From the two pumps, there is a piece of y-tubing which is the ‘Out’ channel going to your PC. The ‘In’ pipe is sleeved with anti-kink springs which mean that the flow is never impeded by bent tubing. This tube goes around the perimeter pipe which is built into the Tundra’s body. The heat is dissipated with the ridges present on both the outside and inside of the Tundra. The pipe takes two trips around the outside of the TD01 before ending back in the centre reservoir.

The rear of the Tundra has three connectors, the In tube port, the Out tube port and the power socket. The power socket is connected to a molex inside the Tundra which then splits the power to three fan headers, with two going to the pumps and one to the front temperature gauge. Interestingly, there is a spare molex socket inside the Tundra, allowing you to hook up anything that uses a molex connector (only the ground and the 12v rails however). This means that you could have a fan or two in there if you wanted, or a cold cathode light to draw even more attention to the Tundra.

To get power to the Tundra, you have to use a short male-male cable which connects to the Tundra and the supplied PCI bracket. The PCI bracket has a molex connector on the other side, allowing you to connect it to your power supply. Also present on the back plate are two pass-thru tube connectors marked with ‘In’ and ‘Out’. This allows you to get the tubes inside of your PC, without having a gaping hole in the back of your PC.