Specifications

First Looks
It arrived to me in its retail package, the typical purpleish packaging I am used to from them. Inside, you will find the pump, the radiator, the hoses, the cooling block, the flow meter/alarm, and the mounting hardware for a variety of CPU and VGA cooling setups, and a syringe-like tool for filling the liquid up. Something worth noting, much like the Aquagate, this water cooler come all setup ready to go out of the box. The hoses are all pre-clamped, the cooling liquid is pre-filled. All you need to do is install the block, mount the radiator, and plug in all the power. Another thing that I saw in the box was this big flat black piece of plastic with two fan holes in it. Ill go over that shortly, because its actually pretty neat. I just thought it was worth mentioning because it really made me wonder what the hell it was.

Installation
VGA Cooling Installation
I decided to try out the VGA cooling first, and installation of the cooling block was a lot less difficult than I thought. I'm not very familiar with VGA cooling/modding/etc, and this was the first time ever tearing apart my 7800gt, so I was probably a little more cautious than most. Anyways, it went well, after getting my cooler off, installation of the block went pretty well. One quirky thing I didn't completely understand was the addition of a foam ring. Its a hexagonal shaped ring that you stick onto the water block to... help with heat transfer? I think the idea was to make it fit a little more snug with the GPU because the block was originally designed for a larger CPU, but that is only a guess. I also like the nice little "top" they added, it makes the not-so-attractive pump/block look much better. Anyways, after getting the block on, its off to my case to install everything else.










Here is where it gets funky. Remember that black plastic thing I mentioned earlier, its designed for installing the radiator in the pci slot. Novel idea, i thought... lets see how it pans out. There's also several other installation options. There's brackets to install the radiator in a floppy or hard drive bay, you can install it onto the side of your case (note: drilling most likely required). What I wasn't excited about, was the fact that the fans are 72mm, so I couldn't install it on my dual 80mm bay in the top of my Stacker, but without the small 72mm fans, I am sure most of the aforementioned installation options would not be possible, so i suppose sacrificing one for 3 others is a fair trade. So, I tried using the different methods, lets see how they work.
The first one I tried was the pci slot one, I haven't really seen any other setup like this before, so I thought it would be the most interesting. It's actually pretty cool how it works, you simply screw on the black plastic piece (you have to remove the fans first), add the metal bracket thing, and then put it all in. I found it a little easier said than done. It isn't that it's difficult to install, it's that with the hoses already installed, and with the flow meter requiring a somewhat small leeway in its orientation for proper functionality, it gives you few options, and in my case, a lot of mess in your case. It actually wasn't that bad, you just need to maybe plan a little better with your wire management and placement of everything.

Next, we have the hard drive and floppy drive installation method. I'm not going to do them both because they are essentially the same. This is what I found to be the easiest... you can have it installed on either side of your case and just adjust your fans for what you find to be the best direction for flow, plus, I think it gives you a little more room for adjustment in the hose and flow meter placement.

I didn't try the side-panel mounting method, because I wasn't really in the mood to drill holes in my case, and I don't really see what difference it would make as far as how it cools, so long as you didn't put it next to something that puts out a lot of heat (i.e. PSU)
CPU Cooling Installation
After doing all that, I then moved on to installing it onto my CPU. I decided not to go through all the installation options that I tried with the VGA cooling setup, so since you have to take your motherboard out and replace the back plate and all that, I opted to use my handy-dandy workstation, and just set the radiator on the top (so i supposed this is very similar to the side-panel mounting system...). The hardware for CPU mounting starts out with essentially the same as the GPU setup, but you just add another bracket on top so that you have a lot more options for the variety of sockets it is compatible with. One thing I noticed was the ability to change the orientation of the top bracket, allowing you to rotate the direction the pump/block is facing, thus changing the side where the hoses coming out. I think this is a great idea for allowing people to adjust to the very large variety of layouts for motherboards and case designs. Nice job, Cooler Master. The actual installation on the CPU was pretty straightforward. I noticed one really strange thing with the threaded bolts that go through the motherboard, you slide them through, and then put a nut on them and you tighten it over the first set of threads, and then it slides down to the second set, but since other than using pliers or a wrench, there's no included way to fully tighten them down, but I suppose you don't want them THAT tight, without risk of damaging your motherboard. Other than that, it was painless, and that wasn't difficult, just weird.

Now that we know how to install it, let's see how it works on each application.
Performance
To benchmark this, I took CPU and VGA temps at stock speeds with the stock fan, and by stock fan for the CPU, I mean my Zalman 7700 ACLU. For margin of error, I did the stock fan setups before AND after I used the water cooler, so that maybe the thermal paste was old and crappy before I took it off initially (which, in fact, it was). I got some pretty good results with the VGA side, and pretty surprising results on the CPU side.
For the VGA performance, stock cooling, stock speeds, I started out with 43C on Idle and around 70C on load (games, and 3dmark and whatnot). After overclocking it to ***** I got idle temps of 45C and load temps up around 78C. I didnt want to overclock much higher than that, and I was also already getting some artifacts on games like Prey. I thought that was a little warm, but not too terrible for stock. After installing the Viva, I noticed a difference immediately. The stock speed temps dropped about 4C to 39C on idle and 43C on load... that is a 27C load difference!!! As for overclocked with the viva, my temps were 41C and 50C... a difference of 28C on load, another big drop in temps! I was very pleased with the amount of cooling power this had for my video card... And, it removed the artifacts from my games!

On the CPU side, the story was a little different. Remember when I mentioned above about taking temp readings before I took off my HSF and when I then replaced my HSF at the end, well, I am glad I did, because it made a world of difference. I used prime95's torture test for an hour or so to load the CPU and ran it a few times to get an average.
I started with stock everything for my CPU. My 3700 was 200x11 @1.4v with the ram at 2.5-3-3-6. The temps were reading 20C idle on the Zalman, and 39C load. I thought that was about right on target. When I overclocked, my computer just would NOT play fair... I had all sorts of troubled with my abit-a8n board... i blame it on fatal1ty... anyways, I got a very mediocre overclock, but it is better than nothing I suppose. It was set at 225x11 @1.4v and I loosened the ram to 3-3-3-6. To my surprise, the OC temps on my Zalman were lower! They weren't lower by much (1C) but, they read 19C idle and 39C load. I check and double checked, but it ended up being 1C lower on idle. Strange. Off to the Viva!
Same deal with the viva, same speeds, same ram, same pathetic overclock. For the Stock speeds, I recorded 22C on idle, and 41C load. Then for the overclock, I recorded temps of 22C idle and 40C load. Again, I was getting lower temps on my overclock than on my stock! Who knows why.

But, if you are wondering why my stock and OC temps are so similar, its because of the lack of a high overclock, so I am not really taxing out my CPU all that much, so for others, the temps may produce different results.
Also, I wanted to touch on the flow meter a little bit. Its a floating "magnetic something" (i assume) inside a tube that when the water is flowing, all is ok. But, as soon as the water flow is too low, or stops altogether, it emits a very ear-numbing screech. I thought it was a nice idea, save for you can only mount the flow meter in certain orientations, otherwise it just sits and screams... Also, it has a nice little blue glow when all is ok, and pink when there is a possible flow problem.

Conclusion
Well, I am split down the middle on this one. I saw pretty good results with the VGA cooling ability of the cooler, but average cooling results on the CPU side of this cooler. I feel that for the price, and the options that you can have with this, between the installation methods, to the two types of application, it deserves a "nice job" for that. Even though it was seemingly lacking on the performance for the CPU, I still think it performed well enough on the video card cooling to be considered a decent water cooling system. The actual installation of the device, however leaves much to be desired, in my opinion. The all-in-one design is nice for many things, except installation and cosmetics. Wires and hoses everywhere, BUT, you do go into water cooling under the assumption that it takes up significantly more room in your case 99% of the time..
Pros:
*Excellent video card cooling ability
*Flow meter adds nice safety feature
*Attractive Black/Crome design
*Variety of installation options
*Option of being a VGA or CPU cooler
*Very easy to setup; perfect for H2O cooling novice
*Its very quiet

Cons
*CPU cooling performance leaves much to be desired
*All-in-one design can make installation tricky, and results can be cosmetically ugly
*Flow meter has small room for installation placement

Instead of doing two separate scores for CPU and VGA, I will simply give it one general score, but with a bias on the VGA because that it what it is geared for (remember, it's an update with a different bracket for VGA). So, I am going to give this review a 7 out of 10. It would have recieved a higher score had the CPU cooling performed better, and had they had some different solution for power wiring other than the octopus wire adapter, but I feel this is fair. I also award this the Hardware Hell's Silver Award.

I would like to thank Cooler Master for providing this unit to review.