Honestly I never thought we would find ourselves in this position again, reviewing a Thermaltake water-cooling product. The original Thermaltake BigWater liquid cooling system destroyed two motherboards on us, with two different CPU blocks. Both blocks cracked as there were no washers under the screws that went through the clear acrylic plastic. While the cracks were not evident right away, they would begin to appear after a month or two of usage.

Then we found that if the BigWater didn’t break down that way, the pump would eventually stop working. After trying six individual pumps and having them all fail one by one, we gave up and promised ourselves that we would never test a Thermaltake water-cooling product again. However it has been difficult to accept how poor the original BigWater kits were given how much we really like Thermaltake power supplies, cases and many of their air-cooling products.

Well, Thermaltake has been quite persistent when it comes to water-cooling and their latest creation, which is very different from any other water-cooling kit they offer, looks promising. The BigWater 760i has ditched many of the pretty and flimsy parts that were so eye catching in the original kits, and replaced them with more bland quality parts. Take the water-block as a perfect example, this part used to feature a clear acrylic cover which was lit up by a blue LED light, and although this looked great the quality of this particular block was certainly questionable.

Now the new water-block is based on a pure copper design and while it may not be as pretty to look at, it appears to be a very solid leak free product. The BigWater 760i is also a very compact unit featuring a much more powerful water-pump. The installation process for this unit is under ten minutes and while it’s very quick and easy, we believe it is also a very safe and smart installation process.

Nevertheless, this time we are not taking any chances and have been as thorough as we can possibly be with a review sample. The Thermaltake BigWater 760i was been under extreme scrutiny for over two months now and we haven’t just set it up once and watched the water go round. Rather we have installed and uninstalled the BigWater 760i once a week into a new system each time, using both AMD and Intel processors. Thankfully, in this time the BigWater 760i has remained bullet proof and has not shown any signs of weakness, as you would expect out of a 2 month old water-cooling kit!