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DangerDen are comparatively new to the water-cooling market, but sell a range of parts from jackets to radiators to peltiers. This new unit from them comes complete with mounting hardware and solid copper cold plate. The jacket itself seems to be made from pure copper too. There is a thin silvery seam around the sides - I don't know enough about metal fabrication to know exactly how this is put together, but with no externally-obvious ways of opening the device I presume it is welded together after the bottom section is hollowed out. The only problem I can think of with that, as opposed to one you can dissassemble and screw back together, is that if you use untreated water and get a lot of slime growing inside the jacket it'll be very tricky to clean. However, I'd say there's an advantage in sheer strength as DangerDen have tested their units up to 1000psi without failing. On dangerden's product page you can see the internal layout, a nice W shape that boasts lots of surface area and is presumably the reason behind the unusual name of this block.

This jacket is available with 2 widths of tubing attachments - 3/8 inch for use with fishtank-type tubing and 1/4 inch for thinner tubing like the Senfu kit (reviewed here) uses. The review unit also uses the larger diameter tubing which I prefer as it allows greater flow rates and is easier to find pumps to fit. One thing I will note is that the water inlet and exit pipes are mounted in the corners of the jacket. This means the water travels some distance internally before arriving at the hot core of the jacket, by which time it has already picked up a little heat. I prefer jackets where the water inlet is in the top centre of the jacket, so the cool water arrives directly into the jacket above the hot core of the chip. An example of this was used in my original water-cooling experiment. However, this introduces some mounting difficulties. We'll see if it makes much difference to cooling on the next page.

The mounting clip is unusual, but quite clever. The nylon bolt ensures no damage to the relatively soft copper jacket and also allows variable-height mounting so you could fit a peltier under it if you liked. The metal mounting arm clips snugly under the clips on the socket ensuring all force is directed straight down onto the cpu slug.

As an aside, the 3 parts of this kit arrive packaged in a sheet of plastic, welded into segments that for some bizarre reason reminds me of astronaut food..

Anyway.. you can see from the photo below that the surfaces are not totally mirror-finished, particularly on the jacket itself, but they have been lapped quite well. A few minutes with some fine sandpaper and you could get the mirror finish that might provide a slightly better thermal interface, but the effort and extra cost this would incur is probably not worth it to DangerDen. No big deal - the surface as shipped is a lot better than a lot of other commercial water-jackets I've seen. Laying a razorblade across the surface with a light behind it reveals it is extremely flat. If you're planning on lapping a water-jacket or coldplate the technique I describe here works well.