New 'Stealth' Water Block Hides All the Tubing for Liquid-Cooled Builds

Ever since both DIY and all-in-one liquid cooling kits hit the market, the tubes that force liquid into the water block over the CPU have always entered from above the chip. This was the only way to get liquid into the system, as the CPU and motherboard are beneath the water block. These are significant impediments, but a clever modder has found a way around this obstacle by designing a water block that sucks in liquid from behind the motherboard. This has the benefit of allowing for a totally clean look, with no visible tubes entering the CPU cooler. Though it's just a prototype for now, it could eventually hit the retail market if there's enough interest.

The "Stealth" water block was featured recently on the creator's YouTube channel and covered by renowned overclocker Roman “Der8auer” Hartung. The novelty of the design is that it splits the water block into two pieces. One part goes on top of the CPU like a regular water block, and that part is then connected to a reservoir that resides on the backside of the motherboard. This creates a cooling sandwich, with the piece on the back feeding cool liquid to the swirling chamber mounted above the CPU. However, adding this backside reservoir could pose some challenges to its adoption, as it's pretty thick. As Videocardz notes, it's likely too thick to fit in most ATX cases currently on the market.

The "sandwich" design of the water block puts the reservoir behind the motherboard. Credit: Der8auer

The way it works is instead of having in/out holes on the top of the water block like a traditional design, those holes exist on the top and bottom of the reservoir behind the motherboard. This hides both tubes behind the motherboard, though it introduces several clearance issues. When it's running, water enters the reservoir from the top near the CPU fan connectors and is then passed to the water block through the motherboard via connecting tubes and over the CPU. The liquid then proceeds through the block to the bottom, where it exits the system and heads to the radiator, and then the loop is complete.

As a proof of concept, Der8auer ran the Stealth water block on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-core, 32-thread CPU running Cinebench to give it a real-world test. Unfortunately, performance was not exemplary as the CPU hit about 94C at 226W in the test. The host attributes this to a less-than-stellar cold plate used for this prototype and says it can (and will) be improved in future versions, should there be enough interest in the project.