Water cooling experiences and recommendations

[Cromcruaich]

for new build have decided to water cool and may as well do it for both the gpu and cpu.

Just after other peoples experiences and any recommendations.

Should I go for an all in one kit or cherry pick the parts. I dont want a big case (just standard midi at most) so will i need a radiator that can be externally mounted? Any item or kit recommendations or ones I should avoid?

What gotchas are there? Can I expect to have to get my dremmel out? Whats it all about? Who am I? Is it time for my cocoa nurse?

 

[Cromcruaich]

No one got anything to say about water cooling? I'm gobsmacked.

 

[Lethul]

I never dared trying it Think you are better off asking some overclockers forum or something. They like water! (or TEC cooling for that matter)

 

[Malecheon]

Silly question, but is there a reason you want to watercool, or you just want to cos it's cool ?

 

[Kryten]

It's generally something I don't bother with these days as the standard of air cooling is very high currently. The last time I did try anything was a half-watercooled ad-hoc system for my graphics card (TNT2 Ultra) using the innards of an imported Dreamcast.

It's a good cooling method, although *can* be more expensive/less efficient to run and just as audible as modern quiet air cooling methods; obviously this depends on the methods beind used, the type of pumps and what not.

There's a lot of complete systems on the market these days though, so I know it's rather popular still. I did set up a silent one a while ago, using that large blue Zalman tower setup. Worked suprisingly well.

 

[ford prefect]

I only tried water cooling once. It went badly wrong. Enough said.

 

[soze]

I wanted to try water cooling to keep my machine quiet but i have seen most work logs have atleast 3 radiator fans and 2 on the machine so ended up pointless. I would like to try it but i would do on an old machine first to test it out.

 

[Embattle]

I've done water cooling in the past, it is indeed great way to cool your system however you must do every test on the system before hand which will mean leaving it on test for leaks for 24 hours etc.

There are some nice complete systems like the Zalman Reserator XT which tend to be good and fairly easy to install.

 

[Kryten]

That's the jobby I was on about

 

[Aada]

I would never try water cooling like Kryten said most fan cooling systems are at a very high standard.

Had a friend with water cooling he had a shelf above his computer and it feel off the wall when his computer was on and managed to crack the cooling inside and the computer started smoking before he realised his water cooling had cracked.

 

[Ominous]

Pretty drastic method of cooling for sure but very interesting. Way over the top unless you are going to overclock. There are alternatives. I have a Multi Fan Speed Controller which takes up a CD-Rom slot on the front of my computer. It has 4 fan speed control dials and 2 other case fan control switches. On my athlon processor I have used artic silver compound and a large size cooler with an incredibly noisy (on full power) 7000 rpm cooler fan. The cooling power of the fan is astonishing but you couldn't use the computer with it running on full power unless you used ear phones as it just too noisy. To overcome this I have wired up all my fans (also changed my video card fan to a much larger one) to the speed control device. I set the speed of the fans to just off noisy and still get great cooling.

I don't think water cooling is really necessary on a standard setup though and who overclocks their computers much these days? Maybe they do but with processors so powerful anyways I can't really see the need.

 

[Embattle]

Well when I used it the reality was the headroom of processors was very low, for example I had a P4 3.4Ghz which for the P4 is where Intel could go no further realistically so I used Water Cooling to push it to 4Ghz but I managed about 3.9Ghz due to the ram not being able to handle going any higher. The other effect was not requiring one of the screaming fans around at the time.

Modern processors from Intel are highly overclockable without much extra heat generated so better quality HSF can be used without the screaming fan, however if you really want to go extreme then water cooling is the next stop although when going extreme you need to make sure that the various other components from ram to the PSU are up to the job.

 

[Jupitus]

I went to a w/c setup with my old prescott chip as it was running very hot (as they tended to)... was quieter than previous system and could clock it a little but the headache of installation and getting all the parts together etc is something I don't honestly think I would do again...if you are going to go ahead get posting for info on the overclocker forums w/c sections.