Water Cooling

lol, yes that missing part was the radiator. I bought it on eBay and was actually impressed by it's quality. for only $10 you can't get much better

you're right, but you don't need all that stuff either. to cool a CPU you need just a single 80mm or single 120mm radiator (this should be able to handle a northbridge cooler as well).

In my example, I wasn't talking about water-cooling every heat-producing component. I was only talking about water-cooling the CPU. personally, I have never felt a need to water-cool anything but the CPU (if I was to water-cool other components, I would run them on their own water circuit, separate from the CPU)

My reason for watercooling is for silent operation. I don't care about how low the temps are, I only care that it keeps my CPU in it's safe operating range while being as quiet as possible. most of the time I run it with no fan (the fan is physically mounted, but not turned on). i turn the fan on only when gaming. My video card, northbridge, RAM sticks, and HDDs are all passively cooled and my system fans run so slow you can only hear them if you put your ear up to them. (the fan on the radiator is louder because the air must pass through the radiator cooling fins, which is why I leave it turned off most of the time). normally the only thing in my computer thats audible is the HDD.

I've heard alot of rumors about watercooling being alot quieter than aircooling....

But as it is, my aircooling setup is just about inaudible. And this is overclocked.

Also, you still need fans on those radiators. If you used the same fans on your aircooling setup, you should not have a setup thats any quieter than an aircooling setup.

But I suppose you'd be getting lower temps than I do...

Hi,I have to agree with CMH about the spelling bit with has knothing to do with helping people here in techspot but the simple thing is a little commen since about computer and water technoligy. Look at my gallery, like they say "a picture says a thousand words" and I made it all myself too and I have to agree with CMH again with a simple cooler from a car and a pump from a aquarium set and a coper block which is what I did and got a temperature from 30 degrees cel and thats with a prescott 2.4 oced at 3.6gig.The cooler was a heater core from a opel to be exact and the aquarium pump I had to shorten to fit in the computer case but the pump is a 2313 eheim which pumps 440 liter a hour.

well, water-cooling isn't always quieter, it depends how the system is designed. how loud it will be depends on the only two moving parts in the system (the fan, and the pump). you don't need a fast fan (sometimes you don't need a fan at all), and there are plenty of quiet pumps available.

no you don't. I have a fan on mine, but most of the time it is turned off (in fact it's turned off right now ) the radiator will dissipate heat with or without a fan. sometimes it's enough by itself, and sometimes you need a fan, every system is unique.

my system (Opteron165 @2.5GHz) can run with no fan on the radiator most of the time (while doing simple tasks like web browsing) however I do need to turn it on when gaming. average, with the fan off at idle my CPU runs in the high 30's (°C), if I start gaming it will get into the high 50's (°C) that's when I turn my fan on and it will drop back down into the high 30's (°C). if I leave the fan running all the time it will stay in the high 20's (°C) at idle (right now it's summer time here and it's been in the 90's (°F) and I don't use air conditioning so those "average" temps are a bit higher, but I can still run the system with no fan as long as I'm not doing anything CPU-intensive.

you're absolutely right. if you're using the same fans then it will be just as loud, but the difference is that with a water-cooling system you can turn those fans way down (or sometimes off) which will make the entire system quieter (in my case, so quiet you can't even hear it )

Thinking about the physics behind this, I think I see why you can turn the fans way down. However, this is only true in certain applications, which will become apparent in my rant.

The whole idea behind watercooling is that water is used to transport heat from hot sites, to sites with large surface areas. In aircooling, plain old metal (copper/aluminum) is used (which is slow). However, if both surface areas are equal, I really don't see why advantage between aircooling and watercooling. However, with a dual 120mm radiator, this would beat any surface area of any aircooling setup. Bear in mind that this is only true if you don't add anything else into the loop, since this would increase the amount of energy needed to dissipate.

So theoretically, its quieter because you need less air over the surface area, so you can turn down your fan.

there is no need for a huge dual 120mm radiator, that's just overkill (it will also require a larger pump, which can mean more uneccessary noise). a single 120mm radiator (or even an 80mm radiator) will still provide more surface area than most heatsinks. also, don't forget the surface area of the waterblock as well.

even though there are huge aftermarket heatsinks available that might match the surface area of a radiator, that doesn't make them as effective as a water-cooling system. a heatsink will get hot enough to burn you, but a radiator only gets warm to the touch. for that reason alone you can use a very low speed fan, or sometimes not use any fan at all.

Gotta disagree with you there. My Ultra-120 doesn't get that hot ever, and thats with a very low rpm fan (S-Flex SFF21E) with a fan controller putting it even lower.

Strickly speaking your ultra 120 is a phase change system not just an air cooled heatsink, and some heatsinks designed to handle smaller loads do get hot enough to burn fingers. :stickout:

Oh yeah, the reason I bought a PA120.2 (dual rad) was so I could overclock the heck out of my hot processor (roughly 126W at 3GHz with no extra voltage) and still have almost inaudible fans. In fact everything I purchased was bought based on preformance reviews that made sense from reputable sources.

you're right. not all heatsinks get hot enough to burn you.

I should have been more specific when I said "heatsink". i was referring to a standard heatsink (which is just an extruded aluminum block with protruding fins and a fan screwed into the top of it).

the Ultra-120 is a heatpipe cooler, which is a more advanced and more effective heatsink design. this is the type of cooler I was referring to when I said "huge aftermarket heatsinks"

:wave:

Okay, fair enough, it really is a phase change system, but not the ones that cost thousands (which really would be what others meant when they said phase change).