News - BFG lets loose self-contained, water-cooled GTX 295 and GTX 285 GPUs

[HEXUS]

NVIDIA's best get overclocked and equipped with a self-contained liquid cooling solution courtesy of CoolIT Systems.

Read more.

[Roobubba]

Every time one of these solutions is announced, I think "ooh yeah, that sounds pretty sweet for me!". Then I read up a bit more, and people who actually have experience of overclocking pooh-pooh the all-in-one solutions (usually offering experimental evidence to support their argument that these solutions are simply not worth it), and I think "ahh. Shame".

Watercooling sounds great, until you put the machine in the back of your car and go off to a mate's house for a LANParty. I think that's the main attraction of solutions like this and the Corsair H50. Of course, with processors, air cooling is almost certainly a better bet, but I could see some advantage of this sort of solution, especially in a case with negative pressure issues which leave your graphics card without enough air to cool properly.

I'm interested to hear what the watercooling boffins think!

Roo

[TheAnimus]

tbh moving a watercooling PC need not be an ordeal, its often a case of the quickly, cheapily done setup thats not finished which causes the problems.

like aircooling, you should check your case if you've not made sure each cable is secured, i nurfed an expensive SCSI cable a few years back now doing this.

In watercooling, if you've got good joints, and each cable pinned down so they can't move, your A OK. These joints don't come apart easy, plus you normally use a die in the water, so its very apparent if there is a leak of consequence before its a problem. Besides which i've had watercooling systems leak before now which caused no real damage because we noticed quick enough.

[TechHead]

I was recently considering buying a water cooling loop for my graphics card alone and i can see the appeal of this sort of product, it must completely remove the hassle of setting up the loop... although having said that i have never actually done it myself (Animus, is it difficult to do - for a noob lol - and can you recommend any good WC systems for just a graphics card? btw its a gtx 285. Under £200 would be nice! thanks a lot!)

[[GSV]Myocardial]

Watercooling sounds great, until you put the machine in the back of your car and go off to a mate's house for a LANParty.

You'll suffer the same problem with this solution as you would with a custom solution. It's not that you are likely to get leaks if you have used clamps or the right sized tubing, it's more that the huge weight of the copper block strapped to the graphics card can cause it to rip itself from the socket and then counce around inside your computer.

With this solution you could could quite simply pull the whole loop out of the case and stow it seperately but for this I'd imagine that BFG will charge a whopping premium.

It will probably not give you quite as low temperatures at similar noise levels as if you installed a good custom solution but a poorly installed custom solution would very likely give you worse cooling.

Overall not a bad idea, just the price you pay could well be higher than doing it yourself and ofcourse you could always go the whole hog and plumb in your CPU, NB, SB and Mosfets etc with a custom solution

[[GSV]Myocardial]

I was recently considering buying a water cooling loop for my graphics card alone and i can see the appeal of this sort of product, it must completely remove the hassle of setting up the loop... although having said that i have never actually done it myself (Animus, is it difficult to do - for a noob lol - and can you recommend any good WC systems for just a graphics card? btw its a gtx 285. Under £200 would be nice! thanks a lot!)

It's relatively easy to do TechHead, just have to take your time and think about how you are going to lay out the loop and what you are going to use.

If you wanted a kit for just a GPU then I'd have a look at this kit: Chilled PC Extreme CPU Watercooling kit (PA120.2)

It would give you everything you needed to do the GPU by just replacing the CPU block with the relevant full cover GPU block from this page: ChilledPC GPU Blocks If you emailed Tom at Chilled he'd sort you out with everything you'd need.