Water Cooling - Is it worth it?

[Stubo]

How well do you maintain your current PC?

If its anything less than, 'extremely well'... watercooling is not for you

Hmm, well I try to maintain a dust free case, I have filters and use compressed air every few months when it starts to build up in there. It really depends on how often tinkering is required, I suppose it's personal preference to a degree, but what would you expect to be average?

Thanks for this post, exactly the sort of thing I was looking for when I made this thread!

[Biscuit]

Hmm, well I try to maintain a dust free case, I have filters and use compressed air every few months when it starts to build up in there. It really depends on how often tinkering is required, I suppose it's personal preference to a degree, but what would you expect to be average?

I will be honest, i haven't dabbled in it myself i only know people who have, so i cant answer the actual value with genuine answers from experience. All i can say is that it takes more. What i will say (again from knowing people who have gone for it) is that once you have spent the time and money to make such a well designed and thought out system, pride becomes relevant. If you are proud of what you ahve done then the effort might not seem like as much of a chore!

Thanks for this post, exactly the sort of thing I was looking for when I made this thread!

No worries

[j.o.s.h.1408]

WC is not cheap!

[GoNz0]

They don screw on tubing .

you totally lost me, i could swing off my compression fittings, there is no way they can come off.

[ehhhhhhh]

I had some pre built loops from corsair. I switched to a custom built solution (mostly EK hardware, laing d5 pump) and I can say, if it's done well then it's a lot better.

Corsair's WC loop is adequate for light use. If you put high load on your components for a long period of time then they cannot keep up.

[Biscuit]

I had some pre built loops from corsair. I switched to a custom built solution (mostly EK hardware, laing d5 pump) and I can say, if it's done well then it's a lot better.

Corsair's WC loop is adequate for light use. If you put high load on your components for a long period of time then they cannot keep up.

Care to elaborate? In what way cant they keep up?

From what i have seen, temps are not quite as good and the supplied fans are a bit pants. Change the fans and that's the noise sorted but temps, as long as you are within safe limits, who cares?


With Sandybridge it doesn't matter what kind of cooling you have, it gets hot because of poor thermal compound inside the chip, the heat doesnt even make it to the surface properly. Unless you are sub-zero-ing it, it all makes little difference.

Happy to be proved wrong?

[mikeo01]

I personally wanted to go for water cooling purely for looks, because when set up properly they do look amazing I give you that but the price, a bit expensive.
My temperatures on air with a decent HSF and stock cooler for my GPU on an average day with the heating up a bit (I am overclocked, well not mee personally ) are CPU 45, MB 30-33, HDD 30, GPU 50

Does depend on the chip, but if you are an average user which does some gaming now and again and some overclocking you may find it hard to feel the benefit apart from noise, because you can get frosty temperatures with air.

That said WC is great for reliability, noise and of course heat when done correctly, but I think the price of the initial setup and the worries about leaks are too high, if it dripped on my motherboard its up to chance to save it.


Unless you go for oil submerged? (just kidding)

[ehhhhhhh]

Care to elaborate? In what way cant they keep up?

From what i have seen, temps are not quite as good and the supplied fans are a bit pants. Change the fans and that's the noise sorted but temps, as long as you are within safe limits, who cares?


With Sandybridge it doesn't matter what kind of cooling you have, it gets hot because of poor thermal compound inside the chip, the heat doesnt even make it to the surface properly. Unless you are sub-zero-ing it, it all makes little difference.

Happy to be proved wrong?

the prebuilt corsair solutions quickly reached 70C (i7 2600K @4.3, 100% load) and it seemed that I couldn't run it without the temp crawling even higher. With the proper watercooling loop, it survives 100% load for even several days, with max temp around 50C.

I don't think that prebuilts are useless but if you use it at high load for long periods of time then it's better to have a proper loop.

[Stubo]

I appreciate how easy the all in one solutions are, and there's definitely a market for that - but I'm certain that most of the noise I can hear is from my GPU. This makes them less appealing for me personally unless I got the Arctic Accelero Hybrid, which isn't overly convincing.

[wasabi]

I tried it years ago with one of those big passive tower cooler things (reserator). Found it expensive, fiddly and to be honest annoyingly noisy (from pump)

If I really were to go for that kind of OTT thing these days I'd probably invest in a mineral oil tank.

In this day and age I don't see why it is necessary to get performance 99% of home users will need.

[dacads]

AIO coolers are certainly more popular amongst CPUs. For GPUs something such as the Accelero Extreme wouldn't be a bad choice

[Willzzz]

It will be interesting to see how Haswell affects this, we certainly seem to be approaching the point where WC just isn't necessary. It seems pretty rare these days that heat is the limiting factor in any component, and it's not even as if WC is always quieter either, the larger 280mm ones are pretty quiet but also very expensive.

[badelhas]

I went for water cooling years ago, imported a load of Koolance gear including controller cards to save on costs a bit, I could have bought another gaming rig for the outlay but that's the cost of getting it right.

The upside, a near silent pc at idle, and during a round of BF3 with a I7 CPu running at 4ghz and 2 GTX 480's that run very hot I still come under the idle temps of most air cooled rigs.

this is the idle temps as of now.

cpu will hit 38 and both video cards (overclocked to 850/1000) will get to 40.

the fan controller has never needed to get above 50% on the fans.

I always thought that a fan controller only served to manually control the speed of the fans, which had little interest to me. From that screen shot it seems that the controller is automatically doing the control of fan rpm's depending on the temps, is this true?! If so, can you please recommend me a fan controller?
By the way you guys should look at the asetek 760gc (cpu and gpu) and 740gf aio wc kits.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

you totally lost me, i could swing off my compression fittings, there is no way they can come off.

They can easily. I'm talking about the fittings connecting to the tube not your rad or block or pump

[GoNz0]

I always thought that a fan controller only served to manually control the speed of the fans, which had little interest to me. From that screen shot it seems that the controller is automatically doing the control of fan rpm's depending on the temps, is this true?! If so, can you please recommend me a fan controller?
By the way you guys should look at the asetek 760gc (cpu and gpu) and 740gf aio wc kits.

the koolance tms 200 series card has 5 temp sensors, 3 fan outlets, 1 pump outlet and 1 flow control input. you can double this with a daughter board as shown in my pic it has 10 temp sensors, 2 pumps, 6 fans (1 amp each, i run 3 140mm fans off 1 header)

each fan and pump can monitor any one of the 10 temp sensors, this can be controlled by the auto setting where you specify the min pump/fan speed, max pump/fan speed and the ramp settings according to temps via the setting window.

ie start at 10% fan until it hits 25 degrees then ramp up 10% every 2 degrees until the limit is reached.

the best part is, if something fails, such as the flow rate hits zero or the temps peak, a pump RPM drops lower than you tell it an alarm will sound and everything hits 100% until you take action, fail to take action and hit critical settings and it will attempt a software shutdown, if that takes to long it will force a hard power off to save the system as the power switch motherboard header runs through the card and shorts the switch for the 5 second hard off.

really cleaver bit of kit

They can easily. I'm talking about the fittings connecting to the tube not your rad or block or pump

so am i, push the pipe over the lip, screw down the fitting preventing it being able to come off no matter what. god knows what you were using to be able to remove a screwed down compression fitting.

care to show a pic of what your on about ?

[j.o.s.h.1408]

similar to this. the red tube connected to the fittings.



comes off easily, especially if your tubing bends a bit.

the screw doesnt come off, its teh tube. fittings simply doesnt clamp and stay