Upgrading to a water cooled core 2 duo system

[edp33]

I’d like to replace my pc currently in a warm room with noisy fans with a water cooled core 2 duo system. A couple of questions, I would really appreciate any advice you can give.

1) I know Scan offer a water cooled system in their 3XS range, do you know of any other providers of custom/prebuilt water cooled systems?

2) The 3XS water cooled system only seems to provide a cpu block. Is a heatsink/gpu block required for good overclocks?

3) I’ve heard that 3.5ghz is the technological limit of the 65nm cores, how are people achieving 3.6ghz+ ?

[Clunk]

1) over-clock.co.uk do custom kits and I think they do prebuilt systems as well. Not cheap but they do know their stuff and service has always been good for me. You can also get some quite specialised bits and bobs.

2) depends on the card, but if you are watercooling the cpu, you may as well do the gpu. From past experience, you can usually squeeze a bit more out of the cards when they are water cooled, but not always, especially if they had a good/efficient air cooler to begin with.

3) That isnt true, hitting 3.6+ will depend on the CPU, motherboard, ram and PSU. They are all different.

[Steve B]

1) I know Scan offer a water cooled system in their 3XS range, do you know of any other providers of custom/prebuilt water cooled systems??

Vadim do prebuilt watercooling, as do Armari, but both are expensive.

2) The 3XS water cooled system only seems to provide a cpu block. Is a heatsink/gpu block required for good overclocks??

Not if you dont want to overclock your graphics card. You dont need to overclock it to achieve an overclock in your processor.

3) I’ve heard that 3.5ghz is the technological limit of the 65nm cores, how are people achieving 3.6ghz+ ?

I'd be interested to know where you heard this, as would like to look into it. But it really depends on the multiplier of the chip. The E4300 has a 9x multiplier, and is built on 65nm wafers. If your memory can cope, then I dont see any reason why you wouldn't be able to achieve overclocks of greater than 3.5GHz

Damn Clunk beat me

[edp33]

Thanks for the quick replies

For No 2) I meant chipset block instead of heatsink to keep the northbridge cooler.

Steve B, I heard about the 3.5Ghz limit from an article at digital-daily.
"In view of the technology limit of the 65-nm process, Core 2 Duo = 3.5 GHz, the operating frequencies of the overclocked system will be within 400 to 500 MHz (E6300: 500 MHz x 7 = 3500 MHz)."
http://www.digital-daily.com/motherb...o_roundup_2006

Doh, reading into it, I guess the technology limit is relating to the multiplier, 7 x a board with 500fsb. Thought the 65nm inferred there was a hard cap.

[Clunk]

You can watercool the Northbridge no problem, I have done mine, but it doesnt really do anything for your overclocks to be honest. It does make your e-penis 1mm longer though. Fact.

[Rack]

lol clunk...

problem with watercooling the CPU and not the northbridge is that you then don't have much airflow on the northbridge heatsink - and with the memory controller being in the northbridge for intel, they do get hot. My DS3 was burning hot to touch on the northbridge until I added a fan in the immediate vicinity.

While that works fine I've now bought a northbridge block purely for the e-penis enlargement.