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Watercooling Is watercooling going to extinct?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Siwini, 11 Jan 2011.

  1. Siwini

    Siwini What is 4+no.5?

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    Not really a question, but it seems to me like watercooling is slowly dying and pretty much extinct now. Especially with new Sandy Bridge requiring almost no voltage tweak. Building a water cooled pc is major overkill now. It’s a shame I personally like colored tubes going through system. It makes pc’s stand out if you know what I mean. Are we going to see less and less watercooled builds?
     
  2. Mattmc91

    Mattmc91 Minimodder

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    No, because you can always get that little bit more with watercooling.
     
  3. Siwini

    Siwini What is 4+no.5?

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    Yah, but there is really no point in doing it now. Is there? Haha funny dual GPU comment!
     
  4. meandmymouth

    meandmymouth Multimodder

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    You title needs to read "...going to become extinct."

    Anyway, I doubt it will cease to exist as watercooling still provides a far greater cooling capacity over air. I would rather like to see how far Sandy Bridge chips can be pushed under water cooling. Just because they can reach almost, if not hit, 5GHz on air doesn't mean that with a voltage tweak water won't take it to 5.5GHz or who knows, close to 6GHz.

    However, I could be utterly wrong. The extra cooling may not help. Someone at Bit-tech or here on the forums please see how well SB overclocks on water
     
  5. Bloody_Pete

    Bloody_Pete Technophile

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    For noise water will always like on. My system with 360mm rad will always be quieter than a tower HSF and the fan on a GPU...
     
  6. =DJ=

    =DJ= Torturing x86 since '86

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    Oh, there will always be those that want to Watercool, just to be different! :thumb:

    As Bloody_Pete says, a properly done system should be quieter as well, particularly with large overclocks.

    I bought a pre-plumbed Alphacool case 3 years back as an introduction to watercooling. It had a triple 120mm rad up top, a CPU block and Enheim pump.

    It certainly kept the CPU really cool, but the lack of air cooling around the CPU meant the NB and VRMs would overheat. I had to add a bunch of fans to get decent air flow through the case, meaning it was just as noisy as an air build! Doh! :wallbash:

    I'm running a different board now that doesn't have a desperate need to self immolate, but even so I know it would benefit from including at least the NB into the loop as well.

    In short, I think for watercooling to be worthwhile you really need to jump in with both feet and not do half-arsed measures as I have done...and that gets chuffin' expensive!

    This will be the Great Water Cooled Divide... :D
     
  7. Risky

    Risky Modder

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    If I didn't watercool I'd get my systems build in weeks rather than years but somehow Ifind it hard to resist the urge. Like any other case of overengineering it's an elegant soultion that sometimes takes over from the probel it was meant to solve.
     
  8. j.col

    j.col Minimodder

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    i doubt it will, you say its not needed with sandy bridge, but who knows about the next series of chips from intel or amd.
     
  9. Matticus

    Matticus ...

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    No one has ever really needed to watercool, and that is still the case. It is mainly done to look cool (pardon the pun) and to eek that extra bit of performance. I watercooled for a while for the fun of it but stopped to raise some funds and to go back to basics.

    I think the same people that watercooled before will still watercool sandy bridge. You can get a little bit higher clock speed on water than on air, it isn't really worth it in terms of cost : performance, but it is worth it if you really like the look.

    Watercooling, as Siwini said makes the system stand out, people like to be different and change things. One of the things that is a double edged sword is the fact more and more cases support watercooling with no modifications. This makes watercooling more accessible to people, but it also means the people striving to be different might go another route.
     
  10. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Water cooling was invented to allow hardcore geeks to squeeze more out of their overclocked PC (without going deaf). In the olden days, speed mattered. This was partly because PCs were just not as fast and powerful as they are now, and partly because hardware cost a bomb. It made good economical sense to buy a cheaper, lower clock CPU and to overclock it to match, or even exceed the performance of a top-end CPU costing at least twice as much. The more you ramped up your clock speed however, the hotter your chips got and hence serious cooling was required. At some point, even seriously loud, powerful fans would not cut it any more.

    But there are four factors which have changed that picture now:

    • Hardware has become more powerful, but cheaper at the same time. You can get a decent gaming-spec PC for far less than what you would have paid ten years ago. It is not such a great expense now to buy a CPU and GPU that perform very well at stock speeds.

    • Air cooling has become more sophisticated. Ever hotter chips demanded more effective solutions that could be applied to stock office PCs, and would appeal to the general home users who does not necessarily feel comfortable with the idea of pouring water into their machine. Bigger, much better designed heatsinks with heatpipes entered the market and delivered a cooling performance (and noise levels) previously only associated with water cooling.

    • With the advent of new chip sets it looks like overclocking may become a thing of the past. With the Sandy Bridge chipset:
    • But that is perhaps beside the point anyway. With the advent of mobile devices, not to mention the rising price of electricity, the focus is increasingly on hardware that is efficient rather than just powerful: that does more with fewer Watts of juice. Not only does that mean a shift away from overclocking machines that are already sufficiently powerful to start with (I mean, can you really tell the difference between a CPU running at 3.5Ghz and one running at 4Ghz? With a TFT limited to 60fps do you really need a GPU to squeeze out any more to play Crysis?), but also hardware that offers comparable performance, yet runs cooler.

    So I think reasons to water cool are gradually starting to evaporate (see what I did there? :p ). The only real reason to still do so would be because it is quieter, and for some that is a Good Thing, especially when you have an SLI system with two GPU cards screaming away. But it is becoming an ever smaller domain, one for bragging rights rather than offering any real advantage.
     
  11. Ph4ZeD

    Ph4ZeD What's a Dremel?

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    The main reason I see watercooling being a tad pointless on Sandybridge is voltages can constrain your overclock your chip, rather than sky high temps.
     
  12. bulldogjeff

    bulldogjeff The modding head is firmly back on.

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    I have to agree Nexxo, thats about spot on. I was so tempted not to watercool my next project , but I promised myself I would and as all ready stated, there's no denying a watercooled rig does look good. Maybe with the new stuff hitting the market it might start to change, but there will always be people about that are going to do it no matter what happens.
     
  13. thetrashcanman

    thetrashcanman Angel headed hipsters

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    Ok, I really hope and don't believe that water cooling will never die until the people that water cool (as mattmc91 said "just to get that little bit extra performance") go as well, and I hope that will never happen, theres also the asthietics side of things. Anyone care to admit that a well thought out loop looks dead sexy?

    It just does, I remember years ago before I got into computers I would find pictures on the internet of custom water cooled loops and some of them just took my breath away, such a wow factor when you open a case up with all the water cooling gubbins inside. Then we think about noise, everyone likes low temps and ok sandy bridge and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong anyone, as I'm not entirely sure about this, but those chips I seem to remember can do 4.8Ghz @ 60C? i think thats correct. Obviously thats not high compred with lga 1366, but you could lower the temps and make a slient build if you so wish.

    My final reason is gpu's, cpu's may be running pretty cool now what with the arrival of sandy bridge, but gpu's generally don't, gtx 470 anyone? So I think there will always be people who want to water cool there gpu, and whats the point of water cooling a high end card and leaving the cpu out? Unless you haven't got the money or the space, then you might as well spend an extra £60-£100 on the rest of the bits to cool the cpu as well as DJ said you basically need to jump in with both feet and not do a water cooling build by halfs anymore, if the sandy bridge chips are anything to go by
     
  14. Cthippo

    Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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    Part of me would still like to do a watercooled comp some day, but really I see my future in efficient mini-ITX systems. Some of these systems draw less power that just a watercooling pump by itself.
     
  15. Picky88

    Picky88 What's a Dremel?

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    I think it will depend alot of the heat output of future chips. Car engines for example are rarely aircooled, as there is so much heat to remove, making a watercooling system more or less mandatory. I can see watercooling getting popular for graphics cards, as they seem to be getting hotter and hotter. The TDP of my graphics card is more than my CPU, which would have been unusual a few years ago, but now is often the norm. If Nvidia or AMD come out with a 700W TDP card, how big is the air cooler gonna be??
     
  16. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Well... yeah. :D

    But I've also seen some really sexy air cooled machines. One was just all copper radial fins mounted on a central spine that clamped the mobo in the case. Russian mod. Awesome.
     
  17. Rofl_Waffle

    Rofl_Waffle What's a Dremel?

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    For one you can't get anything out of an air cooled graphics cards. Theres simply not enough space for large heatsinks on GPUs. Waterblocks are compact.

    Second, air cooling is noisy. If I didn't overclock my computer, I can probably run my fans at 500RPM. At that point they would sound like nothing. You just can't get that out of a air cooler 1/4th the size of my radiator.
     
  18. Bloody_Pete

    Bloody_Pete Technophile

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    Linky?
     
  19. play_boy_2000

    play_boy_2000 ^It was funny when I was 12

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    I swapped my watercooling system for a thermaltake ultra 120 and don't regret it.
     
  20. DragunovHUN

    DragunovHUN Modder

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    AMD doesn't have Sandy Bridge. Graphics cards aren't based on Sandy bridge either. One product isn't going to suddenly kill off the entire watercooling industry.

    Granted it will probably snowball, and i really hope it does and we take a turn towards efficiency, but i'm already sick and tired of OMG SANDI BRIEDG DOES leE3T OVERCLOCKSES WITHOUT WATER WATER IS DEADED threads. Just chill and see what happens.

    Me, i never watercooled for overclocking. I did it because of the noise benefits and the aesthetics. I love the industrial look of a radiator, compression fittings and tubing.

    I'll give up watercooling once every component can be cooled passively without sacrifices. Not a moment before.
     

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