Blogs Is there still a need for water-cooling?

Agree. There are times I question why I'm fitting a waterblock to a 220 pound GPU when it could all go wrong. But once it's fitted I'm glad I did.

I have fitted full cover waterblocks to some GPU's and also the GPU only type cooler. Removing the air cooler on a GPU is very easy. The screws used to secure it are easy to undo and the heatsink slides off easily. If it's a full cover waterblock then it will come with mosfet heat pads and you apply thermal paste to the GPU and GDDR. Whilst it's great to have a full cover waterblock that's chilling all of the GPU parts, they have become too expensive. I don't want to pay £75 to £100 on top of the cost of my GPU (in this case 2 x 560Ti) for liquid cooling.

The much better option is a universal VGA waterblock. I was able to buy 2 x EK VGA waterblocks with 560 adapter plates for less than the cost of 1 x full cover block. In the case of the 560Ti, the heatpipe it comes with only cools the GPU. The ram and mosfets are not cooled by the heatpipe so this means the 560Ti is absolutely perfect for universal VGA waterblock.

It was a simple job removing the MSI Twin Frozr heatpipes and then fitting the EK waterblocks. I actually did buy some low profile GDDR heatsinks that were approx £5 per set of 10 or something. The mosfets on the 560Ti have no heatsinks. I have a 120mm fan hanging off the top 560 which blows air from the side over the mosfets of both graphics cards. The fan is a low noise (silent) one.

Having GPU temps from from 80c down to 30c in game and with hardly any noise is well worth the effort. The universal VGA blocks cost from £35 each.

 

It has interested me but I have never watercooled in 10 years of building my own PC's I have never been that bothered by the noise of the machines.
When the GPU is at max speed, I cant even hear it because the blasts from blowing up buildings within my game are way louder.

 

I mainly bought my Crossair H70 (easy water cooling fro staters) because it has non of the "normal" water-cooling issues. It works with an socket even ones that have not come out unless the move the X connection drastically. Oh yeah an I don't have the cash to buy a "proper wattercooling loop"

 

I think that goes for everything, doesn't it?

I'm overkill watercooling a 1090T with a triple radiator at the minute; it wasn't so much I wanted it watercooled, as I wanted to prove that I could fit a triple radiator into the roof of an Antec P180 and still have room for all the rest of the system I wanted in there.

It's got SLI GTX470s running in it at the minute, and while I want to watercool them, I'd want to put another radiator in there to do so, and right now I can't be faffed.

The things I really do want to watercool are my 2GB GTX460s in my Surround rig; the fans on them are pretty poor - not loud, just not great - but equally I want to see if EVGA get those 2.5GB GTX570s to the UK for a half-reasonable price soon, because I'll probably swap out the 460s in preference to them. So I don't want to buy GTX460 blocks only to replace the cards in a few weeks/months.

 

I've the cash and the time but, like one of the posters above, it just never made sense for me. It costs an inordinate amount of money (and risk) to put the important bits - the motherboard and the GPU - under water, and the fact that the blocks for those aren't reusable is a big problem. It's all very well saying that they can be overclocked further and therefore last longer, but if the cost of your graphics cards and motherboards were increased 50% by watercooling (which seems to be a rough guide) then you simply can't afford to upgrade as often - and that's before you start with the time-consuming disincentive of draining and refilling of loops etc.

 

Watercooled motherboard isn't important these days. Perhaps it's nice for X58 where u have a hot northbridge. For 1155 or 1156 it's not necessary.

A universal VGA waterblock costs £35+ and can be used on both Nvidia and ATI.

Filling and draining? To plumb in another waterblock? Only if you're a muppet. If you know what you're doing then you have inexpensive shutoff taps so you can stop the flow at key points. When I plumbed in my 2 x 560 waterblocks, I didn't need to drain anything. I shut the taps to off position and disconnected the relevant tube sections so I could plumb in the new blocks. Easy.

Flow taps on ebay for a few pounds each.

 

I first got into watercooling due to the fact that the air coolers for my GPUs blocked off the PCI slots that I needed for my add in cards rather than any performance benefit, I used it to turn 6800GTs from dual slot to single slot cards I think and better the performance of the ultras.

Once I was water cooled I much preferred the fact the my PC had one noise level it didn't rev up or slow down under load like running two gpus on air, now I remain watercooled as I have the kit already, its doesn't cost me much to stay that way, whether I need it or not, a GPU running at 40degC under load rather than 90degC under load has to be beneficial from a reliability point of view.

It was a bonus that the water allowed me to extract more performance from my parts and keep temps in check.

Adding a water cooled heatsink to a cheap GPU now i have the kit in place won't set you back much more than buying a higher specced air cooled variant of the GPU you are looking at but you are much more likely to get better clocks out of the cheapo WC'ed GPU than the highend aircooled GPU, so once you've gone to water there is not much point turning back.

 

hello i'm new to this site i am a pc enthusiast and i am doing so much research about pc parts and rigs and all the cooling ETC. what advice can you all give me about water cooling and setting it up, like what TIM should i use the makes that i am most likely to need ETC????

 

Watercooling is the future, for the most part. Nearly eveyone can put a quart of Oil in their car if need be, so why not put water if there computer.

Enough has already been said here to demonstrate why Watercooling is important. I do love the article cause it provokes thought.


Air cooling has one disadvantage and that is DUST. If you dont clean your fan assemblies out regularly, your system performance will diminish. Watercooling is great because you can get low-cfm fans that do a great job.

 

With watercooling you tend to see very little fluctuation in both CPU and/or GPU temperature if you stressed them out for any length of time compared to an aircooled machine which you’ll see the temperature jump up immediately you stress them and jump back down at idle which isn’t ideal when pursuing a stable overclock.


.................but apart from anything else, watercooling rocks

 

This. One of the main reasons I went back to air.

Every component you buy comes with an air cooler, and seeing as I'm a little strapped for case 360 days of the year I couldn't keep updating my rig with new blocks/rads etc. So I gave up on it. Although saying that, I'd love to get a nice beastly case and watercool everything.

 

I don't expect anything spectacular to happen in future with water cooling efficiency because water or distilled water heat capacity is permanent.
Water blocks and heat spreading design could be a matter of future progress. Pump speed and capacity of moving the liquid could be also but these are not of such great importance on performance increase, IMO.
In general, development of cooling performance will follow designed TDP of CPU, GPU etc.

 

Love the idea and did watercool my cpu and graphics card but it doesn't fit well with my serial upgrading nature. It adds too much to the outlay when upgrading on a regular basis, at least it does for my wallet

 

This may be a stupid question, but where does the heat go?

A CPU/GPU etc etc will generate a certain amount of heat under load. With air cooling, that heat gets pushed out the tower via a fairly direct method. With water, surely it gets pushed to the reservoir...and then dumped in to the air from there.

So how does it result in a cooler room? Mainly interested as my room goes up about 5-6 degrees C after a gaming session, which simply isn't pleasant...so watercooling may solve this.

 

You can't get more direct than liquid cooling. Liquid absorbs the heat and carries it very directly to the radiator which removes it (ironically with air). Most liquid cooling systems dump the air out the back or top of the computer case depending on where the radiator is located. On my setup the radiator sits by open window sucking in fresh air which means the rad never breathes in recirculated air.

Even with a conventional water setup where the rad dumps the air into the room you will still get lower temps especially if the room is well ventilated.

On a completely different note: I once drilled a hole through the middle of my water-block and added a rubber gasket around it. Fitted to CPU without thermal paste it sprayed the coolant directly onto the CPU heat-spreader.

 

It doesn't make any difference - the heat can't disappear. But you could always make a ventilation channel to make the way for a hot air from the radiator fans out of the room. This is if you don't have the AC. If you have it, doesn't matter.

 

I've thought about this loads, did it actually work?

 

Go for used parts rather than a new one for CPUs and mobos. Look for used VGAs with water blocks and not for the newest. This is a best buy method. If you are not happy with performance - get the one more VGA for SLI or Crossfire etc. Never buy the new things if possible.
Good luck.

 

It did work. The rubber stopped water leaking around the cpu and I was able to overclock the CPU that bit higher. It was back on one of the pentium CPU's I think. It was a 2.4ghz Pentium whatever and I used to overclock it to 3.1 but I was able to go higher but it was so long ago. My favourite cooling was peltier though. I really miss the days of chilling a CPU with liquid and thermoelectric plate. I used to run my P4 down to about -7c. I was able to overclock higher and with less voltage. Initially I started with a 130w peltier and eventually to a 274w and that is when it got out of hand because the energy consumption was crazy.