Blogs Is there still a need for water-cooling?

Stress was a big part for me deciding to go back to air. I started my WC'ing after an operation on my neck - I had a lot of time at home recovering.

I bought a whole load of new fittings and thicker tubing, but then struggled to get it all nicely fitted in the case. In the end I threw my toys out of the pram and swapped back to air. I quickly advertised all my WC bits for sale, and they went pretty quickly - if I hadn't have sold them all I would have tried again and again.

Poking around in the case wasn't doing my neck any good, and I was getting pretty short tempered with it too!

I do still fancy having a go again, but it would be purely as a hobby, and not for lower temps - as they are ok for me now.

 

wussies xD

 

Wahey! Nice one!

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Just a quick update on the V10 - I have just run a load test with the motherboard fan settings set to standard rather than the usual silent setting, and the temps were down to around 68c, with them on the turbo setting, they temps are down to 65c - but of course it is noiser than I usually have. Hopefully this will quieten down with the Scythe SlipStream PWM fans fitted (110CFM compared to 90CFM of the Coolermasters).

 

That's the advantage of my liquid setup, I don't even try to fit everything inside. I don't need everything squished together inside my pc and I don't want the water rad sucking in heated case air and dumping it into the room. Thus my water pump, reservoir and rad are all remotely located away from the pc by the open window. I have 12mm ID tubing but there is no tight squeeze because I just have 4 waterblocks in there and the big parts are located outside.

One of my friends also followed my setup while another opted for radiator attached to the top of his PC case on the outside.

I don't need to move the PC around so it doesn't matter having the parts several meters away from the case. I would rather sacrifice looks for extreme performance and this setup kills any other straight liquid cooling except for those people who mount their radiator on the outside of the house (I would love to).

 

I don't think you doing it right if your feet are wet

 

I conducted and experiment...

My idle GPU temps were 26 and 27c.

I stopped the 3 x radiator fans (by adjusting their speed down to zero with Speedfan). I ran Kombuster to load one GPU to 88% and noted the temperature increase. After 30 minutes GPU 1 (the one that was being loaded) had increased to a shocking 48c whilst the idle GPU (on same liquid loop) had increased to 43c. CPU cores were between 57 & 60c.

I took my eyes off the PC to measure then radiator and reservoir temps (41c) and the next thing I see the PC had shut itself off within 5 seconds. This is a safety feature I added after my cat disconnected my external water pump some months ago causing the CPU temp to rise to 80c. If the CPU or GPU temps go beyond a certain level then Speedfan is set to start Superfast shutdown. Speedfan shutdown the PC because the GPU temp had reached 48c. Test ended abruptly.

Even with the 3 radiator fans disabled, the system is still cooled by the passive heatsink reservoir.

Ordinarily the rad fans idle at 30% and increase up to 50% speed for a game or other heavy loaded.

 

I wish BT/CPC would do test including a specific WC loop when comparing CPU coolers (it would be harder to include a GPU in the loop). They could maybe use a Kit to keep decisions down over which parts to include. But it would at least give some comparison for air only or water only users - I have seen other websites do this.

I am very tempted to spend some hard earned on another loop - just to compare again, but this time, with a Sandy Bridge CPU instead of the AMD 1090T I used before.

One benefit of water cooling, is the parts do seem to keep quite a lot of their value, and don't depreciate too much.

 

Is watercooling necessary? Probably not. Is it totally awesome looking with the UV tubes and water churning? Yes, definitely yes.

Your computer can be the a decorative piece to your room. You can bask in its awesome UV glow and gloat all over your friends

Apart from that, the noise reduction is considerable. Even though custom fans on graphics cards these days are extremely well made and provide ample heat dissipation, the noise is still subpar compared to what you get with water.

Its not that risky. A leak doesn't instantly fry your computer, a lot of the time the water just washes over the graphics card doing no harm. But leaks are easy to guard against if you just take a little extra precaution.

 

I still watercool , and have done since I bought my first dual CPU mobo (dual P3 800!). I'm currently rocking a dual 5500 xeon setup and watercooling just makes it so much easier to run in a tower pc. Heat and noise are reduced greatly compared to any HSF i could put on it.

 

I have got too deep into this conversation for my own good - I now want to spend some money on water cooling kit again, even though I don't need to...

What would be the minimum kit needed to get better temps (as in worth spending money on to get to)?

 

I was watercooling circa 2003-2005 time frame when p4's where running ridiculously hot ( I was AMD anyways) air coolers weren't great and 200 mhz meant something.

I got out of watercooling. by my calculations it costs about $200 to get into a watercooling setup. At that price I can spend an extra $100 on my cpu and gpu each and just stay near stock frequencies.

I got a "quite" case. It would almost be fun to watercool again, but I remember the headaches and maintenance being a big issue. Nowadays my case hides under a desk so looks inside the case mean nothing to me.

I miss the eerily silent systems, but the system only makes noise when gaming and the volume is up or the headphones are on.

Don't miss having to clean nasty algea out of loops and tracking down leaks. Or having to plumb systems

 

Liquid cooling done wrong.

Who uses straight water? I use Thermochill EC6 which is a vegetable product. No algae, no maintenance. Leaks don't occur at random. They occur after incorrect fitting generally.

" but I remember the headaches and maintenance being a big issue. " - What maintenance? The coolant is filled once a year and there is no algae removal because algae form when you use water and we don't use that any more. I guess things were different in your day grandpa

 

Agreed - my only maintenance was when I bought something new to try in the loop...

There is more maintenance than air though, just not as much as some people think.

 

I use Fluorinert: fill and forget. The loop us as clean as the day I filled it. Nowadays there are many cheaper, and nearly as good alternatives.

Water cooling has come a long way. Just the number of specialist fittings, pumps, control hardware, reservoir and radiator options have skyrocketed. Just look at Aqua-Computer's new modular radiator system (which allows you to build a radiator of pretty much any size, with integrated pump and reservoir) to have your mind blown.

Air cooling has made a lot of progress in the last five years, but water cooling is going to catch up...

 

I still love the old DIY stuff though. Some custom fittings for sure, but if I were to do a water cooling rig, I'd craft as much out of it as possible. There's no fun in buying and assembling.

Plus I got an uncle who's a mechanical CNC calibrator. He's a genius with tools.

 

If you have a problem with A noisy gfx card, you have chosen the wrong manufacturer and or/wrong model. I am only using cards (both ATI and NVidia) that do come with custom cooling (e.g. HD5870 Vapor-X or MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozr), and my box is pretty quiet even under high load (like playing Crysis 2 on 2560x1600 with an overclocked Core i7 CPU). What I however have is watercooling for the CPU - not the kind you need to assemble yourself, but as a complete kit in the form of the Corsair H60. Add a good case fan setup, and you'll never have problems with overheating or noise.

I did full watercooling years ago when there was no quiet air cooling alternative. I used Festo pneumatic tube and fittings for it, because it was very convenient to plug in and unplug (just push the tube in the fitting, or pull a ring on the fitting to release the tube), and because I thought "if it doesn't let pressurized air escape, it sure won't leak water". It was expensive and maybe not the most beautiful solution, but it worked. I wouldn't ever want to go back there these days though. Imo it's not worth the effort and the money any more.

 

My rig has eight 120mm fans, six on the rads, exhausting air, and two intakes*, so it isn't silent; but the noise is little more than a fairly low hum. Compared to the noise from the fans on my previous two GPU coolers, it's very pleasant and never changes; regardless of workload. It obviously runs much cooler too:

It was quite warm yesterday, and my CPU maxed out at 67 degrees after two hours of Prime95 at 4GHz (it was hitting 80+ on air). The hottest GPU hit 63 degrees and levelled out after around 30 minutes of Furmark (high 70's in less than 5 minutes on air). The GPU and CPU have individual loops, each with a 240mm radiator - two fans on the GPU rad and four (push/pull) on the CPU rad.

Yes, it is an expensive hobby, but it isn't without it's practical benefits.

* Reversing the fans so the rads pull air in and the other two 120s exhaust gives me marginally better CPU & GPU temps, but at the expense of a much warmer ambient chassis temperature.

 

Why are your GPU temps so high on liquid? Are your rads sucking in heated case air and dumping it into the room? My 2 x 560's are on just one loop with CPU and hard disk. Highest they will reach at full load is about 38c with the 3 rad fans at 55%.

 

I just benched my SLI setup with Kombuster in SLI mode. Idle GPU temps today are 34 and 33c (it's a warm day).

After 30 minutes there was a 1 degree rise in coolant temps and the GPU temps had increased to 41 & 42c. Fan speed varied between 65 and 100% according to the speedfan profile I created (I sometimes revise my fan speed profile). Noise level was 38 to 39db at a distance of 14 inches from PC.

I currently have 3 fans on the rad sucking in air but I will add another 3 later. Before I fitted the EK VGA blocks on the 560Ti's their full load temps were 80c and rising and the noise level was awful.

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