Hey im planning on cramming a water cooling system into my Lian Li PC-V300B case by getting a 5.25 bay waterpump/reservoir combo. Does it matter what size the radiator is? I understand what the radiator does, but if i just got an 80mm radiator and put it behind one of the 80mm fans on the front of the case would that be plenty of airflow to cool it? Otherwise I might have to buy a dual 80mm and cut another hole for a fan in the side of the case so there is still airflow for the rest of the computer, which I would rather not do because it is a nice case and i would rather not do any mods to it that i cannot undo. Thanks.
the question is what are you cooling. The bigger the radiator the more BTU (measure of heat) it can remove per hour. A BI micro can remove 938 BTU per hour which is 275 watts (if im doing my convertion right) with a 100 CFM 80mm fan. A BI Micro 2 will remove 661 watts with 2 100 CFM fans. BUT do you really want 2 80mm fans at 100CFM? About the fastest 80mm fn you can find is the Sunon PMD1208 which produces 84.1 CFM at 54 BDa. Thats is damn loud. By putting in a bigger radiator you can use fans that move less air and produce less noise. You do not want to sit in a room with two 55 Dba fans which by the way would not be 110 dba it would be 58Dba (crazy **** happens when you add sound levels, yeah logrithmic math) So If you cool just your cpu and are not over clocking it, and it produced 90W then the single 80 radiator with a 60ish CFM fan would be "ok" but not great. If you could fit the double 80mm then you could use two 35-40 CFM fans and have a much more reasonable sound level. Idealy you would want to fit a 120 mm rad in. The 120mm fans move more air with less sound (total Dba and Hz.) but they dont always fit, as may be your case. So. tell us what you want to cool and we can give you a better idea of what you need.
i just want to cool my cpu overclocked quite a bit. my decide to add graphics card block but not for a while.
You'll want at least a 120mm rad. Smaller is just a bad idea for any situation. 2x120mm would add some comfort padding, but would probably be overkill even for a CPU and GPU setup. 80mm is really too small though. Dual 80mm is less than ideal - it'll be less performance than a single 120mm, and produce more noise from fans. But if it's all you can fit, then it's all you can fit.
i could prolly cut a hole in one side of the case and add a 120mm fan, id put the radiator on the inside of the case tho i hate having it stick out on the outside of it. then i would have to take out the hard drive rack, but i guess i could put the hard drives in the floppy drive area.
Actualy a single 120mm Bip radiator will remove 222 FEWER watts (is less heat) then a dual 80mm BI micro. If you use a BiX radiator then Firehed is correct a Black Ice Xtreme will remove 918 watts, these are twice as thick as a Bip. A black ice GT assuming the 20% increase is infact correct (hwlabs does not have the BTU or Watts rating for these listed only that they perform 20% better than BIP) then a 120 mm BIGT will remove 526 Watts which is STILL less than a dual 80mm radiator. Now there are advantages to using a 120mm radiator, the biggest is that they let you use quiter fans to move the same amount of air. But what CPU and how much of an OC and what graphics card is important information for us to know, specifics are important. If we know Exactly what you have then we may be able to tell you... yes this rad or that rad, for your setup. Just saying i want to cool my Oced CPu tells me nothing, i could assume therefore that you are OCing a C2D which would put out a hell of lot less heat then say a P4EE or a A64Clawhammer. Also you need to relise that your pump may not handel a very restrictive set up, What is the head rating of the pump? Your set up may work just fine with a cpu bock (by the way which one are you looking at, specifics again...) but when you add a really restrictive GPU block you may not be moving enough water through your system to really see the benifits of your labor. IN short tell us exactly what you have, how high it is clock (right now on air, or if you want to push it higher on water), what blocks you are looking at and what pump you have. I belive that many people buy the biggest radiator that they can cram in their case when in reality a smaller one would work just as well, BUt then again som people buy smaller radiators when in fact they need one that is much bigger, simpply becasue they did not look ahead and figure out exactly what they had and what they were doing. A good example of some one who took the time is Nexxo his dual opteron system is cooled by a single 120mm radiator, where as others (I wont say names its more of a general opservation) are only cooling their stock CPU and are using double and tripple radiators to do it.
^^^ As said by the man. If you don't know the Wattage of your CPU and graphic card (or whatever else you want to cool) then you deserve to sit in the corner with a dunce's hat. This is the first consideration when you want to watercool, and very easy to find out from the component specs. The second thing, as LVMike says, is to find out the capacity of the radiator. This is usually given as a BTU value. Convert this to Watts by multiplying the value by 0.29. Keep in mind that HWLabs specify the BTU value under the rather hypothetical condition of 100 CFM passing through the rad. In reality, given that a radiator throws up some air resistance, you'd need (very roughly) a 200-ish CFM fan to generate this --as noisy as a helicopter. But you'll want a relatively quiet fan, of course. 120mm fans are much quieter for a given value of CFM than 80mm fans; this is one reason why people tend to go for 120mm size rads rather than 80mm size rads. Relatively quiet 120mm fans tends to be anything around 70 CFM or less (think the low-flow Panaflo). Quiet 80mm fans are more around 25 CFM. Consider that the rad will effectively roughly cut CFM in half, and you are looking at perhaps 35 CFM through the rad using a relatively quiet 120mm Panaflo. This means that the BTU or Watts actually dissipated by the rad will be very roughly a third of what it says on the box. Not looking quite so good now, eh? Calculate the numbers. Margins may be tight. The next consideration is the pump and blocks. Although a decent rad will make the biggest impact, blocks need to be effective also. Don't skimp on the pump because if it fails, your system is buggered no matter how good the other components. Flow is a bit overrated, but the pump does not like to be restricted at the inlet so choice of tube diameter and where/how you connect the reservoir to it is kind of important.
http://www.frozencpu.com/ex-res-94.html?id=IV7Hk2LG http://www.frozencpu.com/ex-res-65.html?id=IV7Hk2LG i was thinking one of those pumps because thats pretty much all that would fit nicely. I dont know what the voltage is going to be because i have not bought the processor i am going to be cooling yet. I'm prolly gunna get a conroe either a 6600 or 6300 on a micro motherboard. and im not sure the video card yet because the card cannot be longer than 7 inches so im not sure what would fit yet. I just want to plaan for more than enough cooling so that i can overclock it.
You may not be able to oc much simply because that case is tight. the conroe runs at 65W, I really dont think you will want to cool your Vid card and overclock the conroe at the same time, your going to be hitting the stop blocks or your radiator. Over clocking is not 1:1 mhz to watts. doubling your clock speed on your conroe wont produce 130W it will produce so high a value that only phase change will cope. (not saying you will try for a 100%OC, but its an example) the increase in watts of heat generated by the CPU per MHz is logrithmic. So look at what other poeple are doing with their C2D's I would still advise aganst cooling your GPU. Even a7900GT will produce more watts then the conre by a good margin. and as they are built on bigger less energy efficent cores the rate of increse of watts:Mhz is much higher than with the proc. easily 2(ln X) or more. (note this means that it will reach its maximum twice as quickly as your CPU, i dont know the exact formula but it, is a more rapid logrithmic growth and thats the key.) Unfortuinitly in your situation you will have to make a trade off between silence and power. If you want to OC your COnroe you may have to negate W/C your GPU, If you want silence you will have to fore go the ocing. Figure out what you want to put into the system before looking at the possibilty of W/C it. right now you are putting the cart well ahead of the horse.
Personaly the pumps are fine they are Lang DDC (not pros or ultras ) but they are top notch for what can be had in for their size in the States. I would save the 200 and just go with the swiftech one. ( damn good warrenty and a fine company) the extra monitoring that the koliance one does you can rig up for much less, I would call frozencpu and see if this ships with the PWM output lang so you can just plug it into a mobo header an monitor pump speed. If it doesnt call Swiftech they may have some that do. Block wise you may want to look at the Apogee 1U blocks, it is very low profile which will help route the tubes in your case.
what if i only wanted to do my cpu with it overclocked and not the gpu? then would that swiftec pump/resivoir, a single 120mm radiator, and the apoggee blocks be a good setup? do u g2 UMR in rolla?
i use to go to the University of Missouri Rolla but im taking a year off. I was an ArchE student and lived in the Quad (good old Holtman and Kelly) Yes that would work but i would sugest that if your going with a single 120, you go with the GT or the xtreme version. Or use a double 180 (which may fit better in your case anyway) Using Nexxos tried and true rule of thumbs, the BIX will remove about 300 watts the BImicro2 about 222Watts and the thiner BIGT will remove about 175 Watts. The apogee 1U blocks are good blocks but most importantly for you in your case they are very low profile. Your case is cramped and its hard to make the tubing route well if there isnt a lot of room over the cpu.
ight cool. what psu would u guys recomment for the watercooling? I've never really spent over 80$ on a psu before but for this i would like to have something that doesnt lose power to the watercooling when it is under a heavy load. The reviews i read for thermaltake toughpowers were pretty good so i might go w/ that. I will prolly buy at least a 600 watt incase i want to add anything to the computer.
Again, no need to go overkill. A quality PSU is important, but not for watercooling. The pump draws no more than few Amps on the 12V line. Your demands will depend on the system you run, but even an SLI'd PC will run comfortably with a quality 500W PSU. Good makes are Tagan, Seasonic and the Rolls-Royce of PSUs: PC Power & Cooling. Antec used to be good but I hear some people complain that their quality is going downhill a bit. Enermax is OK also, but some units seem a bit too over-designed (as opposed to over-engineered) to me. However I have no practical experience with them.
