Blogs Who actually uses water cooling grommets?

What if someone wants to build a WC inside a cheap case and save some $ for better components. I say this because cases for WC doesn't need to have expensive fans and good airflow so you could take any case and build a WC.
What if someone wants to use those two or more grommets for connection of flow-meter to be visible outside a case etc.
I agree it is not a relevant for your job and shouldn't be counted because almost every case has it today so why bother?
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Why shouldn't a case have them? Surely in 95% of scenarios the back of the case will not be visible anyway... plus I never found them particularly ugly.

I am one of those rather bizzarre individuals who did acquire a Zalman Reserator 1 V2 a few years ago (albeit for the princely sum of £15, coolant included!), which is currently plumbed into my heavily overclocked GTX280 via an EK block - the card has never exceeded 55 degrees under load, where it was nudging 100 with its stock cooler. It's also completely silent.

I do own a Dremel, however Antec saved me the hassle of drilling the holes by incorporating a pair of grommets into the P182.

I accept that most hardcore users will probably never find much of a reason to use them but they might have a purpose, even if it is for the more "eccentric" modder!

I know the various Reserators were critically panned, and accept that at retail prices they were dreadful value for money, but does anyone know how well they actually sold?

 

If I was attempting such a thing, probable since I have an airplex 1080 in my parts box, I'd want to use bulhead fittings, for a proper finish.

 

Loving this flameless discussion

Bottom line on the grommets is Murphys Law.
If your case doesn't have them, chances are you have an external wc system and hopefully a
If your case does have them you will either ignore them or find some other ingenious use for them.
For the cost of including them in manufacture Vs the hassle of adding them if you need them, I'd say in general they are a good feature and worth review "points".

I think the whole internal vs external argument is like coke vs pepsi.
I like my case to be nice and clean and open, but my rig in general I like to be big and imposing.
An x2000 and a v1 Reserator achieves that aim nicely...

The Reserator was never meant to be a powerful cooler, it's designed to be quiet and does that perfectly. I upgraded the pump and added a 360 rad and now it IS a powerful cooler, and quiet, and redundant.

Love the Vadim Xiphias Bakes, I agree, filling a case with tech and making it look good is art. Thats why we come to BT.
Never had a leak *touch wood* but maybe working with power for many years has made me a little paranoid.
I bought a Thermaltake Tribe many years ago,cheap, essentially just for the mesh cage to mount a rad in.
And as soon as I saw the "quality" of the wc parts I tossed them all. Still using the cage with a 360 rad in it.

As for the x2000 a rad will fit inside pretty easy, clearance on GPUs is a bit tight, and you need a nice pliable 24pin atx.
But in my case I have 3 par38 size RGB LEDs mounted in that space.
They take up most of the area and block the fans by about 1/3, but it's well worth it.

When it was new I wouldn't dare cut it, but now, 2 years on.
I'm thinking of moving the psu to the bottom and the hdds to the top, adding a 4th 140mm fan at the front and an internal 480rad.
The best part of this case is the hdd racks, the worst is the dual 80mm fans at the bottom rear, should have been a 140.

I love my Reserator Shirty. I knew if I waited they would make a black one, but i couldn't and have the blue. I assume it must have sold well enough to make a v2. I don't think of it as a radiator, more of a res/pump. "Reserpump"? "Pumpvoir"?
It's just a great big RL e-peen!!

 

I agree Creekin - the finish and build quality of the Reserators is astonishing compared to a lot of tech.

I wouldn't have bought one new, but the price I paid for mine would certainly not have bought much better in the way of cooling for a single component.

When I eventually retire it from the main PC I'll stick it next to the telly cooling the HTPC and it can be an interesting conversation piece.

That will require me to break out the Dremel because AFAIK the Fusion doesn't have grommets!

 

I just used mine to get a card reader's short cable through the back because it wouldn't reach to the front. Now i'm in the market for a new card reader but untill then i'm glad i have grommets.

 

I just skimmed the post, but the caption on the picture literally made me laugh.

 

That'd be a no to using the water cooling grommets... I didn't know thats what they were for (not that I've got any water cooling either).

I have used them for cable routing, on things like the fan speed adjuster of an old Zalman flower however.

 

using something for exactly what its designed for is really kind of closed-minded of people. you can use these for many things. sometimes theres external devices that use an internal connection or vice versa (for example, some vfd or lcd screens that use a parallel port or some cheap tv tuners). also, some fans have a little fan control connected to them which you can pull thru the grommets for easy access. you could also do a ghetto e-sata system where you take a long sata data and power cable and push them thru the grommet and easily plug in any sata drive.

as i see it, these grommets are almost entirely useless for their initial purpose, but theres plenty of possibilities otherwise.

 

Performance > Upgrade-ability > Maintenance > Noise >>> Aesthetics

External Radiator/Pump/Reservoir/Bleed Valve = Plug and play upgrades.

Build a fully integrated water-cooled rig is not water-cooling, it's Lego. With pretty pictures.

 

I have no lack of understanding but I'm pretty sure you do. If you did understand you would explain what was wrong with what I said. The fact that haven't suggests you can't, instead you've trying using insults and big words - which is generally the fall back of those who don't really know what they are trying to talk about.

If you did you would be able to tell me what was wrong with my statement. You can't - a decent 120mm fan non-water-cooled heat-sink has similar ability to dissipate heat to a 120mm fan water-cooled radiator. Check the reviews ... there are thousands.

Water cooling is only superior because it's near impossible to stick anything larger then a single 120mm fan heat-sink directly on the cpu. With water cooling the water MOVES that heat in the water to a location where you can place a larger multiple 120mm fan radiator which can obviously dissipate more heat.

 

Au contraire. A higher heat capacity for the medium of energy transfer means that your loop can be used to store heat temporarily. You don't have to dump it straight into the environment like you would with a conventional heatsink.

You might only have the same surface area in your heat exchanger (the radiator), but you have 0.5kg of water (which requires ~3000 times as much energy to increase its temperature as air does per unit mass).

Your PC doesn't dump heat at a constant rate, so the water acts as a buffer to prevent sudden increases in temperature, instead allowing the energy to be transferred into the surroundings at a slower rate.

We can argue about this all day if you want, after all, my time is worthless.

 

It's nice data but it's a way out of a subject. Maybe we could comment what the opening on the back side of the case could be used for?
It could give answer how much review point it worth ...

 

The reason why water cooling temperatures are lower is because the heat generated by the cpu is first heating up the water coolant.

Water has a very high SHC, it means that if you put X joules into water and oil, the water temperature would have a smaller change. This is advantageous because it means that you can transport more heat energy at a lower temperature. Even if the same amount of heat is being removed at the radiator, the temperatures will be lower because the water is cooler throughout the loop.

Furthermore, the heat is moving at the speeds the water's being pushed through the loop, rather than the speeds the heatpipes or copper can manage. This is advantageous also, because it means that each fin in the water cooler has the same cooling potential, less of them go to waste, whilst with a heatsink the top fins are cooler than the bottom ones due to the limitations of heatpipes, which means that some of the top fins are completely useless.

Even if you had unlimited space, and stuck a 1M tall hsf on the top of a cpu (i guess you'd be attaching the cpu to the HSF xD), the cpu would still be cooled worse than a much smaller water cooling rig - purely because the watercooling setup can remove heat faster into the environment whilst you'd have to rely on heat conduction with the hsf - I'd imagine that the top 85CM of the cooler would be at roughly room temperature.

Low temperatures are not entirely dependent on how much heat you can possibly remove, they're much more to do with how fast you can get the heat away from the CPU - that's why massive coolers don't always perform better than coolers with much less surface area. If you want a perfect example, it's why the Thermalright Ultra-120 performs much worse than the Ultra-120 Extreme - whilst they have the same cooling capacity and design the extra heatpipes of the TRUE mean that it cools much better.

 

no its because you can more efficiently dissipate heat with a radiator

in the end with air or water cooling you still have to put the heat into the air (unless you have some more exotic setup ofc) but a radiator generally has more surface area and being able to pump water around it evenly means you dont get hotspots and the like

DbD is pretty much correct

 

Well, had you read the rest of my post you'd realise that I know this. Nevertheless, DbD seemed to assume that the only reason why air coolers are not good is because of size restrictions - this is not the case at all.

In any case, my point still stands, it's why using a really good coolant can change the temperatures dramatically.

 

Come on, everyone knows the first thing EVERYONE does when they find their case has these holes, is just sticking your finger in it and say "yeah, my finger can go through it!". Any other action or thought on what to do with it is secondary!

 

So true! That is actually one of the first things I did when I had unpacked my CM 690 II Advanced
I don't actually use them for anything though. But I am quite happy for them to be there in case I ever do want to use them.

 

Except for those people on this forum who really love their computers....

You knew the conversation was going to go in this direction.

 

Nasty!

Although?..........................................