Cooling Anyone using water cooled PSU?

If so, which one and how is it working? Does it add much heat to the loop?

Does it require a lot of ventilation as well or is the water cooling enough for it?

 

why not get a fanless one?

 

Show me a +500W fanless one...

 

Just take the fan out and watch it melt. Lol it will add some heat but you are better off just using a fanned PSU.

 

i would say that water cooling a PSU is just a novelty and your better off with a nice fanned PSU.

 

There are a few ~450W watercooling PSU's around europeon e-tailers but your best bet would be a good quite fanned psu

 

If it's silence that you want to achieve by water cooling, you'd be better off getting a fanned Seasonic S12 500W PSU. They're some of the quietest and most stable units around.

 

If anything replace the fan with a Scythe fan your breathing louder than it does.

 

The water cooled PSUs that are out are kind of dodgy, underpowered and dont work real well. Plus that is a LOT of heat to dump into a loop. If you wnat silence your better of getting a passivly cooled PSU that uses a huge heat sink that extends out side of your computer.

 

or just do that since itll be as quiet.

 

I've got an Antec 550w that's dead silent, and that's from before they switched to the 120mm fans. When the room temp is reasonable (ie, not the insane heat we've had the last week or so), the entire machine is absolutely inaudible, and I've got it rigged up such that the only fan that's not temp-controlled by my parameters is the PSU fan (others spin along at usually 600-800RPM).

Watercooled PSU is really a novelty imo, and you can certainly get superbly quiet units for far less.

 

I've come across this statement on other forums where I've made the same inquiry... I find it odd... let's face it, water cooling anything in your PC is really a novelty. No one NEEDS to water cool anything. You could say that water cooling your GPU is a novelty... it's certainly a lot cheaper to keep the stock air cooling on it and you aren't necessarly going to gain any additional overclock from water cooling it (possible but not a given).

Even so-called silent or hybrid PSU's are not completely silent under load... that's not possible. If you can't hear your PSU under load, it's probably because your PC is not all that silent. Having said that, water cooling is not completely silent anyway, fans are required. However, it only seems logical that if you can use two low speed fans to cool everything in your case, why not do that? Why have extra fans you could eliminate?

The heat dump from an 80% efficient PSU under load is no more than a typical hot piece of silicon. Many people don't think twice about cooling a second graphics card... the added heat dump from that isn't given a second thought. Why be so concerned about a PSU's heat dump then... especially if you are only running a single graphics card? I'm sure the cooling system I've designed can handle it so why not add it to the loop?

From a cost perspective, a water cooled PSU is only about $100 more than a good "quiet" PSU which is rather trivial when building a multi thousand dollar gaming rig.

Most of these arguments I'm seeing here against a water cooled PSU seem to lack much substance... I don't get why water cooling enthusiasts are so averse to this.

 

Well I'm all for Watercooling I've just come off phasechange and will be jumping back on the watercooling wagon next week, The only thing I can is that is you are going to be cooling your PSU, along with CPU, GFX and Maybe some hardrives or chipsets ? Then you should be looking at a triple or dual 120mm raditor, I'm going to be using a triple rad which will be cooling my CPU (@ 2.85/1.65v, which will put out 180W of heat load), my heavily overclocked X1800XT (also with a high voltage (1.575v which will put out some major heat too) and my NF4 chipset which gets pretty toasty. Some poelple say a triple raditor is overkill but all depends on how much you are cooling and wahat kind heat load it's going to be putting out. So if you cooling a PSU (or two) your goign to have get rid off all that excess heat so a triple raditor would seem aproprate.

So if you really want to go watercooling crazy and make your rig nice and silent then by all means go for a watercooled PSU but If was you I'd stick with a nice tagan/Seasonic PSU. Also i'd like to add that your average watercooled PSU is only about 450W, this is on the borderline for most decent rigs but if your going to be running a hi-power card (eg X1900XTX) and overclocking your CPU that 450W psu probably can't handle the load, so now you can either buy a second watercooled PSU (like franklin did with his Alumanix project) or go for a Seasonic/Tagan 500W+ PSU, finally if your going to be gaming etc your boud to have the sound on so you will not even hear a fanned PSU on load and as for idle, they are extremely slient

 

I beg to differ... My Antec Phantom 500 is quiet enough that it's inaudible even against ambient noise. My radiator draws air over it, so the internal fan never comes on, and the electronics don't buzz or hiss. My TFTs are louder than my PSU, and as soon as I re-mount my pumps, they'll be louder than my whole computer.

 

Not if it leaks. I've never had a leak *touch wood*, but if the main system leaks, you kill the system at worst. Your watercooled PSU leaks, and you could very well burn your house down. Not so trivial anymore.

Technically a watercooled isn't 100% silent either. The water moving in the pipes generates some amount of noise, even if it's absolutely inaudible. But I can't hear my PC at all in a perfectly silent room, and I'm extremely sensitive. Thus I can safely assume that the noise output of my PSU is just as trivial as the noise generated by water moving in the tubing.

It seems like you're just trying to convince yourself that it's a good idea. If you want to, then by all means. They're reasonably safe, albeit not as safe as an aircooled, but offer no real advantage. Most cases are designed to take advantage of PSU airflow, which doesn't happen if your PSU is watercooled. If everything else is, that hardly matters, but you're still adding heat from an already silent source into your loop when it otherwise would have gone straight out the back of your case.

Unlike watercooling your silicon, there's no gain from watercooling a PSU. You can't overclock it, and if the fan is already trivially silent, then you're just spending extra money to decrease your overclock. I watercool for a combination of silence and overclocking, and watercooling my PSU would grant me neither. But in the end, its your decision.

 

If PSUs designed for water-cooling are sub-standard, then it seems there is a definite downside, compared to no upside. Unless you were wanting to water-cool a standard PSU, which isn't possible, as far as I know.

 

It is, but even if you've got a leak-free solution, it's still quite dangerous. Not even something to consider unless you've got a good knowledge of how not to electrocute yourself when working with high-powered electronics that contain big caps.

 

Watercooling a Phantom wouldn't be too hard... Just clip off some of the fins on top (router?), and bolt a hard drive waterblock to that. No need to open the PSU up, but you'll still void your warranty.

 

I would agree if this could be proven to be true. Unfortunately, there are no reviews of water cooled PSU's upon which to base an opinion.

I'm considering the SilentMaxx PSU sold by Alphacool...

http://www.alphacool.de/xt/product_...axx-alphacool-edition-watercooled-psu-50.html