would a watercooling setup with a single 120mm fan rad be, compared to air cooling, if i use all good quality parts? I want to have a go at watercooling, but i don't have room in my case for a bigger rad... do you think i would get enough benefit for it to be worth the money and effort?
I have that setup, running the fan at 7v and it's still a lot cooler than air. It's an asetek kit, with a single 120mm rad, and waterblocks on the CPU northbridge and GFX card. Temps are half of what they were on air, and there's less noise. What CPU are you using? (the above system's an XP3000)
I have a dual Opteron 250 and a Radeon 9800Pro running on a single BIX with a quiet low-flow Panaflo fan. CPU temps peak at 45-49C maximum on a warm day. Also read: What To Expect From Watercooling by Coolmiester.
It's an AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ with one 7800GT Current temps are usually below 30C on air, but I'm not sure how accurate the onboard thermometer is!
Easy. Dual Opteron is 2 x 85W, plus Radeon 50W is a total of 220W. An AMD Athlon64 X2 is 110W, plus 7800GT is about 70W, total 180W. Should work fine. And below 30C on air? I don't think so...
To be fair, the case i'm using at the moment does have about 5 120mm fans on full power, but it does still seem a bit extreme! The thing is, i've tried with several motherboards and they all say the same temps...
What i'm really after is similar performance without having to soundproof my entire room to stop the neighbours complaining about the fan noise
Then a single 120mm rad should be fine. I use a pair of 120mm rads with very quiet fans on a similar setup and get great performance, and only use two rads because it's easier to have some degree of redundancy. I don't even monitor temps anymore just because I have no reason to ever worry about them.
No idea whether the FX xhips run hot, but I find that even with a triple BIX and 3x 120mm fans, the idle temps, while lower than air, are not astounding... I idle at around 38 degrees when the rooms at around 28 degrees (it is overclocked to 3.1GHz tho)... what I DO find is I have much better delta.. meaning the change from idle to fully loaded is often around, or less than 10 degrees unless I properly cane it with a prime95 test and try doing stuff at the same time. Another good thing is how FAST it drops when the load drops.. it's almost instant... 48 degrees being hammered.. stop the app in question and BANG!.. 38 degrees. Gotta love that. I never got that on air.
As you increase the rads you get diminishing returns. An FX generates 110 Watts. Even a single BIX can handle that comfortably. You're having such high load temps because you are overclocking it pretty far.
Or he has poor contact with the core. My presshot idles in the 33range and loads in the low 40's. And im using a single 120mm fan and a small heatercore. A triple rad should give him better temps than that. My chip fully overclocked gives off roughly 150w of heat. Sounds like a bad mount.
That was my initial thoughts, but the block is nicely lapped, and there's a very even spread of arctic silver ceramic over the whole ship surface... it's unlikely that's the reason. It is overclocked, so that will raise temps, but even at stock speeds it wasn't as low as I thought it would be... however, I'm not that bothered, because what I do like about it, is how little it changes between idle and load, and how fast it drops when load is eased.. and after all... 36 degrees at idle @ 3.1Ghz is non too shabby.
