No, I am Prime stable ( at least for the 12 hours I tested), but the RAM is noticably warm, verging on toasty. I have pulled out two of the 4 sticks and so far the area seems considerably cooler. My point, poorly phrased as it might have been, was simply that the move to water will have consequences for components not in the loop that previously benefitted from fans nearby. *Thanks, biff. *@Coolermeister...had I not squandered all my money on parts, I could afford a better camera. I'll try to do better pics in the future.
hope you don't mind but i just brightened up that image a little. The 120mm out take fan looks like it would be fighting with the PSU fans.....and no fan directly on the Rad??? No through air at all in the bottom section of the case plus it looks like sound deadening foam which will not only insulate sound but also heat and is maybe why it's getting a little toasty in there. Just an observation
Actually, the 120 on the back is blowing in. Above the radiator is a Nidec Beta 120x38mm 3-bladed fan, pulling through and out the roof. As yet, there are no fans or intake grills open in the bottom section of the case. Until I finalize the waterloop I am loathe to make any other changes/revisions to the cooling.
I agree... BUT. In this case those sticks are slammed pretty close together and all that I've read says that the heatspreaders that manufacturers put on their ram is primarily for physical protection and looks (that bling factor again). Also I've read that OEM spreaders actually insulate the chips more than they sink the heat, which seems like a realistic statement to me when I look at the thickness of that frag tape. Add that to the fact that the ram is installed in such a way the the spreaders are pretty much touching so air flow is all but impossible and you have double insulated ram chips.... its not going to take a whole lot to get them real toasty. IMHO the best thing would be to take all the spreaders off which would let those poor little chips breathe, and after that a fan will most likely not be neccesary. If it is indeed hot ram thats causing instability.
You bring up a good point about the heatspreaders. Poorly appied ones are nothing but an insulator. That with the sound padding may cause some problems in a really low airflow environment. I didn't notice the sound padding in the darker picture...Good catch.
I'd drop the radiator to a vertical position in the bottom front behind a nice, big intake grille, have the fan behind it sucking air in, and the rear 120mm fan on top sucking air out. That would also provide some airflow to your RAM which would obviate the need for booster fans:
Thinking of going water myself, but never really read anyhting about it, was thinking of buying a full kit all there and just going for it, trial & error sorta thing. Is it easy to get up and running?
Food for thought, definitely. I am currently exploring the possibility of having Danger Den update my NV-68 Plexi cover with tapped holes ala the SLI versions. Should this happen, I have a plan which adheres to the spirit (if not the precise details) of your suggestion. Obviously, major revisions like this become more difficult to do without leaving a trail of unexplainable/useless 120mm holes all over the panels. In this case, I can logically relocate the HDDs into the upper bay area and devote the roof fan to them. The TJ-06 already has a front 120mm intake, so that is no problem. Thanks for the input. I admire your rendering abilities BTW. I have none myself, relying on mental conceptualization mostly.
FWIW I'm running pretty much the exact same setup Nexxo is suggesting and it works quite well for me. Well I wouldnt say its easy but it's certainly not an impossible challenge. Just be thoughtful of your layout and be meticulous about your assembly. A drop of leaked coolant could cause a lot of problems. I don't know what kit you're thinking on getting but I think you'd be far better off piecing together your own setup, you'll almost certainly get a better performing system and maybe save some coin along the way. Before you buy anything, do your homework and ask a lot of questions.... thats what we're here for.
If you go SLI, then you can simply change the BIX for a BIX2. Actually that was just a freehand drawing in Paint. My CAD/CAM skills are pretty rudimentary, which is a pain since I am trying to design this bespoke aluminium CNC'd/lasercut WC case for my next project... Metaversa, too, was entirely done in my head with only a few cardboard mock-ups for the brackets.
It's not that I'm going SLI, rather, the added flexibility the extra intake/outflow options will provide is very attractive. In my case, intake will remain from the bottom and the outflow will be able to go up, which should aid air removal considerably. Thanks again.
Very interesting topic. Even more interesting for somebody like me that isn't into watercooling and never experienced it. Some points of view about watercooling that I would like to share, and discuss of course. - better cooling. - harder to install and maintain. - more expensive. - more silent. - needs lots of parts. - needs more room. - not good for "moving" PCs. - more risks. Now what I really think. I think that there are a lot of good heatsinks that can work really good with a couple of fans and a little of "cooling & silent engineering". It's easy to install a heatsink, and once it's installed, it will sure work, and you don't have to worry about anything else. I think that you can have an uber silent PC if you take some time to do it so. As the old days, when people used baybuses and stuff like that... "why having a fan at 12V when you don't need that much cooling?", now what I say is "why having such a high FSB or multi when you're just surfing the web?" There are programs that let you adjust the FSB and multi depending on the load, or you can even reboot and lower/rise it, even more when people claim that their systems boot as fast as a Concorde (RIP).
Skylined, I'm not sure what your point is. None of the bullets under "watercooling" are necessarily true. For many folks ( a higher percentage here than normal, I would guess), PC hardware is very appealing and there are many examples of extreme air-cooling ( for either silence or performance, sometimes both) that rival any H2O rig in complexity and effort. In essence, we treat computers the same way that others do their cars. Personally, I enjoy screwing around with my computer as much as I do playing on it, so I follow the hardware. If a new, interesting heatsink comes out I wouldn't hesitate to strip out the waterloop and see what it could do. If the sink performed slightly worse but looked much more interesting, I might keep it in. And so on.... None of us actually need to do this, we just wanna, so if you want to watercool that's good enough reason for me. As to whether one can go back after tasting watercooling, I'm not married to any single approach so I have no qualms about switch-hitting.
I guess Skylined is trying to get a balanced pros & cons list together for himself (I would disagree with the "needs more room" though), and thinking that a combination of aircooling and dynamic hardware throttling can work just as well. This is of course true. There are many paths to high-performance-but-silent-computing nirvana (some people for instance simply buy a Mac...). Each has its own merits, and each can provide an opportunity for a modder to show his/her l33t skillz. I've seen some awesome aircooled systems out there --with home-made polished heatsinks. Hmmm... tasty! In the end, art is not in the medium, but what you do with it.
I have a dual CPU watercooled setup in a mid-tower. And I have space left. It is all about how well you design it. And, clocker makes a very valid point. Having unobstructed airways takes up space too.
clocker - are those Mushkin Redlines? those actually REQUIRE active cooling, you can stick a fan in your case just for those sticks. nice setup, i love the PolarFlo D4 and chrome BIX. Nexxo - what kind of pump is that? an Iwaki? really sweet setup as well. how much did you pay for your fluid. i read that the 3M FC-77 is really expensive and Flourinet weights 1.5x's more than regular water.
The pump is a 12V Davies-Craig EBP. Orignially an electric coolant pump for cars, it has similar performance and lifespan as the Swiftech MCP600. My coolant is PF-5080 (a slightly uprated version of FC-77), is 1.78 times heavier than water and cost me about £70,-- for 1kg = 560ml, bought from Armari. The have some supply issues so they do not currently stock it, but plan to do so again in the future.
