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Watercooling your PC.


thorne

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I made a few it's not worth it unless you need to overclock the the shit out of you cpu and gpu. All the systems I've made still had fans in them to cool the radiator.These ended up being very big budget projects and i saw very little productive gains just slightly higher benchmark scores. if you want a quiet and cool computer buy an oversized heat sync and put a high quality low rpm fan on it. Then run more quiet case fans as needed. You can still achieve pretty good overclocking ability with a setup like this. Or you can make a oil cooled computer if it needs to be silent.
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Slightly off topic.....Can someone PM me a good how to about overclocking. I understand that it is making a computer work faster then it is rated and I am not sure of anything other then that. I would like to know what it is and how to do it. I just don't know where to start or what sites to trust.
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When I had my rig it was watercooled, overclocked .5ghz on each core ( could have gone 2ghz over on each core but the mobo wasnt manufactured right and overclocked the ram also) and I think it ran 1 degree warmer than stock, so basically 2 degrees over room temperature. Once I'm out of college I'm building another water cooled rig, IMHO its totally worth it.
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Water cooling is only worth it if you are overclocking. Air cooling is perfectly fine for a stock setup.

 

But, if you enjoy projects and doing cool shit, water cooling is certainly a neat project to work on.

 

Seconded. Check out my pics in the other pc thread. If done right, not only is it hella effective, but it looks fucking awesome.

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Its not worth it.

 

Right on. Nowadays it isn't worth it. If your hardware runs hot, it would be cheaper to upgrade to new stuff that runs cooler and faster. If I wanted to watercool my crossfire 4870s, it would have cost about $400 to get all the stuff together, plus adding 15lbs of weight to my case and the risk of water damage.

 

Instead I bought a 6950, and did the bios mod to change it to a 6970. Runs faster, cooler, and uses less energy. No need to watercool it. Same goes for processors. The sandy bridge stuff runs so cool there is just no point. Mine hardly hits over 100* F. on the stock cooler.

 

Now, oil submersion cooling on the otherhand...always worth it if you build a custom enclosure to house it all :)

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300-500 is a perfect budget for an excellent custom WC rig.

 

http://www.dangerden.com to get started. :)

 

If you're going to water cool this is the place to start. Don't fuck around trying to fabricate water blocks. Buy good ones that are pressure tested and will fit correctly.

 

Then it's a matter of coolant, pump storage and heat exchanger.

 

I put together a system a while back that consisted of a 10 gallon fish tank, fish tank pump and a small radiator. You can buy one for a PC or use a transmission cooler. I drilled two holes in the back of my case for inlet and outlet lines. Honestly that was about it. I cooled two systems with that same rig for a couple years. What ever you do make sure you don't use plain water as your coolant (add alcohol or some additive) or you'll end up with snot growing in your water blocks. Heck, you might try running a cheap bottle of vodka as your coolant. It might work well.

 

If you want a prefab unit check out http://www.koolance.com/ They have some nice boxes that incorporate the pump, storage and heat exchanger. Both internal and external systems.

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