Thread: Water Cooling

I am interested in trying water cooling as well at some point; for now my nearly 5ghz on air is awesome enough.

Oh! am I bragging again?

Honestly, looking at the number of fans heavy has in his case, I am okay with my air cooling (no offense, if I had the dough, I would likely also have liquid). But it seems like the number of fans are roughly the same and I am achieving very high speeds without liquid cooling using rather inexpensive equipment. 3x120mm are AC cooling Hydro-bearings with PWM , a 92mm of the same make and spec and a Zalman CNP9500 for the CPU plus a big 200mm NZXT (stuck with it because it is a strange size for this case). I am actually running all my fans at 20% power. 4.8ghz at 1.35volts. It is plenty quiet, even when gaming. So... water cooling may not be all it is cracked up to be considering the cost. My friend is running an AMD system with ATI cards and it is a very different story; his ambient temps are significantly higher even with 80% power to an array of very good fans (anecdotal, yes, but I have heard similar of AMD systems and thermal bleed).

Not to be trolling, but I am very surprised at my power and sound level when compared to these elaborate water cooling systems.

I think what Soy said has plenty of merit. There are a lot of air cooling solutions that do pretty well up to the 4.5 GHz mark and beyond in some cases. While I do think that water is more effective at cooling a CPU, it may not necessarily be more efficient. In most cases, Soy is correct about the cost of air vs. liquid.

Where it gets challenging is when you throw a GPU or two into your loop. This likely means you need a bigger radiator, or more (powerful and quantity) fans. But..water cooling a GPU is like magic. For whatever reason, GPUs love water. I was able to overclock my two GTX 570s from 732 MHz to 950 MHz. That is almost 30% more performance... for free! Believe it or not, this made a HUGE difference with gaming performance when running the more demanding games.

Let's add that the GPUs with the 30% overclock were actually cooler under load than the stock clocks. I don't think I would have been able to come close to keeping acceptable temps with my CPU overclocked at 4.7 GHz and the GPU clocks I was achieving.

Originally Posted by HeavyG

I think what Soy said has plenty of merit. There are a lot of air cooling solutions that do pretty well up to the 4.5 GHz mark and beyond in some cases. While I do think that water is more effective at cooling a CPU, it may not necessarily be more efficient. In most cases, Soy is correct about the cost of air vs. liquid.

Where it gets challenging is when you throw a GPU or two into your loop. This likely means you need a bigger radiator, or more (powerful and quantity) fans. But..water cooling a GPU is like magic. For whatever reason, GPUs love water. I was able to overclock my two GTX 570s from 732 MHz to 950 MHz. That is almost 30% more performance... for free! Believe it or not, this made a HUGE difference with gaming performance when running the more demanding games.

Let's add that the GPUs with the 30% overclock were actually cooler under load than the stock clocks. I don't think I would have been able to come close to keeping acceptable temps with my CPU overclocked at 4.7 GHz and the GPU clocks I was achieving.

I will say I have trouble OCing my GPUs even 5%, hence a 690 is in my future...

Originally Posted by SoySoldier

I will say I have trouble OCing my GPUs even 5%, hence a 690 is in my future...

And that is regardless of the CPU being OC'd or not... it makes me think it is actually one of the cards (I have not tried OCing one only) having an issue. Research show me thathe 560ti's can typically OC much harder than I tried to do to my set. And in fact they are not thermaling, my system just becomes unstable if I OC them at all... but they never crack 78C.. My CPu never breaks 66C.

Before I babble more I will try to OC the cards in single GPU mode to rule it out.. but my ambient temperatures are quite low...

Hmmm... Well I have a while to think about it. Sending my existing mobo in due to it all of the sudden not posting (have tried numerous vid cards and RAM sticks, but looks to be a memory parity error). Almost exactly 2 years and 11 months on my 3 year warranty, so might as well replace instead of upgrading.

Good points all around though. I might look at getting a portable AC unit for the entire upstairs actually.

Thanks for the tips all.

Remeber your only using distilled water, so you don't have to always use SUPER DUPPER COMPANY COOLER WET STUFF.

Also, I recommend a reservoir. My Cooler Master unit has only a screw hole at the top of the radiator block for filling and emptying. It sucks.

If you do use a colored water, keep an eye on it after about 3 months. If it looks like the cool has changed, changed the water. I let mine go for about 8 months. I didn't have bubbles in the system, but I had sludge paticals build up. And again, with only that small fill hole, it was not fun.