Hey all

Its soon will be time for me to assemble my next super home PC Game/Workstation.

Back in the day it was all about the airflow and getting the air round to cool things off. Now that we are running at much faster speeds and generating a lot more heat I was wondering about Water Cooling.

Firstly, Is it really necessary? Will running a few intense games on a 3.2> Intel Duo + High End Nvidia Card (8800) really need Water or would Air be sufficient?

Is it dangerous? I'm not to comfortable having water flowing with my expensive electronic componets. Has there been cases of leaks or punctures or moisture causing breakdowns and component damage, is it possible at all?

What kind of sound does it make?

Is it more or less expensive then Air Cooling and if its more is it worth it?

How does it work exactly, I have had a read and looked at some diagrams and I gather that there are pipes which carry water in close proximity to hardware but I'm still not entirely sure.

What components benefit from the water cooling the most?

Thanks for your help

In a nutshell it kinda works like car cooling, cold water flows around the hot components and absorbs the heat, the water is cooled outside the pc before starting the cycle again.

It doesn't really make any noise hence the advent cos fans weren't the quietest.

I wouldn't bother myself, good fans and case design nagate the need for such extremes.

Liam

watercooling is really for tight installs or more primarily for big overclocking systems.

This is something I may contemplate when I come to my next build, although not looked further into it than that, lol.

Trancendental said:

Back in the day it was all about the airflow and getting the air round to cool things off. Now that we are running at much faster speeds and generating a lot more heat I was wondering about Water Cooling.

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air cooling back in the day? no no no. watercooling.






Dangerden Maze 2-1 block, eheim 1250 pond pump, copper pipework and a heater matrix from a mini.. now that's back in the day cooling. Allowed for silly things like

2v up a duron, and 100% stable silent overclock to 1.054ghz


or 2.35v up the same chip for a little more power:


or 2.3v up a t-bird 1.4 to 100% stable, (not so silent, it needed fans to be switched on on the heater matrix)



Watercooling is pretty simple. You have a water block, which is a copper block with channels milled into it. Water enters the channels at one end, flows through them taking heat from the copper as it does and then it leaves out the other end. From there it goes to the pump, and then to a radiator. Some systems will run a resivour as well - and a submerged pump. Pumps add heat to the water, hence passing it through the radiator before it reaches the water block.

Are you planning to overclock this system, if not then imo it's not worth building/buying a watercooling system unless you have are wanting to setup a system that runs very quiet. For example, Bladerunner's zero fan setup: http://www.dwpg.com/content.php?contid=3&artid=57 thats from 2001, but you get the idea. his current site is here: http://zfz.com/projects.asp

As i'm sure you know, heater matrix's work better at higher temperatures. Can take advtange of that, and can cool PC parts to below ambient temperature using Thermo Electric Couplings, or TECs for short (or plebs will call them Peltiers, but they're not - they just create a Peltier effect).

A TEC is an electronic heat pump. You feed it power (lots) and it will transfer heat from one side to another. They are generally around 10mm thick and around the size of a CPU. One side is the hot plate, and the other is the cold. You sandwhich the TEC between the bottom of the waterblock and the CPU, with the cold plate pointing toward the CPU. It's a very good to not place the TEC directly on the CPU, but have a solid copper plate around 10mm thick first. This nicely spreads the cooling effect. So when its working the CPU dumps heat into the copper plate, which is then cooled by the TEC, which is then cooled by the waterblock, which is then cooled by the radiator.

Without a TEC you cannot cool below ambient temperature on watercooling system. But using one, you can cool it down to below 0.

For extreme cooling, there is always the vapochill systems. phoenix has one of them, it uses a fridge compressor basically. You power the system on, and it cools the CPU to around -50c before it powers the PC part up.

sooooo erm, yeah. there's a bit of info. been a while since i looked at any of this.

oh yeah, my system isnt watercooled anymore because around 4 years ago i moved it and caught a pipe on the desk, and it leaked. However, only the motherboard died (it dripped onto the USB ports, windows had a fun time trying to install some mystery USB device, the water), the GFX card had a puddle on it - but was coated with a conformal spray to waterproof it. I wouldn't worry about leaks tbh.

Trancendental said:

Firstly, Is it really necessary? Will running a few intense games on a 3.2> Intel Duo + High End Nvidia Card (8800) really need Water or would Air be sufficient?

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imo you'll never have heat issues with that spec running new games in a case with half decent ventilation, and if you do have heat problems its almost always the gfx card that suffers first, and you can easily fix that by adding better cooling to the gfx card, such as artic coolers. realistically nothing will have any heat problems unless the case does not have adequate ventilation.

i've damaged a few cards by overclocking them until they overheated, even with an artic cooler fitted. so now i just buy a better card to start off with, leave it set at standard clock speeds, and i can play my games no bother even at high resolutions with anisotropic filtering and trilinear filtering and pretty much all options set as high as they'll go. with a geforce8800 you'll be fine, and heat wont be an issue, but if it ever is an artic cooler should fix that. rather than spending money on water cooling i'd just get a better gfx card.

You can get the heat pipe type heat sinks that are a combination of liquid and air

my AMD xp3200 used to run very very hot 80 to 90 degrees was normal

fitted an AMD heat pipe with big fan, lapped the processor blob of Arctic Silver and now even after hours of 100% cpu usage it sits at about 40 degrees

anly problem is that it is huge

My cousins Alienware case left him with alot of room, and a very very hot processor, he basically NEEDED water colling, as the space was perfect for it and its completely silent. Also, with UV reactive fluid, it looks awesome - glad he tried it first!



Jordan

Water cooling isn't really necessary with the core 2 duo chips, they run a lot cooler than the old arcitechture. Just a decent air cooler is enough. My conroe is running at 3.2ghz and it runs 35C idle, 55C load. Water cooling is still good though, particularly for hungry gfx cards like the 8800GTX. And of course, they are really silent which is I guess the main reason.

How about phase! Just kidding.

Im sorry but ive been PC teccie builder for many many years now and i tell any one who asks for water cooling to go some where else.

Im sorry but just check out some of the stuff, Cheep stuff leaks yer thats really cleaver !! Other stuff just sucks, Come on plumers our still working on trying to get none leak pipes to do just that, You telling me the computer world has done that first time round, Im sorry but ive had to do repairs to a hell of a lot of computers that have had home water cooling or even internet units fitted in there machines, Over tighting of the clips normaly dont help they come lose again after awhile and ooooh **** you got a leak, Remember its takes one drop on your mainboard graphics card any thing else in there and ya f**ked really aint you,

Why bother with water, My last gaming rig had 4 120mm silent fans and a cooled silent tech CPU fan on it and never ever went above 16 on the temp reading, Even the CPU never hit its normal of 40 which is what there suppose to run at with standard fans, That normaly got to about 22 to 30 depending how hard your pushing it, 30 was at the max in the middle of the hotest day of the year, Now im sorry but why do you or why would you want it any cooler then that.

There a company out there that do ice cooled towers and all they use is fans and there case comes completly rigged up with every thing you need, PSU is at front of the case with 2 inverted fans blowing and PSU temp right out the top of the computer keeping it away from any of the mainboard area, Hard driver coolers pre fitted and ive seen these in use and there good very very good much better then water.

Water unsafe
Fans replaceable when broken.

like i said, mine was watercooled so i could overclock it and still run a quiet system.

if the temp on ur rig never went over 16c, then you must live in a cold house - because you aint going to cool below ambient using fans..

water is safe to use, as long as you ain't stupid with it.

arc said:

As i'm sure you know, heater matrix's work better at higher temperatures. Can take advtange of that, and can cool PC parts to below ambient temperature using Thermo Electric Couplings, or TECs for short (or plebs will call them Peltiers, but they're not - they just create a Peltier effect).

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Eh What do you mean the work better at higher temperatures?

They work better at a greater temperature differential - eg: dT = 40 deg C as opposed to dT= 20 deg C

Heat Exchangers are governed by Q = (m-dot) * cp * dT, and the thermal resistance of the surrounding fluids and solids.

Q is heat transferred , also equal to qA (heat transferred / unit area * total area)
cp is a heat capacity constant thats specific to a material,
m-dot is mass flow / second
dT is temperature difference.

So max heat transferred is most capable material, largest possible flow and biggest temperature difference...

FYI...Im still looking at how Im gonna reverse engineer that system of yours into my box!! Taking forever as I have other stuff to do....

If you want a nice quiet system which is fairly easy to maintain then why not chuck your system into a nice plastic tub. Seal off the processor with some rubber sealant. Remove the processor and graphics card fans and fill the whole lot up with some engine oil (fresh!).

Oil doesn't conduct electricity and a couple of litres (say five for a half decent sized tub) will have a pretty big specific heat capacity. With the top of the tub open the oil will stay reasonably cool. A pump to keep it circulating might be a good idea, as would keeping the disk drives outside the tub!

Stick a couple of LEDs under the oil for cool lightshow effects!

Or just buy a decent case, processor and graphics card heatsink/fan. BTX cases have good cooling characteristics for example.

you want mineral oil for doing that, not engine oil.. i've seen it done. and you can't leave it open, as the dust falling into it would add impurties, make it conductive and frazzle the lot.

Tom - stop being picky, you knew what i meant. If the coolant going through the matrix is of a higher temp (and ambient has remained constant) so temperature difference would be higher.

(and that setup you have is gex's old setup, not mine.. mine used 1/2" tube, and an eheim1250 pump )

lol - i feel chuffed that jordan posted a pic of my PC :slayer:

now consider this: converting from air to watercooling just cost me £80 AND IT WORKS VERY WELL!

ok, i had to mod the case extensively, and its not exactly easy to set up, but if you do it right, you will NEVER want to go back to the noise that air cooling makes.

arc said:

you want mineral oil for doing that, not engine oil.. i've seen it done. and you can't leave it open, as the dust falling into it would add impurties, make it conductive and frazzle the lot.

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Engine oil is mineral oil.

Perhaps you mean vegetable oil.

Oh and if you seal it then the oil just gets hot if you leave the system on for a bit.

If your keen on overclocking my old companies German arm used to use Asetek VapoChill chassis to run P4s up to 4GHz still with full warranty. The German workstation pm was dead keen on them.

Pricey mind.

i know about vapochill units, theres one broken sat at my mates house. around £500 i think. they only cool the CPU though.

engine oil has lots of aditives, and aint pure mineral oil.. anyway though is silly.

As stated in last post, Im sure you will be doing some repairs in there at some point, All it takes is one drop of that water to leak out and every thing leaks at some point.

Im sorry but i will stick to my ice cool fan systems which may i add is silent case so you hear nowt coming from it what so ever. And the silent strips cost pennies and work extremly well to reduce noise,

But its every one to there own i suppose lol...

I might try it one day but i dont want my computer to end up in the graveyard of computers that our water damaged from miss fitted kits or cheep ebay ones. But i suppose long as its closed unit and fitted correcly then whats the harm.....