Water Cooling

[Woodlouse2002]

Having built my monster PC at the beginning of the year, and having listened to the monster electric blue fan ever since I'm now looking at watercooling to completely silence the whole shabang.

So, what I want to know is:

What aside from the processor and GPU are major sources of heat in a pc?

Is it possible to remove the fan from the GPU and watercool that as well?

And what do HDD's need by way of cooling?

[Mushroom_Farmer]

I wouldn't rely on water cooling alone. What if the circulator craps out?  Besides, a good fan system will remove residual heat that a liquid system can't reach.  

Definately, the HDD needs airflow over it. Todays HDDs with their higher volume and speed should not be without cooling.

[Woodlouse2002]

[quote] I wouldn't rely on water cooling alone. What if the circulator craps out?

[Brett_Henderson]

I thought about designing a pumpless/fanless cooling system... But it would have to be a ridiculously big, expensive and bulky set up. I suppose if you dump $4000.00 into a system and quiet, dependable cooling is important.. it might be worth it..

Simply;  It would have to be off by  itself, in a special case that would allow all heat-producing components to be at the bottom of a HIGH volume, convection driven, fluid system. Take just the CPU for example:





There would have to be enough fluid at the CPU to keep the temperature to a certain point.. and enough volume in the main tank for the fluid to completely dissipate the heat, as the fluid flow would be relatively slow. It's a simple convection pump where the CPU is the heat source. I'd imagine it would all need to be in a file-cabinet sized case, in the corner of the room with monitor and key-board, mouse and optical drives at the desk. There's no doubt it would work.. It's just a matter of size and space. Like I said.. If you spend $4,000.00 (or more) on a computer and need quiet, dependable cooling.. it might not be a bad idea...

[NicksFXHouse]

1. Post a complete list of part in your system. A photo of the tower with the side off would also help.

2. Water cooling is not as cost effective as it once was. This is especially true if you are after noise reduction. Proper aerodynamic design of the tower system/component spec can obtain nearly silent operation with high stable overclocks.

3. If the plan is to seriously overclock, a good liquid system is going to cost you 400-500+. Is 400-500+ dollars worth an extra 10% of CPU past what air cooling can do? I think not... and in order to do high clocks, you still need to crank up the radiator fans so where is the noise reduction? (in the toilet) You only gain 3-5% more processor for every 10c drop in temp so unless your planning on running a chiller on that (another major expense with condensation issues) you will not see any superior overclocking ability over a standard liquid system.

3. Ambient air temps are a major factor to cooling. If the area your tower sits in is 76c+, you will need to hear fans, water cooling or not, how loud those fans are depends on the type of fans and heat sinks you select for your tower components

4. HDD cooling is not needed unless your tower is packed with hard drives, the tower is too small for the number of drives you are running, you do not have space between the drives and/or the airflow in the tower is poor. The only other reason for HDD cooling is running multiple SCSI or high RPM units in RAID.

5. Water cooling or not, the PSU is going to make noise unless you bought one with good current headroom and one that has a thermal controlled fan. It should be spec

[ripping]

Definately, the HDD needs airflow over it. Todays HDDs with their higher volume and speed should not be without cooling.

I'd probably disagree with this.  HDD are not really much faster than they were a few years ago.. and you'd like to think the (thermal) efficiency is improved.
Many people run HDD's in external enclosures with essentially no active cooling these days.  I've had a few like that for well over a year, that run near continuously..
they run reliably.. a little warm yes, but not enough to worry over.

[ctjoyce]

I'm just going to throw my little $0.02 in here. And while Nick has covered well as to why watercooling isn't all that great anymore, I'm going to agree. My Zalman CNPS-9500 cools just as good as 90% of the watercooling setups I have pitted it against. Infact it cools better than the last 10%. About two years ago I would have shelled out the $400 for a DD or Swiftech system, but now I'm quite happy with the $65 I spent on the Zalman that sits atop my Prescott now.

There are only two reasons that I am considering watercooling for my next rig.

1: It look u3br 1337. And being the gamer that I am. Anything to make my rig look better, I'll do.

2: Currently I can't get the cooling that I need on my northbridge. So by doing watercooling, I could throw a north bridge cooler into the loop. However I'm planning to go with a NF5 board, so I don't even know how practical thats going to be.

So when it comes down to it, Aircooling is the real way to go. Unless you are like Nick

Cheers
Cameron