To watercool or not w/o OCing?

[Jarim23]

Hello. I will be building a new PC towards the end of march and I have a couple of questions regarding watercooling. First, the important specs:

Case: Cooler Master ATC-201B-SX2
PSU: Antec 430 Watt TruePower
CPU: Intel Pentium 4-3.06 GHz
Motherboard: ASUS P4G8X Deluxe or Abit SI7 (hopefully)
Memory: 1 GB MB Corsair DDR 400 or 1 GB 1200MHz RDRAM
Hard Drive: Seagate 80GB, SATA, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache (X2) or Western Digital, SATA, 10000 RPM, 8MB Cache
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9900 Pro (just waiting for March)

Questions:

1. Will watercooling provide me any better performance from my machine than aircooling WITHOUT overclocking? I'd like to have it just for the lower decibels, but if watercooling won't help with performance without having to resort to overclocking, then I'll have to pass.

2. IF I do decide to watercool this system, will the Rambus memory remain cool enough without any aircooling? I've read that Rambus can get quite hot and I want to make sure everything is covered from a temperature standpoint.

3. I realize this may not be the correct area to post this question, but I did not want to start any entirely new thread. Strictly speaking of gaming (FPS, RTS, MMORPG, etc.), will SCSI HDDs provide a significant improvement over Serial ATA? I plan on using RAID-0 for whichever I get.

If you are reading this post, thank you. I've pretty much exhausted my other resources (friends & family) and I'd like to solve these issues before I start building.


-Jarim23

 

[marneus]

You are missing the point, cooling your CPU will not effect the performance of your PC, good cooling is needed to improve STABILITY & if necessary allow the user to overclock the PC & it will cut down on the noise generated by you current cooing solution...

unless the kit U but comes with memory cooling bits then a watercooling solution will have no effect on your memory, best I know of is to but heatsinks with wee fans on you memory

This is for the hard drive section but For gaming, SCSI is overkill & it is much more expensive than IDE...





Hmmm, wonder if I can get a valid page fault ???
these invalid ones are far too commonplace...

 

[NE_Corridor]

1) Marneus hit it on the head. Cooling affects the stability and not the speed/performance of your cpu. Better cooling enables you to maintain higher clock speeds. If you're not overclocking, stock intel HSF is fine.

2) Rambus memory may run hot, but it's still within its safe operating limits. If you have good airflow in your case, you'll be fine.

3) Early samples of SATA HDDs indicate that they perform at or slightly better than similar IDE drives. However, IDE drives perform fine for games; I wouldn't spend the cash on SCSI. That said, if you're into MMORGs like Everquest or UT2003, you should spring for the best internet connection you can. I've tried Everquest via 56k. Can you say suxxors?

Yay, I'm a freakin' noob.

 

[Jarim23]

Yeah, I guess I used the word 'performance' when I should have used the word 'stability'. I just wanted to make sure air cooling would allow sufficient stability with the high-end components I plan on using. I will not be overclocking, so I suppose I will stick with the standard HSF. Not sure about the fans in the case yet, guess I'll have to experiment once I get it.

-Jarim23

 

[Codinerx]

Yeah definitly stick with the stock hsf- those are usually very quiet anyway. I can't imagine there being a significant drop in noise level with a watercooling setup, especially with the stock hsf. Good luck!