Water cooling question.

excypher

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Apr 22, 2007
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Hello all, as a quick intro, my names dave, i've been working with computers for a little while and am a regular reader of tom's hardware when i can get to the computer (girlfreind) greetings and salutations to everyone.

Now to business...

I'm currently in the business of building a new rig, and was interested in a water cooling solution... not so much for the added overclock-able benefits but more so to satisfy my childlike want to fiddle with expensive and possibly dangerous pieces of mechanics.........

Now my question is esentially this... while water cooling provides an efficient and indeed silent (must be silent, i want to sleep with it on in the room) method of cooling ones pc, there are a couple of things im concerned about.

My current cooling solution consists of 2x 120mm fans one in the front and back of the case and a zalman flower cooler on the CPU, this provides good airflow to all the components by them all "helping out" each other, with the flower cooler providing a decent job at not only cooling the cpu, but blowing air through the heatsinks that are linked to the northbridge.
All this circulating air also cools other components that, although not needing direct cooling, need a helping hand sometimes, such as the RAM, capacitors and other components on the motherboard itself.

So if water cooling does indeed provide an extremely effective cooling method, its very focused, so we have the VGA, CPU and northbridge being cooled directly, now considering i want to install this water cooling device and not have any other fans in the system... no air would be circulating in the case, thus the previously mentioned components would go untouched, would this result in these individual components heating to an undesired and at worst dangerous temperature levels?

Lastly the solution that most interests me is the radiator style passive zalman cooler as found on Here (apologies if external links are not allowed)

Has anyone got one of these? can they provide an opinion on its effectiveness and will i need any additional fans in the system if i rely on this solely to cool the entire system?

For reference the spec is:

AMD X2 6000+
Asus M2N32-SLi-DLX nforce mobo
Geforce 8800 GTX
2gb Corsair Xms DDR2-6400C4


Many many thanks for your help, and thanks for reading my post!

Dave
 

ProHandyman

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Looking at what you are trying to accomplish, I would say your going to need at least one fan to help with VRM and other chipsets. HOWEVER, depending on how you mount and feed air to your radiator can make a big difference. An external solution such as your considering will leave the need for at least one fan in the case. The use of one of the new SilenX 120s could fill this need.

I question whether the Zalmann exterior Resorator is up to the task of such a cooling solution. You have a number of componants that are going to dump some serious heat into the loop.

You may want to look into other solutions (not T-T, gigabyte, etc), especially using a Thermochill PA series rad. These can be teamed up with fans like the SilenX for a very quite solution of good performance.
 

excypher

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Apr 22, 2007
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Aha, my other problem lies in that, i live in the UK, and apparently finding suppliers of quality liquid cooling systems can be very hard.

What i want to ultimately end up with is a completely silent solution that can handle anything the computer can throw at it, bar overclocking.

Thena gain i suppose thats what everyone is looking for....
 

petevsdrm

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Feb 19, 2007
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While water cooling will provide very focused cooling on the components you attach a block to, you will still need case fans for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

There are some practically silent 120mm fans on the market that are superb for just that, they are very quiet and move a large amount of air even at slow speed settings.
This one
http://www.frozencpu.com/products/2539/fan-38/Vantec_120mm_Stealth_Fan.html?tl=g36c15s60
or this one
http://www.frozencpu.com/products/2423/fan-109/SilverStone_SST-FM121_120mm_Case_Fan.html?tl=g36c15s60
would do nicely.


And here are a couple of reviews on the Zalman reserator2
http://hi-techreviews.com/reviews_2006/Zalman_Reserator2/P8.htm
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=3851&s=1
http://www.guru3d.com/article/cooling/393/

It looks pretty nice, as long as you are not looking for the super-efficient cooling normally associated with watercooling. Really, if you are looking to
satisfy my childlike want to fiddle with expensive and possibly dangerous pieces of mechanics
:lol:
Then this fits the bill. It will probably look pretty cool sitting next to your PC too, which doesn't hurt.
 

excypher

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Apr 22, 2007
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Wow, lots of useful links from everyone there, thanks a lot! i shall have a look through them all.

*scuttles off with his credit card*