Recently I bought Thermaltake Big Water 735 water cooling system to replace my 9700 zalman air cooling system. With the air cooling, my temperature was 50/73 (idle/load). After I replaced it with the water system, the temperature drops, but only by a little bit! It drops down by 3 degrees or so to 47/69.

From what I have seen, a water cooled system can easily reach 25-35 idle temperature. My system is far from getting there!

My spec is quad core 2.66ghz with one 8800GTX card. Do you think the temperature is normal for my computer? Or am I doing something wrong?

One more note, I use Intel TAT software to read the temperature (which I think is giving the right temperature). Speedfan's temperature reading is 10-12 degrees lower than TAT's.

thanks

Are you sure that there are no air bubbles anywhere in the system? Did you move the case around...from side to side(carefully), and tap on the tubing...to help dislodge any?It doesn't take many to disrupt flow/heat removal. GL

You bought a bigwater? That's not even a decent water-cooling setup. Granted, your temps should be a few degrees lower, but you'll never get anywhere near 25-35 with that kind of rig. Check for bubbles as someone else mentioned. What kind of TIM did you apply, and is it possible you applied too much/too little?

Yeah, I am probably gonna be refunding this crap. It costs me 160 dollars at compusa. I can probably get a better one off newegg.

I used the stock TIM that came with the cooler. I was reading some other thread about applying too much TIM can increase the temperature. I defintely was using way too much TIM. Gonna try applying with way small amount of grease and see if it helps.

Thanks guys, I appreciate all the inputs. This is my first PC that I build on my own and I still need to learn a lot.

Yea, sorry to be the one to tell you. Return it if you can. You would honestly be better off with a nice big air-cooler like the Thermalright 120 Ultra. If you're prepared to spend around 300 you could get a real water-cooling setup. Let us know if you need help picking components and whatnot.

When you say "a real water-cooling setup", do you mean to build your own water cooler from separate components (radiator, pump, etc)? Or is there a kit (just like big water) that does a decent job? I can probably go up to 200-250 dollars for the cooling system.

Well, if i had the money, and i was going to buy a kit...i would buy this one:

Swiftech H20-220-APEX-GT

As several have mentioned, that system is NOT high performance enough to cool a quad. I had a similar but fancier setup Thermaltake Aquarius II which uses the same pump/reservoir, hosing size, radiator as that but all in a nice package on my old AMD Socket A and it could barely keep that thing cooled when running OC'ed.

If you are serious about pushing or keeping Quads cool, build your own. It is much more work but the cooling efficiency is worth it.

I use a DangerDen Block on my C2D, DD reservoir, Enheim pump, 1/2" hoses, Frozen PC dual radiator dual high CFM 120mm fans. When overclocked and full load running Orthos both Cores maxed the CPU package reports 49C and the cores individually hit 55C each. A benchmark like 3DMark06 will not stress the unit more than 1C above idle temps. Games and benchmarks don't use all cores 100%, let alone apps. 3Dmax rendering can get close.

It is also more expensive, the Enheim pump was as much or more than your whole TT 735 was though.

Sheesh - which Eheim did you get and where did you get it? A 1048 model costs about $60 US and a 1250 costs about $70.

Game: If I bought a kit, then I would probably go with the Apex GT or a good kit from Danger Den. This DD kit includes a GPU block. That would be an extra part to buy if you got the Swiftech kit. With the performance of high-end air cooling hardware, I would seriously stick with air. Air has the best bang for buck and is a lot easier to handle. A thermalright Ultra 120 (or Extreme) and an HR-03 for the 8800GTX. Costs less and performs great.

I think i know the culprit of why my temperature is so high. I have been using crap loads of thermal grease. I am gonna try remounting both my water cooler and my zalman 9700 with much less grease and see if that helps.

Sheesh - which Eheim did you get and where did you get it? A 1048 model costs about $60 US and a 1250 costs about $70.

Game: If I bought a kit, then I would probably go with the Apex GT or a good kit from Danger Den. This DD kit includes a GPU block. That would be an extra part to buy if you got the Swiftech kit. With the performance of high-end air cooling hardware, I would seriously stick with air. Air has the best bang for buck and is a lot easier to handle. A thermalright Ultra 120 (or Extreme) and an HR-03 for the 8800GTX. Costs less and performs great. the 1260 is still over $100 dollars. All I know it was high dollar although it works good but you have to insulate the footing real well because it vibrates and hums loudly otherwise.

Did you buy an extra block for the GTX or are you using the stock cooler with it?

Too much paste will definitely screw your temps. Tell us what they are when you get things installed properly!

Too much paste will certainly contribute to the problem, but you're simply going to saturate your WC setup with heat, it'll never perform anywhere near as well as a better kit. That Swiftech kit is the best value/performance. The DD kit is overpriced IMO, and I would really hesitate to ONLY cool the GPU on a G80 anyway, the memory gets crazy hot and with passive cooling you're asking for trouble.

The 1260 is still around $120 and the 1262 is around $130, but why would you use it in a WC setup? The 1260 dumps around 2-3 times the heat into your loop without adding a lot of real-world benefit over a 1250 or even a 1048 for most setups. If you were pushing thru dual rads, CPU, GPU, NB and SB blocks then you might need something more than the 1048, but that is on the extreme end of WC.

I had never used Eheim, which I keep misspelling, so I figured, hey, the bigger the better, right? (I am from Texas) and in fairness I was originally thinking of watercooling EVERYTHING but after reading reviews of water cooled GTX's and other than lower temps not offering significant OC performance over air cooled I changed my mind. Now I got that pump, pumping away massive amounts of fluid happily along. It might be overkill in this case but they are still high dollar. Even the $70 job is half the cost of small TT rig.