Is a high performance water cooled set up worth it???

[maverick7]

well basically $500 or so for a high performance danger den water cooling set up that would cool the gpu and cpu, and chipset if you so wished..

now that is about anothet gtx, so my question is when i order my parts do i go sli?? or water cooling??

by the way ill have a 680i and Q6600

*and how much does raid 0 affect your performance?? is it better to get one wd raptor x, or 2 slower hard drives in sli?? etc, what are my options here

 

[systemlord]

Having a raid0 set-up allows one drive to read data and the other to write data. Also using a raid0 reduces in-game shuttering, but if one drive fails you lose everything. So make sure you have a trusty Raptor drive. Water cooling doesn't mean your OC will be good because all chips are not made evenly, so CPU (a) might OC better than CPU (b) even having the same model. But WC does keep temps in check and that can only be a good thing, I'd go WC if I had the money. Be very very careful when setting up WC and plan all your moves the last thing you want is a PC flush.

 

[maverick7]

wait so do u mean you would go raid 0 over a single raptor??? or are you saying 2 raptors etc??? i have 3k for a system but cant decide on hard drives and ram and weather or not to go for sli or watercooling

 

[maverick7]

uhhh why cant i edit my post...

i was going to also say i cant decide between a thermaltake armor and antec nine hundred

 

[cb62fcni]

well basically $500 or so for a high performance danger den water cooling set up that would cool the gpu and cpu, and chipset if you so wished..

now that is about anothet gtx, so my question is when i order my parts do i go sli?? or water cooling??

by the way ill have a 680i and Q6600

*and how much does raid 0 affect your performance?? is it better to get one wd raptor x, or 2 slower hard drives in sli?? etc, what are my options here

If you plan on overclocking, watercooling is absolutely worth it if you want the absolute best performance out of your components and don't mind the cost. RAID0, however, is definately not. Unless you'll be doing heavy duty video compiling/editing/rendering or audio encoding, you will see nearly no benefit from a RAID array. And having a RAID0 setup does not mean you can read off one and write to one at the same time. Basically, it puts the same information onto both discs and then pulls the data off both discs simultaneously. It sounds like it would be faster, and it is when it comes to sheer data throughput, but there's a catch: seek times go up, and in most apps, seek times trump transfer speed. See for yourself:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969&p=9
If I were you I'd just get a Raptor for the system and one of those sweet Hitatchi 1TB drives for storage. You'll be very happy with the performance and it'll save you some cash.

As for Water Cooling, Danger Den is kinda overpriced. There's better performing stuff available out there for less. Check FrozenCpu.com, they have tons of stuff. What are your goals with the setup? I'd say go for the Antec case, I've built three systems around them and it's a very good, solid case.

 

[maverick7]

antec nine hundred?? my only concern was that it wont be big enough, because in my wildest dreams i was hoping to somehow get that rad box in the case.. and since the armor has a huge front i thought i could squeeze it in lol :S

as for my goals, well i wanted to get an ok overclock, maybe 3.4 or so with the q6600. as for the video card, im really not sure, as of yet, getting a regular gtx to the speed of an ultra would be quite nice and makes me feel like im saving money.

thank you very much for the info btw on the hard drives that was extremely helpful (iv given you some stars lol :S )

as for the watercooling though, im still hesitant just because instead of water cooling i could get another GTX.. so im sort of in a dilemma here... watercooling looks bloody brilliant, and will get my cpu to a nice speed (though i could probably hit 3ghz with just a thermalright ultra 120.) i will be able to oc my single video card also.

if i dont go for it however, i could oc like i said the q6600 to about 3ghz, and then get another gtx, instead of overclocking.

 

[cb62fcni]

How big of a rad were you planning on running, a triple or just a double. If you're only cooling your CPU you can get away with just using a double easy. There's really not a big point to SLIing your GTX's, it'll get you killer performance, true, but you'll have to use a 680 board that doesn't overclock a quad nearly as well and won't likely be Penryn compatible. Just get a P35 mobo and one GTX, and put the money you save aside for a next gen GPU or CPU. That way you'll get great performance now and still be on top of your game later. If you add a block to your GTX you can easily overclock it beyond Ultra speeds BUT the waterblock will likely not be compatible with the next gen card. Unless you use a cheesy GPU-only cooler, which are great and all, but they leave the RAM, VREG and other components on passive cooling only, which is not a workable solution in my book.

 

[pavel-]

water vs air:
Yes, your temps will go down, but a q6600 @ 3.0 ghz (i'm also assuming you'll be able to reach that with a thermalright ultra 120) might not be the bottleneck of your machine, so a further overclock may not necessarily give you a great performance boost, so spending the extra $300+ here to only see a performance boost in %20 of your tasks may not be the best idea.

raid0 vs raptors:
I've read a few reviews on raid0 vs wd raptors, and to be honest, it depends entirely on what you are doing, as cb62fcni has already mentioned. I do have a suggestion for you however that may be appealing and you'll get the best of both worlds - 2 74gb (or even 36gb) raptors in raid0 + a reasonably sized storage drive. You'll get low seek times of raptors and all the benefits of striping. The new WD 750gb has been shown to perform on par (if not better) than the 150gb raptor, so that may be a possibility for a storage drive. With this setup youre looking at spending about $450+ on hard drives, but it may be worth it for you.

gtx overclocking:
The common opinion is that you should be able to OC the gtx to ultra speeds with stock cooling, so you'll be saving around $200 there by just moving some slider bars

 

[maverick7]

hmm so go with only a single gtx?? and get 2 74 gig raptor x drives in raid 0, and then a storage device?? but is it really worth it for raid.. like i could just get another graphics card etc etc.. or almost

and for watercooling, should i just then just cool the chipset and cpu??

and what would be wrong with a asus striker extreme?? i could go sli on that and get a great oc with the board. in fact i was following a guy on you tube who just uses swiftech watercooling (on his cpu only) i think to cool a qx6700 all the way to 3.8, and he uses 2 gtx ultras, as well as the striker extreme etc.. and he got nearly 20,000 in 3dmark etc etc.. now obviously im not spending that much but im just saying it is possible to get a nice oc out of it while being an sli board

and as for a case the lian li v2000, is it possible to get that case with one of the sides being clear etc so you can see inside?? or would i have to do a mod on the case to be able to see inside etc??