I'm Considering Water Cooling.

[Rugburn]

Hello everyone.

I have an Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe mobo, AMD 64 X2 6000 proc being cooled by a Zalman CNPS9700 and a 8800 GTS video card. I love the machine. My only gripe is that it throws off allot of heat. While playing games my cpu temp hovers around 45c-47c. I'm trying to find out if water cooling would help. I read the beginners guide to water cooling and its looks pretty straight forward. Any suggestions?

 

[ouch1]

For the best performance buy decent quality stuff. I.E. stay away from Zalman or Thermaltake kits or ones like it. And remember that with water cooling you tend to pay for quality.

The best bet is to put together a loop from components from places like:
http://www.dangerden.com
http://www.petrastechshop.com/
http://www.directron.com/

And do your best to not mix metals like copper, and aluminum in the same loop to minimize the risk of galvanic corrosion.

-ouch1

 

[phreejak]

Watercooling is the next logical step up from standard aircooling. However, you do need to answer some questions for yourself to determine if watercooling is the route you should take at this point or upgrade to a better air cooling solution (new CPU cooler, better case, better fan arrangement, etc.). This is important to determine because, to make the difference between what you have now and what you hope to obtain, it might involve a substantial investment in watercooling. You see, the low end of the spectrum (as far as watercooling setups are concerned) do not perform that much better than some of the high end air cooling solutions. So, if you plan on o'clocking and want to maintain closer to ambient temps than aircooling than you may have to invest $$$ - the larger the investment, the more you want to cool.

So, let's assume you have a peaked interest in watercooling.....

My advice is to not start out too big (i.e. HDDs, ram, northbridge, PSU) and stick to CPU and GPU since this is your first foray into liquid-cooling.

If you do plan to o'clock than you'll need to decide if you are going to o'clock both components. Assuming you do than there is a point to consider - when you o'clock two primary components like the CPU and GPU know that you are creating two focal points of abnormal heat generation. In a cooling loop, it is advisable that you do not have one waterblock feed into the other without doing something about the heat. Since the primary method of heat dissipation is the radiator than that means a safer cooling loop would have radiators after each waterblock so that one block does not have to suffer the heat from the other. Understanding this would have a cooling loop looking somehting like:

reservoir - pump - cpu waterblock - rad - gpu waterblock - rad - back to reservoir

Mind you, this is just a suggestion if you intend on o'clocking both the cpu and the gpu. In order to avoid having to add the northbridge to this loop it is extremely important that you have good airflow in your case as placing a waterblock on the cpu will remove any influence a CPU HSF woudl have blowing air on the NB in standard aircooling setups.

 

[Mugz]

If you have copper and aluminium mixed in the loop, mixing in car antifreeze (specifically ethylene glycol) helps.

FWIW my watercooling rig runs entirely off ethylene glycol, and six months later I still haven't encountered this issue (copper CPU block, aluminium rad/res).

 

[ouch1]

Give it time Mugz. You will get Galvanic Corrosion even with ethylene glycol since it is in fact does not stop corrosion. All is does it delay it. To stop it you need something like Water Wetter. Plus with a high concentration of Ethylene Glycol to water your loop will not perform its best. I usually use a ratio of 9 parts water to 1 part G11 (pentosin w/ ethylene glycol) plus 5ml of algaecide (liquid from pet store). It works quite well at keeping my temps right around ambient.

-ouch1