Thinking about liquid cooling

Hi all,

Since I moved my antec 900 in the family room, my girlfriend is pissed about the fan noise. So guess what is quieter ? Yeah... water cooling.

Now I looked around and I did not find a lot of review, could you help me locate some ?

Also if you got recomendation of what should I get, and, is it really quieter or not ?

My system right now:

IFX-14 with 120 mm fan,
Fan in the window side case
XFX 8800 gt (the stock fan is noisy, maybe adding the card in the loop ?)
2 x 1gb Ocz 800
500 Gb barracuda 7200.11
E6700 oc to 3.6 mhz

Finally, dont know if it changes something, but the cable in there are a mess and I wll dremmel some hole in the case to correct it, so if I need to add some for water cooling it would be a good time to do it. I got a''newer'' 900 where there is two factory made holes in the back of the case.

Thanks for your help

Whats your budget? A decent starter WC sytem of QUALITY and no pre-built kits is $250+. A GOOD kit to cool your NB/CPU/GPU is about $400.

I did my CPU/NB/GPU and it was a tad over $600.

Budget... humm

I guess I should say budget is not really a matter here. I mean : I dont mind spending around 500 $ if I can better and quieter cool my cpu and Gpu.

But if I spend that kind of money, I want to be sure I get to most out of it. Also, I'd like to keep the loop when/if I upgrade CPu/Gpu in the future. So I'd guess I'd have to go with gpu core block. And, It would need to be better than my IFX-14 for the cpu.


Not sure about the need to cool NB, specially since I have the 750 i chipset and there is actually two chips under my Nb....

According to my reading a setup would look like this :

Cpu waterblock : Enzotech Sapphire

Pump :Swiftech MCP655-B, opened to sugestion....

What kind of radiator ?

Also I am lost with t-Line and reservoir ?

What kind of tubing should I use ?

Does my decision of going GPu and CPU would change my Radiator choice ?

Finally My case is an Antec-900, do I have any limitation on components choice ? As I said, I have no issue with case customizing.

Theses are the current questions, any contribution/suggestion to those questions would be greatly appreciated.

Well, alot of what you may end up doing will be greatly influenced by your intions as far as o'clocking is concerned. If you are an aggressive o'clocker - that is, if you heavily o'clock your CPU, GPU. Ram and you mess with voltage adjustments - then you may end up considering waterblocks for the CPU, GPU and/or NB. Aggressive o'clocking can also influence wether you might consider one rad or two. The reasoning here is that one component will be made to suffer from its own heat generation and the heat from the other major component.

About the Northbridge...

The Northbridge, typically, controls memory functions like – a memory controller (for Intel Chipsets), a level 2 cache communicator and bridges the gap between the CPU and Ram – it also handles functions between the CPU and the graphics processor on the PCI, AGP and PCIe slots. Since this particular part is always busy it can generate quite a lot of heat.

Now, if you just mildly o'clock than you really won't need to add a NB waterblock as a decent HSF combo (together with some good airflow within your case) would suffice.

You do owe it to yourself to, at least, see if what WestWarrior pointed out will help. Otherwise, figure out where you stand with o'clocking first, then we'll see what kind of components you should get.

The swiftech kits are the best kits out of the box. The 220 kit is the best of them. Good waterblocks, great pump etc. None of it is crap like most of the other kits.