I'm looking at buying an Alienware Area 51 7500 (Yes I know I should build my own, I will probably build my next computer but I want this one now and I don't trust myself to build one yet). My question is whether or not liquid cooling is necessary for people who don't really plan to do any overclocking of their computer or whether the fan cooling is effective enough on its own.

System specs:

Nforce 690i motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
4 gbs of DDR2 RAM
750 Watt PSU
Dual 512 MB 9800 GT
500 GB of memory

I'd also like to know how often problems seem to crop up from Liquid cooling. When I asked a guy from best buy's Geek Squad that I know he said to stay away from Liquid cooling because of leaking issues. Is that realistically a problem if you don't move your computer around very much? I would hate to spring a leak and ruin $1500 or more worth of hardware.

I'd stay away from nVidia 6x0i chipsets. Since fan cooling (depending on the cooler, of course) is plenty for even substantial overclocks on recent Intel chips, you certainly don't need liquid cooling. Besides the leakage issues, there's replacing coolant once it gets gunky and other maintenance issues. All these can be minimized by getting very good quality stuff, but you'll pay for that.

No need for water cooling on a cpu that isn't even going to be overclocked. That would be like supercharging an engine to drive on surface streets.

Thats what I figured but I wanted to ask to be sure. Thankyou very much for the information.

(Yes i'm aware the general oppinion on this board is nvidia boards are bad, thankyou for the warning at any rate)

i didnt even know there was a 690i chipset, lol..

The 690i chipset is actually pretty good from what I've heard. Overclocks well and provides all the goodies of other chipsets too. It is also quite expensive however, and I think a x48 chipset makes more sense right now.

get the newer 7x0i chipset those are newer and cooler in comparison and OC better. 6series chipset is just nightmare!

I'd stay away from alienware; their custmer support is terrible.

Personally, I went with digitalstorm, but cyberpower and ibuypower were on my list too...most everyone else either forced Vista on you, or lacked decent DDR3 RAM when I was looking 3 months ago.

wait you said you wanted it now? i heard the wait period for actually receiving your build from alienware was close to two months?! YOU CAN WAIT FOR 2 MONTHS?

evga 750i FTW dammit! that board IS FTW they arent lying

FTW means something i guess!the latest one i think its 790i Ultra FTW. heavily loaded with EXTRA FTW.

LOL! well unless you can shell out for a $3000 system with 3 GTX 280's, no reason to go to a 780/790i over the 750i FTW! 750i has the same high performance heatsinks, all solid capacitors etc WHO NEEDS 3 PCI E SLOTS OR DUAL GIG ETHERNET?????

whats that extra PCI-E on the 750i mobo? thought it can run 3 way sli.

theres only 2 lol... they r green and stand out from the crowd...only green things on the board...

lol i thought you are a amd fan no?

wtf no i hate amd! down with you weak son of a mothers!
meh tbh i have never used an AMD product in my life and im not that keen to try, lol...i like the current intel and nvida products