Need some watercooling advice from the gods

I'm running a coolit domino now on my I7@4Ghz and idle's are in the high 30's and i'm satisfied.. BUT. I bought a coolit eliminator from a friend and it's just been sitting here. It's the one with those 3 TEC's. Now if i was to buy some new tubing and have the coolant go through the radiator on the domino THEN the TEC's on the eliminator and back to the waterblock. Would i see a drastic drop in temps? I'm willing to try this but only if i can drop coolant temps to below 20C. Right now coolant temps are reading 27-28C on the domino lcd. What do you think?

The best way to run a tec is directly on the CPU. By directly i mean with a fat copper spacer of course. Chilling the water/rad never works well.

A tec will make things complicated of course. It needs to be powered. Even small units drink a lot of juice. They need to be cooled properly. That means a water block, pump and rad that are up to it. It also can cool below ambient which means condensation. Sealing ur mobo etc is a major irritation.

Looking back on how much i spent on my water system, and the fact i now need to pull it apart for a good clean, which is a major PIA... id rather have got a great hsf and made a custom venturi etc, let alone bother with a tec.

Wonderful, happy for you. Let us know your results..

Okay Ry, ya got me.

I'm the guy who is using tap water to cool my PC. I've been thru the pump-rad. home made for ambient temps which in my case was okay for a 3.83G OC on a Q9550. My ambient temp is 68F as I'm in my basement.

But I like to play FSX. That sim likes lots of clocks and cores. My GPU is a 8800GTS (g92) 512 that is very good for this sim. It does not like SLI or Crossfire set-ups. Another good canidate would probably be nVidas 9800GTX+.

My original goal was 4G OC stable with ambient temps but it just wasn't working out. My water pump was a $18.00 bilge pump from Wal-Mart in a $3.00 foam cooler. That pump was rated at 500GPH and did a fine job. They just were not meant for continus duty and would start failing after 4~6 weeks.

However, I could put ice blocks in my cooler and have CPU idle temps at ~ 2C! But the ice would melt within an hour due to heat from both the pump and the CPU and NB.

That brought me to my current solution. I have an old dog chewed up garden hose that I couldn't use for anything else so thats what I use. I simply used adapters to down-size to 3/8ths tubing to my pressure side and stuffed my returns in a short piece of hose to go to my drain.

I control the flow rate with the shut-off valve that my hose is attached to. This has turned out to be fantastic for me. My ground water is 50F and so should most water supplies. If you live in an appartment building I don't think your temps will be as low because usaully they pump the water to a tank on top of the roof or in the "attic" to supply the appartment building with cold and hot water.

My specs are ASUS Striker II Extreme, 2 X 2G OCZ DDR3 2000 ram, and of course a Q9550 CPU which normally is clocked at 2.83Ghz and 8800 in SLI. I like FPS too. So the first pic is a screen shot of what my clock is and my score in '06 free version, OCCT running to show temps(which I think report ~10C too high, but just my opinion) and CPU-Z.



This next picture shows the flow rate going to the drain. It wasn't fine tuned and can be run with a lower flow rate. I'm using a Apogee high flow CPU water block. Now, even thou the flow rate is low in 3/4" garden hose by the time you reduce it to 3/8ths it moves along quite nicely. I have since fine tuned it to a lower rate by watching my temp in CMOS. My results are the same.



I live in rural southeast Missouri and the mineral content is really high. So high I personlly can not drink the water with out getting kidney stones within 6 months. Very painful. Any way my point is that all water cooling solutions require maintenance, and that does not exclude my PC. So I fully expect to clean my water blocks occasionally just to make sure alls well.

But I have to tell you that after a month there is no detectable build-up of minerals yet. I also look in CMOS hardware temps and then open OCCT EVERY time I start my PC just to make sure my temps are where they belong.

I did this because I am not rich and my water costs ~ the same as the pumps I was buying from Wal-Mart. Thats an acceptable trade off for me especailly with what I have gained in OC performance.

Just remember that you need very good OC'n skills to go along with any cooling solution and most importantly, I DO NOT CLAIM THIS WILL WORK FOR EVERY ONE!!!!

I'm sharing this only to demostrate that there are other ways to cool your CPU or PC. If you have an air cooled PC but had a rad in your case with my set-up then your temps inside your case would be MUCH lower. Just a hint. Okay?

And last but not least, a cool PC is a happy PC, no matter who owns it.

Happy cooling folks. Art

@ arthurh have you considered making a loop somewhere so the water comes back cold? If it snows where you live, you could run the hose outside so it comes back in freezing cold, all you need is a non-walmart pump Maybe make a loop under ground? lol

Yea I'm a water cooling noob, still don't know what kind of water blocks I need XD 'scuse my ignorance ^.^