Water cooling with 1/4" id tubing/ (help)

[ferny12345623]

hey everyone i recently went to a micro atx case any my water cooling kit witch uses 1/2" tubs now wont fit. my question is if i use 1/4" tubbing will it make a big difference? has anyone water cooled with 1/4" tubbing? what do you think good idea or bad?

 

[ferny12345623]

also what coolant is best? i was thinking alcool or oil.

 

[NITROGEnarcosis]

Well about the best ive seen is the dex cool for car radiators, other car radiator fluid when mixed a little thin for car use works great plus it is UV active.

 

[rubix_1011]

What are your componets being used?

If you have used 1/2 in the past, going to 1/4 is going to severly reduce your flow rates. Alcohol is not good with anything acrylic and you are better off with distilled water and PTnuke.

 

[ferny12345623]

danger den mc-tdx water block, black ice Xtreme II rad (2, 120mm fans), D5 pump. and fillport. i was also thinking that i might use 2 black ice micro II (2, 80mm fans) rad's instead, but thats only if i can't fit the xtreme rad. i've always used distiled water and it works freat so i think ill stick with that, i just wanted to try something new. by the way this setup will cool a phenom II 955, a hd4850(maybe 2 of them). ONE more question, is it worth it to water cool the hard drive?

 

[rubix_1011]

You are going to need more radiator surface area if you WC the video cards. Look for about the area of a 2x120 radiator for each CPU and GPU to effectively cool them.

Hard drives don't need to be WC...just make sure you have a fan that blows over your HDD cage and that should be sufficient.

 

[Conumdrum]

You will need a total of 120x3 of rad space to cool the CPU and both GPU's. Why not drop to 3/8 ID tubing? Any less than that and your flow rates will cause higher temps I'm pretty sure.