The Third THG Video: Silent and Ice Cold

Conclusion: High Performance And Silent Operation

None of the well-known manufacturers offer PC systems with perfect cooling for all components (CPU, graphics card, chipset, hard disk) and noiseless operation as well - this is what we achieve with the PC system that we built here. Friends of extreme overclocking also get an optimal foundation for stably running the AMD Athlon XP or the Intel Pentium 4 at their limit.

Granted, we've presented a rather elite solution that's not exactly cheap. However, in the end, you get a water cooling system with components that are of the highest quality and precision. In the long run, it's well worth the investment, especially because the cooling system will also be compatible with processors still yet to come (e.g., AMD Hammer or Intel Pentium 4 - Prescott), as well as with future graphics cards.

The simpler water cooling kit is priced at $199, while the full-featured kit costs $365. It's quite a large expense for users on a tight budget, but on the other hand, it's a perfectly reasonable price for a perfect cooling solution. If you compare the effectiveness of a water cooling system to that of the most high-end, high-performance cooling fan, then the price difference is not so great. Retailers often ask for as much as $80 for top-of-the-line standard coolers. Also, a traditional cooler of the high-end category attains its effectiveness through a massive fan, which in turn generates high noise levels, thereby destroying any sense of ergonomics or comfort in the workplace.

The new Tom's Hardware Guide video is an important part of this article, and it continues the series that began with the first two THG videos. The video is 5.5 minutes long, so it requires more memory than the previous videos. We limited the resolution to 360 x 288 (compared to our last video at 720 x 576 pixels), otherwise the file size would have been approximately 30 MB. At half the PAL resolution and with the help of all optimizing methods offered by the MPEG-4 format, we've managed to keep the file size to 18 MB, which is quite reasonable when you take the video and sound quality into consideration.

Thanks to our international team, we bring you the video in three languages: English, French and German. We are quite interested our readers' opinions, so we appreciate any thoughts, comments and criticisms that you send to us.

A complete PC system with water cooling for all components.