Whenever this discussion comes up i always think of the guy we used to have at work who was always trying to build the fastest PC possible. He would spend upwards of $3000 building a custom water cooling system for a $2500 bleeding edge overclocked PC. He did this at least once a year. Then 6 months later i would be able to put together a stock generic PC for $600 that would run circles around what he had built.

Why bother?

I'm overclocked and on water cooling right now. It's a homemade system. The cooling block is made out of two 1-1/4 inch copper pipe endcaps cut to about 1/2 inch height and then soldered together with copper nipples soldered to the side. The pump is a little 12 volt automotive utility pump with a homemade 12volt power supply that's turned on by a relay plugged into the computer power supply. The radiator is mounted inside the intake furnace duct (household furnace.... we have our furnace fan set for manual run and on all the time for humidity and filtration reasons)

The system works great. The temps are much more even and have a narrower spread. I had some pretty high temps on fan-only, and now I get temps between about 35 and 58.

I did however have a problem with condensation and destroyed one video card as a result. The block has since been insulated which has arrested the problem.

You can see a pic here:

http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/storage/54/123679/cooling.JPG

The cooling block is that round sort of cylinder in the middle of the mobo... (obviously!)

Blink, are you cooling the air for board and power supply using water too? Are you using a reservoir and do you have internal soldered copper coil to the end cap making contact with the IC? Angling or Inverting the board would help with "leaks". On large water systems, chemical additives are used a lot, but for home system, a small amount of alcohol will aid in heat absorption(especially in fast temperature changes).

it's great to extent the life of parts (notable the CPU). but I've NEVER had a CPU die. Ever. Period. My CPU's from ~7 years ago still work like they did 7 years ago. With components, like CPU's & GPU's, coming out with HUGE upgrades every year i just don't see it worth what it used to be unless you're OC'ing. Really OC'ing to something that's not available (like a P4 to 5ghz, for example). Example: I could water-cool my AMD 64 3000 & most likely get it to an AMD 4000 speed. But why when I can get an X2 CPU for less then the price of cheap water cooling?

Blink, are you cooling the air for board and power supply using water too?
No. Every thing else is cooled by fan. I once upon had EVERYTHING onto the cooling water (including the HDD's), but found that it's a lot of over kill. CPU's throw off a lot of heat... enough to substantially raise the operating temps of the entire computer. With the CPU being channeled COMPLETELY away from the other components, the whole machine stays much cooler. The pwer supply fan as well as HDD cooling fan in fact have both been throttled back to 400 rpm each (vid card running at factory speeds but throttles on its own.). This gives enough air and makes things very close to inaudible.

Are you using a reservoir and do you have internal soldered copper coil to the end cap making contact with the IC?

No copper coil needed. One side of the of the copper end cap has been machined flat just like a factory heat sink. The entire inside of the cooling block is flooded with water. It's bolted on as normal with a spring suspension bolt system. And yes... there is a small reservoir that includes an air damper located at the radiator. Water is a non compressible item... if you do not include some form of expansion tank, then you will blow a tube as the water expands.

I had the board mounted inverted after I bought a new vid card, but the condensation continues... just flows to a different location. The insulation (made from a neoprene camera strap) is a permanent (and cheap) problem solver... stops the condensation from forming... period.

We have had several systems here that I've dubbed The Hovercraft because they were built with so many fans and they're quite noisy. Our solution was to buy Noren racks and these pretty well blimp our hardware, but we're in San Francisco where it rarely gets hot. In other places you'd need to feed cool air to the rack intake.

I'm working on some training on a water cooled system for a client. What they're telling me is a) they'll only support overclocking on their water cooled model, b) sound levels at idle are about the same on their air and water cooled systems, c) sound levels on the water cooled system running flat out are almost as low as they are at idle, d) if the pump fails, certian graphics cards run hot enough to actually burst the plumbing around the cooling block.

The Noren racks are too expensive for most people but I've been curious about Zalman's Reserator in combination with a blimped enclosure. The thing about this water cooler is that you can run it outside the cabinet, taking most of the heat out and keeping most of the noise in. In our case, we keep a couple of 16 disk arrays in one cabinet along with a couple of computers. Getting some heat entirely out of the box would really help.

I think what you're hearing here is that water cooled is attractive when dealing with noise. If noise isn't a concern you could just use decent heat sinks and fans. Probably using memory with heat sinks could be helpful. If you're just thinking of retrofitting an existing system I'd first determine whether you actually have a problem to solve. If everything runs well and isn't too noisy then just leave it alone. On the other hand, if opening the case and blowing a box fan into it is solvling a problem...

Rob Mack

"Why bother?"

Silence. Everyone tends to become accustomed to noisy computers but once you eliminate that noise and get used to the working environment, there's no going back.

Unless you put your ear right upon it, my editing PC makes no noise whatsoever. I run dual SLI video cards and two Opteron 280 CPUs all of which are water cooled.

There's no need to spend thousands of dollars, Zalman Reserators do the job very nicely. I'd wholeheartedly recommend water cooling, even for modest systems.

Zalman Reserator 2

Blink, with a doubt, the insulation made from the neoprene camera strap, was a good solution( yes, I did type that), without investing a lot more money.

Still, the inside coil or fin will extract heat a lot faster( possibly extending the cpu life cycle), but there are a lot of alternates in heat transfer designs. But the simpler design ( fewer parts to fail) is usually the best, sounds like your system is a good balance.

I have found the disk drives for PCs performances are greatly effected by marginal heat increases and once they get really hot, they never recovery and perform to spec. Cooling the drives is a good thing vs. the cost.

Noise with fans can be sometimes solved by simply using larger diameter fans with lower speeds.

Based on the many tests done at sites such as Anandtech, I can't imagine much benefit from liquid cooling. Even a stock heatsink allows for overclocking to a considerable degree (pun intended), and if you really want to push the envelope then buy a $50 aftermarket heatsink that will lower your temps by ~15 degrees C. I've pushed my little AMD 3800x2 with a 30% overclock and it's perfectly happy with the stock AMD heatsink and (quiet) fan.

Anandtech and others say that with the top air coolers there is not only a very significant temperature reduction but also practically no fan noise. Given that, the only advantage of liquid cooling is just bragging rights or because you really love to tinker.

The Noren racks are too expensive for most people but I've been curious about Zalman's Reserator in combination with a blimped enclosure.

These work well. The general idea behind them is that if you can get the heatsink big enough, then no fan is required. The sink will dissipate a large enough volume of heat per unit time to keep things cool enough.

However fans and noise are not such a big deal when you start talking water cooled systems, because you can mount the radiator and fan unit just about anywhere you want (keeping maximum pump head pressure in mind of course). You can even drill a hole in the floor and mount the unit on the next floor below you if need be. As I said above, I don't run a fan unit, because my radiator is mounted right into one of my household furnace ducts.

but the biggest advantage is that you can channel that heat away from the other components almost totally. Whereas the standard fan and heat sink tend to build up heat in the immediate area, thereby raising the operating temps of the entire machine.

I would say #3 if you are OK with the fan noise.
Mine is a bit noisy, but has never gotten very hot, even during marathon rendering sessions.
I am running a QX6800 with a Nvidia 8800-768MB graphics card. Toasty components, but no liquid cooling needed.
Perhaps this is because Vegas does not tax your graphics card very much. If I was running another application that might be different.

Why stop at "water"? Just go straight to "liquid nitrogen"!

"Given that, the only advantage of liquid cooling is just bragging rights or because you really love to tinker."

That's not really true. Overclocking can just as easily be achieved with fan cooling as it can water cooling, but as stated already in this thread, watercooling has other significant advantages.

In a PC case, the fans cooling a CPU and GPU vent warm air into the case. The northbridge chipset generates heat, so does the power supply and the hard disks. All this compounds and therefore the case itself requires a good airflow to stay cool. Airflow equals noise regardless of what fans you use, especially if you're running a high-end CPU, GPU and have a fairly chunky power supply.

As has already been mentioned, watercooling allows heat to be dispersed outside of the case. Almost all the heat from the CPU, GPU and northbridge can be radiated externally, which then means the power supply and hard disks are in a much cooler environment, thereby extending their lifespan and performance range, quite apart from the fact that noise is greatly reduced to the point of being eliminated altogether from some systems.

I think I'd want to see some sort of automatic shutdown triggered if the pump ever stopped pumping. Like what a UPS does.

One thing about water cooling is that you need to factor warranties in. We don't do it with our edit stations because we keep them stock and lean on the integrator when there are problems.

Rob Mack

One way to reduce fan noise is to isolate the fan from the metal box. Small, soft rubber grommets in oversided mounting holes is one reasonably simple solution we used years ago.
Also gluing sound deadoning material to the large flat panels inside the case will help.
Bob.