Inexpensive but complete watercooling kit

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JCNiest5

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Okay, does anybody know of a complete but inexpensive watercooling kit they can recommend for a WC newbie here?

Thanks for your time...
 
So I guess there are no inexpensive watercooling system that someone can recommend...that's sad.
 
JCNiest5 said:
So I guess there are no inexpensive watercooling system that someone can recommend...that's sad.
Click to expand...

There might be, but you have not given a budget, or what you are wanting to cool.
 
build it! way more fun, way more effective, way less expensive. theres no reason not to! if you give a budget and what you want to cool, the fine folks here will probably recommend some great stuff that will do you good. oh, they also look better. i dont know if i mentioned that before. to give you an idea, youre looking at minimum $250 for a cpu-only loop. more if youre cooling an i7. probably get down to $150 if you pick up some slightly older model stuff used in the fs/ft forum. but really it depends a ton on what you are cooling, and how much you are willing to spend. i dont recommend prebuilt ones because youre looking at probably $200 minimum, and they will only give you comparable performance to a $50 air cooler.
 
Swiftech H20-220 Compact. My first kit, really easy to put together, decent performance and price.
 
Okay, a really newbie question: Can I use coolant made for cars on watercooling system? I think I may come up with something that may cool really well. I have to put that theory to work before posting it here. It may be a super watercooling system.
 
Has anybody ever have a pump die on them causing the CPU to overheat or similar incident? How reliable are the pumps being used for watercooling? Do they pump forever or do they go out in a certain number of hours? I am afraid if I were to have one, leaving the PC over the weekend while I'm out of town, coming back to find that PC is dead because the pump died while I was away. That would be a nightmare to find out.
 
Pump failures are extremely rare - especially if you get a decent one like Laing D5 [aka Swiftech MCP655] or Laing DDC [aka Swiftech MCP355] or the one that is built into the Swiftech block [basically a MCP355 "insides"].

Their MTBF is 50000 hours [over 5 years 24/7].

In the worst case your PC will shut down before it burns anyways [unless you disable this in BIOS] - it's a standard in Intel CPUs [AMD probably too]. Anyways, trust me, killing a PC with heat is kinda hard :d

PS. Swiftech H2O-220 Compact is a really good kit - maybe not as powerfull as custom setups but it will keep pretty much any CPU cool and allow easy upgrades.
 
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You don't need to use car coolant. Ideally, the best possible coolant you can use is pure distilled water, mainly because of its very high specific heat capacity (the amount of energy it takes to heat up water) and its very low price (about $1/gallon). However, without anything else, you'd get growth of algae and other nasty stuff in your loop, so get some of Petra's PT-Nuke and put a couple of drops in the loop to prevent algae growth.

As long as you're not mixing metals (which you shouldn't anyways, use only copper or plated metals in your loop) then you won't need any anticorrosive additives.
 
If you want a "pre-built" kit check out some of the kits over at Petra's. I actually just purchased their Coolkit Basic for myself, along with some other parts, since it came with most of the parts I was going to buy individually anyway.
 
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