Looking for some advice for water cooling kits

[Ramaddil]

I have come to the point where I want to switch to water cooling instead of air and I have 2 pcs that I would like to water cool. The first is my AMD 955 quad core with raedon 5850 graphics, and a dual core AMD 4200 with dual 7950 gt nvidia cards. I am currently using zalman 9900 on the quad and 9700 on the dual core. There are a couple of reasons that I want to switch to water one being less heat in the computer room and less fans running inside the cases. Both of my cases are full towers and can fit sone big water rigs.

The advice I need is what are some kits that would be good to cool my CPUs and graphics cards with out killing my pocket. I understand they are not cheap I am just looking for kits that are good on the low and high end of the price scales that would be good kits.

 

[entropist]

First off, unless you put the radiators outside the room, you will still have exactly the same amount of heat in the room. Water cooling is more efficient at moving the heat but does not actually eliminate it.

As far as kits go, stay away from them if you really want the best thing for your $. It would be blind luck to find a kit that actually had a good selection of parts for any particular system. You'll do best to hand pick; don't be afraid to buy used, it's easy to get a used block in good-as-new condition.

Look around the forum you''ll find many old threads to help you out.

 

[ghost6303]

as mentioned- heat is heat, unless your hardware is producing less of it, no matter how you move heat you are still going to have the same amount of it in your room. water cooling is just more efficient at dumping the heat outside the case then air.

so you have a list of the parts you want to cool-
1 CPU - Socket AM3
1 CPU - Socket 939
1 GPU - ATI 5850
2 GPU - nVidia 7950

now just go online and find some compatable blocks. some questions you need to answer first would be....

- what size tubing do you want to run? this is important because it influences everything else you buy. mostly personal preference, standard sizes are 1/4" 3/8" and 1/2". each size up flows exponentially more water then the previous size so pick the largest you can easily fit in your case. most people go 1/2"

do the GPUs need full face blocks? (a full face block cools the entire card not just the GPU, memory and voltage regs included, typically cost $100+ per each) this would eliminate the need for any other cooling for the card.

or would you prefer a smaller water block that only cools the GPU (around $50) and spend a few extra dollars on some ramsinks. if you go this route you need to have adequate airflow over the card to cool those ramsinks- you will no longer have the card cooler blowing air over the ram and voltage regs, you would need another fan somewhere in the case to do this. also that heat would not be absorbed into the water loop, it will blow around in the case increasing ambient temps.

- what size pump do you need? (if you are going with 3/8" tubing go MCP355, if 1/2" tubing go D5)

- what size radiator do you need to run? im not familiar with AMD and dont know how much heat those components dump out, but your choices are probably either a 2x120mm or a 3x120mm radiator.

-are you mounting the radiator inside or outside the case? grab an extra 120mm fan and see where you could fit 2 or 3 of them side by side (that is the size of the radiator). remember the radiator will need good airflow, that is where 100% of the heat from your computer will be exiting.

- are the two computers sitting next to one another always? (could you put them both in one loop? as long as you never move them- this can save you some considerable costs by not needing to buy 2x pumps, 2x radiators, 2x reservoirs. but this setup has some extra hassles like not ever being able to separate them, if you take one computer offline for maintenance, you have to have them both offline, etc.


once you figure all those things out, you can save yourself 25-50% over the cost and get better cooling performance from buying a "kit". then just go out and shop around on the components. www.frozencpu.com is the place to start, they have the widest selection of everything ive ever seen, though their prices arent necessarily the best. they have everything you need in one place though.