Needsome advice on my liquid cool sys

[bterrill]

OK, I have a few questions. I'm no expert and this is my first time. The system is running so it's not anything like what to buy how do I drill holes etc.

I am obviously oc'n my e6600; 450mhz * 8 = 3.6 but I am only using a waterblock on my CPU. I hit a "wall" @ 450 mhz, or 400 mhz if using * 9. Maybe not the wall you talk about, but I either get black screenboot, instant reboot that needs power off, freeze during windows load screen, or load desktop and freeze.

Sometimes more vcore fixed that, sometimes I did have to up my PCI Express by 1. It would get 2 seconds more on the boots but crash, 1 more PCI would be ok until I hit 5-10 more mhz. So, that was the best part of paying attention and doing 3-5 mhz a whack I found out that my pci is a problem sometimes and the vcore too.

Anyways, I am running hugee vcore, 1.56 to hit this 3.6 and my PCI X is at 115 mhz. Is this due to NOT having a gpu block? System specs will be posted at the bottom since most super knowledgeable guys will want it to figure out stuff.

Not only is this my first liquid system, this is honestly my first PCI express video card, or even motherboard. I come from agp and P4 era. So I am unsure really the heat these things put off. I also realize oc'n ups the video and all connected to the PC so it will be hotter from that. I do not want to game a lot or anything if my video is going to be too hot from the 1.2 ghz oc. I didn't overclock thevideo, have no clue how, it's all whatever the factory shipped me. I didn't want to drop the extra $80-100 for the vga block since I was unsure if I needed it.

I use the swiftech apex ultra h2o kit with only cpu waterblock. Like I said, it was/is my first liquid system so try not to rag on me for a kit... I'm sure the majority started this way too. If waterblocking the video is not required for this setup, but would help, how muich performance increase would I get? or temp decreasing?

Secondly, and this is more important to me. The swiftech kit said the coolant is good for about 18 months. I filled that baby to the top man, about 14 days ago and it's almost half gone. I have zero leaks, and I properly put the 5% mix (or was it 10%? I cancheck the manual I followed it to the wire) of distilled they said in there. Air bubbles were there but the inital bleed got rid of them. I have however ran orthos/prime for horus, heck, days on end testing many OC things finding my stable spot. My questions are this, and they are importantto me because the kit said do not run your box with less in the res than the logo which is approaching.

Did that all the prime drain it? I ran the max heat/power tests. This spiked 73-75 C temps according to asus probe (tat said only about 64-65 tho, and core temp about 67-68). My idle is 49-52C on asus probe, again, 47-49 on core temp and 45-49 tat. Unsure which is more correct, but also do not believe a few days straight of stress testing and that high of temps would drain so much coolant.

Was 18 months a joke? Was that assuming you barely oc'd and bought it to make your system quiet?
Does swiftech default coolant suck? I was debating going to Fluid XP from frozencpu because it lights up (yeah I'm one of those guys....). Is my mix bad?

Lastly, this might be a problem too. I found the armor case to not have room to mount the res where I desired, so it's sitting on the floor next to my pump. I have a shitty cam on my phone but you can see the pics of the entire case (easier to see res position), inside the case to see it up close [blurry, sorry, my cam phone sucks], and then I included a pic of some of my cpu/pi/tat/etc crap that might have tech info of important to someone that can lead me to an article or the right directoin.

System:
Build Specs: (copied from newegg order log sorry for all part #s etc)

Case = Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
Motherboard = ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
PSU Unit = HIPER HPU-4B580-MS ATX12V 580W Power Supply 100 - 120V
Video Card = eVGA 512-P2-N635-AR Geforce 7950GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
Memory = GeIL Ultra 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000) Dual Channel Kit
DVD = LG 16X DVD±R Super-Multi DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write Black E-IDE/ATAPI
CPU = Intel® Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe Processor 2.4GHz, 1066FSB, LGA775, 4MB Cache
HD = Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer
Cooling = Swiftech APEX Ultra Liquid Cooling

Pictures:
Here you can see where I have the res, I wanted to mount it up on the side of the drive bays at the top like I saw in the tutorial I read, but them plastic "bay holder" things in the armor block it from going there. I was scared of leaks inititally, so I didn't dare sit it on any kind of device of mine. It's not even using the velcrow, it kind of holds itself in to place against the bump due to that hugeh 250mm fan.

Upclose, but blurry. Better pic of the res position and how all the tubing goes together. After cutting the rad->cpu block tube short 3 times in a row, yep I'm an idiot, I cut the othr rad->pump tube about 3 times toobig lol, so yeah. and no, the wiring is not so horrible now these pics are a bit old.

Last but not least, some temp/volt/random infos from the oc tools, maybe you can spot something that does not seem right. I'm pretty new to this stuff so I might be missing obvious. The best oc I got on my p4, which I came from, was 10 mhz so.. yeah

If there's articles floating about or anything I can go read those, I'm not looking to be babied with anwsers. I am wanting to liquid cool a new pc now that I've done it once, and try DYI, so I want to make sure I didn't do anything wrong. It does seem that the coolant is still sucking down at a good rate, but like mentioned, there's no leaks that I can see at all. Nothing has fried at all, the pc is on 24/7 usually dvdshrinking stacks of dvds, or unraring huge archives, compressing ghost images and other intensive stuff. I just got a soundcard in today from newegg also, sad to say Asus let me down and everyone else on their pos HD onboard audio, so before I game I really want to know why my coolant is going byebye at light fast rates and if it's safe to play games without video blocks on this OC.

Thanks for info, tips, and anwsers.

 

[Adidas4275]

okay 1st tip... this is way too long of a post... i read like less than half of it...

repost a summary... like 3 lines of what you are trying to say..

oh and that OC is damn good....

 

[WarMace]

I got a question for you, what are you using to monitor temps in the task bar?

As for your coolent dissiapering, it settles, sometimes bleeding dosent get it all. If its not a sealed system and open at a fill port overnight, that hot liquid could evaperate in a cool room quite surprisingly. But to be on the save side, when i ran watercooling i used construction paper under the PC to see if it dripped even once. It seems your way past that stage though.

 

[WarMace]

I couldent figure out what you ment by mounting in the drive bays untill i saw this..

 

[medel]

I find that it's pretty standard to have a ridiculous quantity of tiny bubbles drop your cooolant levels that much inless you submerge components in distilled water or similar to get as little water as possible in them. I haven't run a res in a long time, but when I fill my T-line, it just keeps needing more every hour for a day or so.

As for vid card cooling, what are the temps on the card? (sorry if I missed it, it's late) Is the fan horribly loud since you started clocking up the PCI-x bus? Is there artifacting on the screen (lines, triangles, windows smearing when you move them, spots, anything weird)? I would say it's unlikely to need it if you aren't OCing it directly, but I'm not 100% where you're OCing the PCI-X bus..

The temp monitoring program is Asus Probe. I think it's just put over the taskbar.

 

[bail_w]

So... can you rephrase your problems in 2 sentences?

thanks

 

[bterrill]

um, I'm sorry some of you cannot read but this isn't an msn conversation and I'm sorry I have a job and cannot reply to every question in two seconds. If you're going to post saying I cannot comprehend how to read beyond "ok like u and stuff" and need a shorter post skip it? For having so many intelligent people on this forum there's a hell of a lot more idiots.

I'm not going to spend 10 replies saying my vcore, my position of the res, what clock speed I'm running at, did I try this or that because I don't have time.

I found the problem, there was a leak that started roughly when I replaced a harddisk. Hitting thetubing with my hand a few times in the install put enough pressure on the cpu block barbs to turn them slightly resulting in a very small but steady leak. I'm fortunate the mound of crap on my video card didn't fry it. I ran the system with build up of wet coolant on the video card for roughly 7 days before I booted down and spotted it.

I'm replacing the coolant with fluid xp, non-conductive. What's a $35-40 bottle when I have a $4k system? Nothing.

To the ones who tried to help, thank you, to the ones who complained about he post size, you should hit the libary and read a book to expand your mind if it bothered you, ecspecically considering 40% of the post was system specs and pictures and background info on what I would of been asked for if it wasn't included, just like almost every other reply in every other thread asking for volts/temps/whatever when it's not included.

I also have no clue the video card temps as I've not run sensors there yet, but I know I had up'd the pci to 115~ to pull off my OC and I plan to heavily get in to FPS gaming again. I quit playing them a few years agowhen I could not keep up system wise on the ol p4. I figured since I will be re-doing the tubing and coolant that if I'm going to add a waterblock on the card now is the time, not in the future.

Yep, that's asus probe, but the temps seems off according to tat/core temp who both report steadily lower temps. I mainly use it for the vcore readout when OC'n, which seems to be fairly accurate. I notice once it goes much above 1.5 it's unstable shortly after. But since my cooler was leaking I'm sure I can get past 3.6, 3.7-3.8 or so I'll try.

As for the res mount I wanted to pull off, but am unable to in the armor without removing/cutting down the plastic bay holders here's exactly the position that I want to pull off. It's perfect for high/mid case positioning and accessability to refill. If it leaked from the res it'd drip to an area that's also not containing compenents or many wires, but I'm completly re-doing the cooling system and tubing this weekend so maybe this project/mod will be in the future. All I know, is that I got to get the res off fthe floor, that being there and being moved around a lot while going in/out lead to the 2nd cpu barb leaking a little too, but no where near the amount of the one on the left which I grazed multiple times taking out the hard drive bay.

Perfect res position: (taken from a swiftech tutorial off some site I forgot)