Water cooling - how effective?

[jm8881]

I've been thinking about going to water cooling to clean up the inside of my couputer (tons of wires) and to lower the noise level a bit. How effective are these setups. I've just read on these forums for about an hour and I've got a bit of a headache from everything I've read. Logic would tell me that it is more effective than air, else no one would use it, but how much more so? Also I plan on cooling the cpu, gpu, and possibly the north bridge. I'm not to worried about looks or going with an external setup. My computer is not pretty, it's actually all primer black since I never finished my case mod project that I lost interest in. Anyone with tips to send me in the right direction? About how many gph would be needed for this and how big a radiator or heater core? Thanks, I'm off to read some more.

 

[AggieMEEN]

About how effective it is:

WCing is as effective as you want it to be. Use a crappy pump, with a crappy heat exchanger, and you're likely to get poor performance. Use good components, and you're likely to get very nice temps, with low noise (assuming you've got the fans on your heatercore wired to a bus).

Case in point: on my 2500+, with air cooling I idled at 42+C; with WC I idle at 24C. Load under WC never goes beyond 35C.

 

[Vengance_01]

just like to add a few things. W/Cing is very very dependent on your Room temp. For example I have a custom W/Cing setup

WW Alu block
C-System 1/2 750 Pump
2 120mm Heatcore 4 120mm fans total 6-7 volts

With my case temp around 40-42C I run around 46-47C Idle and full load 49-50C. This is with Moblie 2400@1.95volts 2500MHZ. When my case temp is around 34C I can run around 42C idle and 45-46C Full load. So my point is, W/Cing can help in any situation. Another thing to note is idle and load are never far apart, and you can pump much higher voltage into the processor. A radiator is only as good as how cold the air be sucked throught is

Forgot to mention Room temp is always around 80F with A/C(rarely on, damn parents) and around 90F W/O the A/C on.

 

[coz]

I'm a recent convert to Watercooling and I'm very impressed. I grabbed a Waterchill KT12A-L30 kit, perfect for a watercooling n00b like myself. It was a bit of a bitch to get it all running (the pump's impeller had been very loose before I repaired it) but now it's working great. It's doing a great job keeping my P4 cool.........

(P4 @ 3.76GHz, Waterchill fans @ 7-volts)
Room Temp - 25*C
CPU Idle Temp - 27*C (RT + 2*C)
CPU Load Temp - 31*C (RT + 6*C)

Compare that to some old measurements when I was running with air-cooling

(P4 @ 3.2 Stock, Stock Intel HSF)
Room Temp - 23*C
CPU Idle Temp - 32*C (RT + 9*C)
CPU Load Temp - 53*C (RT + 30*C)


That's how effective watercooling has been for me. Even with a lot more CPU watts and a warmer room temperature, the Watercooling is still able to produce a load temperature lower than the air-cooling could keep the CPU under idle!!

 

[coz]

Forgot to mention Room temp is always around 80F with A/C(rarely on, damn parents) and around 90F W/O the A/C on.

90*F?? That's inhumane!! Take 'em to court and get legal rights to run that A/C 24/7!!

 

[Dijonase]

Watercooling will give you great temps as long as you've got good parts, but it'll also decrease noise considerably. Well, in my case it did anyway. I had a Volcane 7+ on my CPU and you could hear the fan on that damn thing from 100 yards away. After I added my watercooling setup the noise dropped by quite a bit.

As far as the temps go, I used to be idling at about 39C or 40C. On water I'm idling at about 32C or 33C. Also, a previous poster mentioned, the temps really don't go very far on load. They maybe raise 3C or 4C for me, whereas they used to get up near 50C.

 

[Stugots]

i had my p4 running at 3.2 on a volcano 7 and the load temps were around 60C. after i got my koolance running, i was able to raise my speed to 3.4 and my temps are in the high 30'sC. im using the koolance to cool my cpu/gpu/nb. id imagine with a better performing watercooling setup, you could get down to the low 30's

 

[0933]

I've been thinking about going to water cooling to clean up the inside of my couputer (tons of wires) and to lower the noise level a bit. How effective are these setups. I've just read on these forums for about an hour and I've got a bit of a headache from everything I've read. Logic would tell me that it is more effective than air, else no one would use it, but how much more so? Also I plan on cooling the cpu, gpu, and possibly the north bridge. I'm not to worried about looks or going with an external setup. My computer is not pretty, it's actually all primer black since I never finished my case mod project that I lost interest in. Anyone with tips to send me in the right direction? About how many gph would be needed for this and how big a radiator or heater core? Thanks, I'm off to read some more.

First of all if your wanting to watercool the cpu, gpu, and the nb your not going to have much room left. Air cooling leaves alot more room then watercooling. The typical watercooling setup takes up pretty much all the room left in the case. As for how effective it is... My take on it from my experience is that its about 5-10 degrees cooler but says cooler when you overclock. That is to say that if I were to increase the my overclock it wouldn't heat up as quickly as with air cooling. Does that sound right? Hope this helps.

 

[Vengance_01]

90*F?? That's inhumane!! Take 'em to court and get legal rights to run that A/C 24/7!!

Man I would love too see how well my W/Cing rig could do in a room at 25C But I think I am gonna get a small windowed A/C unit and run the Bitch 24/7

 

[jm8881]

First of all if your wanting to watercool the cpu, gpu, and the nb your not going to have much room left. Air cooling leaves alot more room then watercooling. The typical watercooling setup takes up pretty much all the room left in the case. As for how effective it is... My take on it from my experience is that its about 5-10 degrees cooler but says cooler when you overclock. That is to say that if I were to increase the my overclock it wouldn't heat up as quickly as with air cooling. Does that sound right? Hope this helps.

I have a full size tower so room is not an issue, but if it were to be, I would just run everything outside of the tower which is what I was thinking I would do in the first place. To cool the cpu and gpu, I'm thinking the nb really won't need it, how strong of a pump would I need to supply enough water and be able to handle the 3+ ft of tube?

 

[coz]

I would just run everything outside of the tower which is what I was thinking I would do in the first place. To cool the cpu and gpu, I'm thinking the nb really won't need it, how strong of a pump would I need to supply enough water and be able to handle the 3+ ft of tube?

You're thinking of doing exactly what I *am* doing. I've got my res, pump and rad all outside the case and I'm using virtually all the tubing that came with my Waterchill kit (supposed to be 3 metres!). I've only attached the VGA and CPU blocks, I couldn't be bothered with the NB block since I'm not going above 1000FSB (250MHz) on this i875P MCH. The Hydor pump that came with my kit is supposed to push 1200 litres an hour, I guess flow must be pretty good because the temps I'm getting certainly are.