Beginner Water Cooling

Hi, I'm interested in doing water cooling to lower the temperature on my cpu and throughout my computer. I saw a water block in a tigerdirect magazine, and it got me interested in water instead of fans for cooling. I was wondering if i could get a crash course on water cooling. Like is it possible for me just to use the water block alone to cool my cpu? Or do i need to get tubes running throughout my computer connected to a larger container of water as i've seen some people on this website do? Im also curious as to how it works exactly. Im curious on the cheapest way to do it, like spending $30-50 bucks, and expensive ways to do it. Any information would be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

in water cooling you have a resevior, pump, radiator, and water block. water travels out of the resevior, through the pump, to the water block, back to the radiator and round again.

 

as Dan said. in addition, you can ad a chipset cooler in there for the video card.

keep in mind cheap 'packaged' water cooling systems are usually not that great. even the expensive 'packages' are usually not as good as what you can do if you buy individual components.

dangerden and swiftech make great waterblocks, and if paired with a good radiator and a solid reservoir can make for a great watercooling setup.

 

I bought a Koolance Case /w water-cooling built into it and its given me no troubles and works great. Almost zero fan noise and my temps are usually around 80` F under load. I bought the newest cpu block and chipset block from koolance because they have screw-on ports to attach the tubing. Easy and works with no leaking. I love it.

 

alright thanks for the info. Im gonna have to do more research on this. It appears it going to be a lot more expensive than i thought.

 

This seems like a good resource:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20010528/

 

I've also noticed that looking at a lot of cooling kits, they say they support amd k7/k8. What is that exactly? I have a athlon xp 2400+, and im believe that it is supported by these kits, but i have no idea what k7/k8 are.

 

k7 is the athlon XP line of processors, and k8 are the new athlon64's

 

When you do get your water cooling system. Please let us know how it goes. I also have a XP2400 and was considering steping into the ring of water cooling.



cooked

 

it can get cheaper. if you're willing to do a bit of diy, you can probably drop the price to about $120 total. that involves getting a cheap heater core (for a car), a panaflo fan, a via agua pump, a dangerden or ww or swifty waterblock, and some good tubing and t connectors and hoseclamps and the sorts. try out this site: http://www.dtekcustoms.com/

 

well in the end, i figure i dont have the money to do good water cooling. I'm just gonna stick with air for now. Im replacing my old basic crap cpu fan with a volcano 12, and using ceramique thermal grease instead of the white glop that came with my standard fan. im also adding a pci exhaust fan and a hdd cooler to my second harddrive. This is ontop of my 1 front intake fan, 2 rear exhaust fans. hopefully things will cool down more in my computer with those. But i think a big improvement will come from the new thermal compound and fan. My computer used to run at 38 C idle, now its 44, and runs at 50 C at full load. Do you think i'll be able to overclock well with this new volcano 12 fan?