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Loading ...Adventures in water cooling
garethogden
There are many things you can do to a PC in order to mark it out as a custom rig, but few are as obvious or as effective as water cooling. A well-implemented, water-cooled PC is more that just utterly cool, it’s a work of art, as the PCs from Vadim and Voodoo PC regularly illustrate.
I don’t contend to be able to build a water cooled PC to the same standard as these two mighty system builders, but I have dabbled with water cooling on more than a few occasions, both for my home rigs and also for features in the magazine (the last one being the system in the ‘Build your Dream PC’ feature.
However, because air-cooling has improved so much over the last couple of years, and PC processors have become (in the main) more efficient, the need for water-cooling has diminished, to the point where the only good reasons for doing it were if you wanted to cool the CPU, Northbridge and graphics card, with a view to heavy overclocking. Quiet cooling, traditionally another reason to go for water over air, could easily be achieved with a HSF.
This is starting to change though, and since I’ve upgraded to Core-architecture CPUs I’ve noticed that, while these chips are efficient at stock clocks, overclocked and overvolted, they really pump out some heat.
My latest toy is a quad-core QX6700 rig, overclocked to 3GHz, which, in addition to providing giggle-inducing levels of performance, pumps out enough heat to roast a Christmas turkey, and no HSF I tried could tame the beast without sounding like a screaming banshee.
It’s for this reason that I decided to dabble with water-cooling once again, in order to restore some peace and quiet. However, the process of water-cooling my QX6700 PC reminded me of one of the reasons why I ditched water-cooling in the first place - it’s a major pain in the arse.
It didn’t help that my water-kit was a bit of a Heath Robinson affair, cobbled together from a variety of different bits I found languishing in the Labs (I used the last spare full kit upgrading a reader’s PC last year). The pump/reservoir, 120mm radiator and tubing were from a (now discontinued) Cool by Corsair kit, and I chopped off the existing (boring looking) water block and replaced it with an awesome Swiftech Apogee GT block.
Unfortunately, the LGA775 mounting kit for this block was nowhere to be found, so I ended up improvising a mounting system from a bunch of other mounting kits, including a Zalman retention bracket and AMD Opteron screw kit from some other long-forgotten water setup.
A couple of hours of fiddling, swearing and hunting through tubs for spare screws later and the hardware was in place. I then filled the loop (although at one point I almost drank from the bottle of Alphacool Tec-Protect-Plus, instead of my cup of tea; note to readers - don’t do this) cleared out any air bubbles and hooked the system unit back up to my monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Naturally, it didn’t work (I had anticipated this eventuality and so didn’t swear too much) and, after about 30 minutes of faffing around in the BIOS, decided to re-seat the water-block, which did the trick. By this point, my Windows installation had been corrupted by several abrupt system shutdowns, thanks to the CPU’s thermal trip kicking in, although this wasn’t a problem thanks to Vista’s Repair function.
Eventually, everything was working as it should and my QX6700 rig now runs at 3GHz with only the gentle murmur of the pump and restrained whoosh of the 120mm fan on the radiator disturbing the peace.
Was it worth it? Yes, since the PC is quiet and overclocked and, if I’m honest, I did actually enjoy doing it too. The fact is, though, that I wouldn’t have even considered water-cooling were it not for the fact that HSFs simply weren’t up to the job.
If CPUs continue to get quicker, and pack in more cores, water-cooling may start to creep back into the mainstream again, which will make building a quiet, performance rig much more difficult and certainly more time consuming, but, ultimately, that little bit more rewarding too. I’d certainly recommend using a complete water-kit though!
Photo: The world of water by Snapr.
Oh Gareth what are we going to do with you! Welcome to my world though! It’s taken a couple of years for me to get to know all the manufacturers, types of fittings, best setups and what is and isn’t worth it, with a few leaks here and there too! The bottom line is if it doesn’t leak, you’ve done a good job and you can pretty much guarantee that you won’t have to worry about heat anymore.
I totally agree it’s a steep learning curve and even when you’ve built up the confidence to have water passing within inches of hundreds of pounds of hardware, the setup process can quickly get complicated and easily turns into a nightmare, especially if you have mixed and matched components instead of buying a complete kit. However even when it’s been working away quietly for months, I never fail to be impressed by how cool it looks, the performance it gives and how quiet it is.
I have just started to build a water cooling system from scratch, looking at your bloggs, i wish i hadn’t.
at the moment i don’t need the cooling capacity but i though i could do a good job. can you recommend some good water blocks (at the moment for a socket 754 Semperon (No Laughing)).
Water-cooling a S754 rig is a bit OTT, although this at least means you don’t need a very high-end kit.
There are many different theories on what block/fitting/tube size is best, so anything I say will no doubt be contradicted by something someone else might say!
Swiftech kits are pretty good if you’re just starting out though and it will still be usable when/if you upgrade to a different CPU/motherboard.
Ha Ha – that is funny – actually not really.
I guess this is the reason Gigabyte is now introducing the 3D Mercury.
Its got water-cooling built-in, and the whole concept seems very interesting.
Check it out
http://www.gigabyte.eu/Products/Chassis/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=2327
Some might like the idea, while others will not.
But it’s not really about that – it’s about offering choices.
Installing water-cooling products is not always easy and a lot of people make mistakes.
The concept of water-cooling your components is good and it does work.
Maybe CustomPC will review this product soon… 
I think maybe CPC need to write a feature on watercooling - the setting up of, the pitfalls and a review of some half-decent complete kits.
We’re looking into doing another big feature on water-cooling, but it’s still in progress. The issue is that there are so many different schools of thought when it comes to what kit to use (high flow/low flow etc) and how to set-up a loop that it’s a bit of a minefield. We think we have a way around this though so stay tuned…
My Q6600 (SLACR) would do 3.08ghz on the stock fan. With a triple radiator setup from Radiical it will happily deliver 3.825ghz with 60c temperatures whilst priming.
wow!!!
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