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best bang for your buck: Water cooling kit, or buy parts?

R

RIGorous1

Platinum Member
Hi I'm thinking of going water cooling my entire case... gpu, cpu, etc. and was wondering what is the best way to go on the shortest amount of cash? I don't want the best subzerochillibrator with gold cooling fins or anything, just a standard $100-250 setup that will allow me to overclock like air couldn't. Or should I just buy parts and build it over time? cheaper?

If anyone could make some recomendations or refer a good place that sells this stuff for cheap, or can point me to a guide to build it all, I'd appreciate it.

Also is it possible to replace the resevoir and water pump on the thermaltake aquarius for something better?
 
up for some responses please
rose.gif
 
I have always hear that you can get the best performance and the best price by custom building your own setup. The bad part is, you have to know what you are doing. Honestly, I would not build a water cooling system if I didn't have the money to do it right. Chances are, you would gain nothing over a decent heatsink if you cut corners on your water cooling setup (in all fairness though, there are some very nice heatsinks on the market.)
 
I wouldn't underestimate the DangerDen watercooling kits. For example:
  MAZE3 AMD
  Aluminum 120mm (90cfm) Fan
  10xWhite 1/2 inch Hose Clamps
  Hydor L20
  Black Ice Extreme
  5 1/4 Bay
  10ft ClearFlex 1/2-inch
Total: $192 at voyeurmods.com

You can get a Eheim pump, but it'd cost ya about $20-35 more for the same capacity pump.
 
sweet setup some1x... that's just in my range, also thanks for all the links. Did you guys see the new maze4 from danger den? its got a nice swirl design. Is the maze4 better than swiftech's mcw5000, cause the mcw5000 looks like a simple 1 channel design.
 
RIGorous1

I picked up the Swiftech H20-8500PV kit for my first H2O set-up, and I was really happy with it. I'm only up to 3.0ghz stable on Prime95 (24hrs) on a 2.4b. I should have a 2.8c from Newegg on Monday, so I'm hoping to get a little more out of the system.

The kit had everything you will need to get the system going, except for Distilled water and some Artic Silver 3 (if you don't want to use the thermal compound that came with the kit). I picked this kit over the Danger Den simply because I was a bit confused by what I needed to order from the DD site in order to get "everything" I would need. The Illustrated instructions (8+ pages) were easy to follow and when I finally flipped the switch everything worked great.

The kit was a little pricey at $257.00 but I think I got my moneys worth. On to the 2nd H2O system...
 
Thanks for the review some1x, it was some good reading, but I noticed that they reviewed the maze2 and 3, not the maze4 which just came out.

cooltechnica has it and it looks better than the maze3. Hrm... cheaper and better than the mcw5000?
 
Originally posted by: funkyduck
RIGorous1

I picked up the Swiftech H20-8500PV kit for my first H2O set-up, and I was really happy with it. I'm only up to 3.0ghz stable on Prime95 (24hrs) on a 2.4b. I should have a 2.8c from Newegg on Monday, so I'm hoping to get a little more out of the system.

The kit had everything you will need to get the system going, except for Distilled water and some Artic Silver 3 (if you don't want to use the thermal compound that came with the kit). I picked this kit over the Danger Den simply because I was a bit confused by what I needed to order from the DD site in order to get "everything" I would need. The Illustrated instructions (8+ pages) were easy to follow and when I finally flipped the switch everything worked great.

The kit was a little pricey at $257.00 but I think I got my moneys worth. On to the 2nd H2O system...
Click to expand...

Nice kit! I was looking at that one earlier because it includes the video gpu block also... where did you get your set up? Since this was your first time with watercooling what was the hardest part about puting it together, cause I'm sure there was something that the manual could not explain perfectly. Thanks for the feedback, I'm getting psyched about all this :Q

Rig
 
I got the kit at pcpowerzone.com and they were very quick to get it out to me (3 days).

I only ran into a few snags.
One was getting too much of a bend in the tubing. My radiator is in between the GPU and CPU, so there isn't much room to bend the tubing. I should have installed the cooling blocks (making sure to protect the surfaces like the instructions say) on the CPU and GPU and then cut the tubing to fit. I eye-balled it and when I did finally seat the GPU, there was too much of a bend in it. I also installed the radiator so it is pulling air from inside the case to out. I may redesign it so it pulls air from outside - in, but that will leave me with the problem of hotter air inside. (still reading forums about this one...)

I had a small leak from the ratiator, but it didn't cause any problems. I clamped the tubing too close to the radiator side of the inlet/outlet valves instead of closer to the valve ends. This caused the seaping to stop, and no more seen for almost 3 weeks.

I also bought a 1L bottle of water so I would have a container to mix the coolant in. Considering I only used a cup or so, I was able to seal the container with what remained (at least 2/3 liquid was left over). If I run into any problems, at least I have enough to fill the system 2 more times.

That's it for any problems I ran into. I read the instructions 3 or 4 times (a first...) and had the system going in a few hours. If I can find a way to get some pics on here I will, if you want to see the install so far.

 
becooling

dtek

these are the places i got my components from

dtek radiator
t- splitter
10 feet of 1/2 diameter tygon
120 mm fan (very quiet)
swiftech mcw5000a
via aqua 1300 pump
water wetter

with shipping and everything, it was around 200 bucks... running full load on seti@home @ 40C's 🙂
 
SOme 1x

I agree, that the fans are a little small and don't seem to push much air through the radiator. I ordered (2) Thermaltake Smartfans II to replace the ones that came stock. I'll be able to crank up the rpm's to see what a difference more airflow will make with this radiator. I liked the DD radiators, but I didn't have the room to mount anything bigger than 80mm in the spot where I wanted the radiator.

Still, with the stock Smartech fans and radiator I'm only running 46c to 48c (CPU) under Prime95 at 3 Ghz (2.4b). I'm not sure If I should be getting better with the watercooling or not. The system is still in my garage, so it should go down a few degrees when I move it into air conditioning...
 
What case are you using? If you cannot use 120mm fan/radiators, then consider adding another black ice micro (which is the exact same as the swiftech radiator) to your system.
 
i just replied to you rigorous1, but here's my rig right now...
2x BlackIce Micro's...
1x BlackIce Chrome Xtreme REV2 (best rad ever made)
Eheim 1250 (317GPM)
1/2"tubing all around
handmade aluminum resivoir
Swiftech MCW-500A
Swiftech MCW-40 (modded to be a 1/2" GPU block)
1x Panaflo aluminum case fan (similar to 12L series of today)\ are my radiator fans
2x 36CFM 80mm case fans.........................................................../
All this in my Lian-Li PC-71 case, with 8HDD's, 3 CD drives, 1 120mm intake in the bottom, and 4 80mm fans for intake/exhaust.
 
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