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Dipping a toe into Water Cooling...

Essence_of_War

Essence_of_War

Platinum Member
Are the usual suspects of AIO water coolers a decent way to dip one's toe into water cooling territory?

I was thinking about dropping a little money on a 240mm AIO, and I don't really care if it isn't an earth shattering performance delta, but I was mostly interested in if they will "give one a taste" of the dark arts of water cooling. 😛
 
Its a water cooler but it doesn't really give you a single part that could be used in a future custom built water cooling loop.
 
The experience of getting an AIO would be no different than getting an air cooler as everything would be a matter of plug and play. You get no such luxury with custom watercooling as there's a cycle of building and maintaining.

If you'd want to get some experience with watercooling, consider getting XSPC custom watercooling kits. It eliminates much of the designing and with some common sense in assembly, you can have something that's similar to custom watercooling.
 
Too bad the H220 won't be on sale in the US
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It won't be? I see it available on NCIX-US for a-not-totally-unreasonable-price.

My reading of the various reviews of it indicate that it's a AIO cooler but that it is designed to be able to be expandable into a custom loop, is that correct?
 
dma0991 said:
The experience of getting an AIO would be no different than getting an air cooler as everything would be a matter of plug and play. You get no such luxury with custom watercooling as there's a cycle of building and maintaining.

If you'd want to get some experience with watercooling, consider getting XSPC custom watercooling kits. It eliminates much of the designing and with some common sense in assembly, you can have something that's similar to custom watercooling.
Click to expand...
Great advice, I agree. You can also look at what XSPC kits use as a "shopping list" of essentials and order your own kit off their outline.
 
I'll look into one of the XSPC kits, thanks for the recommendations.

Here's a hopefully-not-obvious question, when orienting water cooling radiators, should they be intakes for the case, or exhausts? My guess is that in general either would work, it's just a question of what makes the most sense based on your case set-up, and the rest of your intakes/exhausts etc, right?
 
Essence_of_War said:
I'll look into one of the XSPC kits, thanks for the recommendations.

Here's a hopefully-not-obvious question, when orienting water cooling radiators, should they be intakes for the case, or exhausts? My guess is that in general either would work, it's just a question of what makes the most sense based on your case set-up, and the rest of your intakes/exhausts etc, right?
Click to expand...

Generally, you want them to have the coolest possible air running through them, so intake; however, I'm sure if there was a choice between a larger radiator blowing air out of the case vs a smaller radiator sucking air in, I'd go with the larger 100% of the time.

I don't really see how that would ever be a case though, as you can chose the orientation of your fans yourself.
 
Essence_of_War said:
My guess is that in general either would work, it's just a question of what makes the most sense based on your case set-up, and the rest of your intakes/exhausts etc, right?
Click to expand...
Either way would work but for blowing case air out through the radiator, determine whether the case temps is considerably higher than ambient temps. Higher case temps can be caused if you have the GPU exhausting its hot air into the case and gets recycled through the radiator at the top. Wouldn't be an issue if you watercool both CPU and GPU.

I orient my fans to blow in, but I placed filters that restrict its performance a little but IMO is a worthy tradeoff when I don't have to dust the internals as often.
 
Thanks for the quick replies, I was sort of wondering since I have a case that has two front 120mm intakes, a side 200mm intake, and a 120mm rear exhaust. I have two top intake slots (or space for a 240mm rad), but I'm not sure if it's sensible to add, what I can only describe as, EVEN MOAR INTAKEZ!

Would it be more sensible in this sort of set-up to run the the side fan as an exhaust, and have the rad as an intake?
 
First things first, don't stick any body part in the water ;D

But on a more serious second, definitely look at the XSPC Raystorm D5 kits as viable watercooling kits (Specifically RX/AX). If I were looking at a kit at this current time the Raystorm D5 Photon kit would have my full attention.
 
Essence_of_War said:
Would it be more sensible in this sort of set-up to run the the side fan as an exhaust, and have the rad as an intake?
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I went with all filtered positive pressure; 6 intakes and 1 exhaust at the back. There can be drawbacks to my approach but it doesn't matter much because all the hot air will be removed (internal case pressure > external ambient pressure) at the back, where there are slits and perforations at the back of the case.
 
Hmmm that is a good point I guess, there are a ton of PCI slots, an io shield, and a bunch of cracks, crevasses etc that all act as auxillary exhaust points.
 
That kit would be great for entry level but if you're going with that, limit it to CPU only. That pump would support a single CPU block + single GPU block but anything more, the restriction would overwhelm the pump. Furthermore, that pump is may not be serviceable (screws at the top of the reservoir but I'm uncertain if it opens).

To my knowledge, these kits do come complete with fans and tubing. However, you would need distilled water (store bought is fine) and this (prevents algae, place it in the reservoir, submerged). Combination of these two will suffice and there's no need in special colored coolants.
 
That is the problem with many of the kits. The pumps are not powerful enough to move water for much more than what is included in the kit.
 
OK...so that kit + fans + distilled water + silver killcoil for a CPU only loop.

I'll have to think about it, it's a pretty reasonable price, comparable to one of the nicer AIO's, and has the added advantage of the fun of putting things together myself.
 
I'm looking to build my first water cooled setup as well but I'm going to use all custom quality parts. Like a few others said, the pumps that come with most kits are not really upto snuff. It's better to spend a little more $$ to build a custom setup with quality parts.
 
james1701 said:
http://www.frozencpu.com/products/1...w_Free_Dead-Water.html?id=8xzNIQcf&mv_pc=1355

I just ordered this kit. If I run into not having enough pump, I will give up computers all together lol.
Click to expand...

I'm going to file away that link for future reference, since I'll soon reach a sort of "casual" crossroads between air and water -- to deal with the "fire" and "earth" (of heat and kruft). [That's supposed to be funny, if you understand the pre-Renaissance origins of scientific thinking. . . ]

So I'm also interested in opinions about square copper radiators:

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/1...-_Version_2_-_Full_Copper.html?tl=g30c95s1344

I'd prefer a single fan, and so I'd prefer a radiator to fit. That leaves the question as to whether fitting it to a HAF midtower would only require a minor mod or none.

Fewer fans, the better. More airflow, the better. More cooling capacity, the better. I don't see why you couldn't hook up two of these m_____rs in your water loop.

Of course, there might be a natural aversion to large fans. You could worry that your computer could actually take off from your office heliport.
 
I think that rad with a fan on it you overlap the mobo a lot if you were able to shoe horn it in. I think it has great potential, but not so much in a HAF.

That was funny!
 
BonzaiDuck said:
...I don't see why you couldn't hook up two of these m_____rs in your water loop.
Click to expand...

You could easily. mount the rad to your case and sandwich a fan between the two. I did this with dual 240's for some time when I was benchmarking. One rad is in pull mode and the other is push. The delta between the first rad and the second is minimal.
 
Tweakin said:
That's a lot of pump! I ran my entire old system off a MCP350 with dual rads...it's all about the head pressure, and you've got a lot!
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That's what she said 😉

It's a pity they don't make full blocks for my Gigabyte 7970ghz cards. So right now, I am not sinking money into upgrading those, but when I do, the will go in the loop.

I just wish I could find an Aquaero 6XT in stock somewhere in the US.
 
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