Originally posted by: HeaterCore
Here we go again. Stock answers at the ready:
For about $200-250 you can assemble a top-notch watercooling system that will be easily expandable and adaptable. For that price, which will largely carry over into future systems, you get cooling an order of magnitude better than with a traditional HSF as well as blessed silence, if that's your thing. Either alone is sweet; the combination is better. I pity the folks with their Deltas screaming away.
The performance improvement depends largely on the platform. I'm running a Barton at 2500MHz, when my max on air was 2300. Not a huge difference there, sure, but you couldn't buy a Barton with this sort of performance, and to get anywhere near this on air (this side of a mobile chip) you'd go half deaf. A Prescott-based system can see huge performance leaps from watercooling; A64s tend to see less benefit, especially the 90nm chips, because they often reach the limits of their process before heat becomes the overriding factor.
And then, of course, there's the bling factor. It's just cool, a good conversation piece if nothing else. (My fiance took one look at my rig and said I must've been reading my "cool meter" upside down....) Look, some folks rice out their Civics, some build serious home theater setups. And some of us put highly conductive liquids inside running computers. Hell, you already enjoy tinkering with your PC enough to log onto these forums; why not go that extra step? Or don't. Whatever. To each his own, eh?
-HC-
