Water or Air?

[PrISM506]

You can check out my build thread L=herehttp://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1988938&enterthread=y[/L] for the skinny on it.

Basically my question is should I water cool or air cool my new build? I understand that water cooling is more expensive, but can run quieter and is more effective. So if I'm building a E6600 system with a 8800GTX (possibly 2 in SLI in the future) could air get the job done? I've never had a water cooled system before so another concern of mine is the ease of putting it all together for a newbie.

I've been looking around at some different water systems trying to get an understanding. There are systems like CoolIT's Freezone or the various Koolance EXOs which seem fairly easy and straight foward to put together. They seem to garner some positive reviews, but I see on various forums people saying that they aren't any good and you're better off building the whole thing yourself. So who's right? Is there any truth to it?

 

[Talcite]

watercooling is rather high maintenance. You should really consider sticking to air unless you want the absolute quietest build possible and you're sure you want to OC. Since your components arn't designed for a quiet system anyways, I'd say only watercool if you plan to do intense OCing.

 

[Noubourne]

Get air. You don't sound like you know enough to overclock, much less watercool. And the components you are looking at all suck. If you've been looking around for water cooling advice and you still think an Exos or Freezone is a valid choice, then you're not looking hard enough.

 

[PrISM506]

Originally posted by: Noubourne
Get air. You don't sound like you know enough to overclock, much less watercool. And the components you are looking at all suck. If you've been looking around for water cooling advice and you still think an Exos or Freezone is a valid choice, then you're not looking hard enough.

Thanks for a pretty much useless post. Telling me that 'all of my components suck' and then not explaining why or offering alternative suggestions means either you're lazy or you just want to sound like you know what you're talking about. And if you actually READ my post you would have known that I was asking about the disparity between the positive online reviews for the products and people on various forums with negative opinions.

So why don't you explain why all of my components suck?

 

[Noubourne]

Reading comprehension guy.

The WATER kits you are looking at are garbage. Your computer hardware is fine.

There are three blocks you can consider: Apogee (cheap), Storm Rev. 2 (pricey and best and most tested), and an MP-05. If you want anything other than that, you probably haven't done any research, or are reading press releases and marketing crap from the actual manufacturers. Dtek's new untested fuz(s?)ion would also be an acceptable answer.

There are only a few rads to consider: BlackIce series (cheap and good), Swiftech's MCR rads (also cheap and good), or the Thermochill PE series (best by far and most expensive by far).

Pretty sure it's the MCW-60 for waterblocks that have an 8800 adapter plate that works (I, like you, am too lazy to look it up).

Only a few pumps: AquaExtreme 50Z, MCP655/Liang D5, or MCP355 or 350... Iwaki at the insane overkill high end (if you wanna throw $200 minimum on a pump, go Iwaki).

If you'd done any research you'd insist on 7/16" Masterkleer tubing, worm clamps...

Type water cooling into google, and if you haven't seen the brands I've listed here within the first 10 minutes of research, then you are doing something wrong.

 

[PrISM506]

Now if you had just posted that in the first place, there wouldn't be any problem. I'm so terribly sorry for coming to a hardware forum looking for information on...hardware.

 

[Noubourne]

Well I've seen a lot of bad advice about water around here and you came with opinions from other sites that seem equally bad.

You also still haven't really posted a reason as to WHY you'd want to go water.

I'd still recommend air until you squeeze every last bit of performance out of a top-end $40-50 HSF, and then when you absolutely can't live without pushing that last .15v into the CPU to get to 4Ghz, THEN you move to water.

There are quite a few 3dmark records of even QX chips on air up to 3.8Ghz or so, and probably not that many QX chips in the wild, so I would like to see your goals before I recommend you move to water cooling. C2Ds run relatively cool unless you push them really, REALLY hard. That's about the only market left for water, since 120mm silent fans and heatpipes started to dominate the bang for buck silence market.