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Watercooling??? Never considered it but is it quieter....?

aircooled

aircooled

Lifer
I'm not into overclocking anymore since clock speeds are so high (and cheap nowadays). But regarless, the main PC has moved into the living area of the house rather than a back-room. I would like it to be a quiet as possible and as powerful as possible. Is a pump driven watercooled CPU quieter than a HSF??? I've never even considered watercooling in the past, but these units from Koolance look very solid and reliable.

Is water cooling going to one day replace aircooling of non-o/c'd processors?? Should a non o/c'r consider watercooling as a quieter alternative to a fan???

Just looking for input and opinions....
 
With careful selection of cpu and case fans such as Panaflo's, you can make your system pretty darned quiet, and a lot cheaper...

HTH 🙂
 
water cooling is very silent. it uses ( in the koolance case) 3 slow moving fans. So unless ur computer is ancient enough to not need many fans u should really look at the koolance water colled cases.
 
I've been researching water cooling for quite some time now..... The more I learn, the more I want to get a system.... Theres tons of options for pumps (If your concerned about noise) This is the best I've found so far is this one 200gph pump, reservoir, maximizes space

about the koolance cases... They seem Like a rip, 200+ bucks... It would be a LOT cheaper to build your own system, including your case
Some other great sites I've found with reviews and a lot of water cooling info is dangerden.com and http://www.case-mod.com/store/default.php

Hope this helps,
Yeti
 
While I am going to have to agree that watercooling is near silent, there are better ways to reach a quiet pc. And cheaper. You can use sound dampening material, you can get larger fans at slower rpms. You can get a hard drive enclosure that dampens sound from that too.
 
Originally posted by: BuddyAtBzboyz
While I am going to have to agree that watercooling is near silent, there are better ways to reach a quiet pc. And cheaper. You can use sound dampening material, you can get larger fans at slower rpms. You can get a hard drive enclosure that dampens sound from that too.
Click to expand...

Good points. Plus when aircooling, you don't have to worry about anything leaking, condensing, or a pipe bursting and ruining everything. It could work, but air is cheaper.

Plus you don't need THAT many fans. A couple will suffice for most any machine!
 
I agree, my old case had two old fans in it, one of which barely worked. When I got my new case it came with 4, I unpugged two, no change. And sound-dampening material doesn't do squat, just another waste of money...

My dvd is the loudest thing in my system...🙂
 
I'm watercooling with no radiator fans. Loudest noise is my Maxtor D740X (liquid bearing), over my retrofitted power supply with a panaflo.
 
That D-tek system is fantastic. The max inline system is exactely what I have but I opted for the maze3 waterblock instead.
My 120mm fan on the the heater core is completely silent running at 7v, and I'm able to o/c my cpu to 2.5Ghz while being silent.
I have two 80mm silencer's blowing air out of my system. The loudest thing in there is the fan from the Geforce4 (Which I plan on adding a water block to this too.)

The highest o/c before for me was 2.3 stable with the stock Intel fan. So an extra 200Mhz is nice plus my temps are 9c over ambient temp under load. I have yet to see 40c on the cpu. I'll never go back to air cooling after this. BTW I tried the Koolance system before and had problems, and it wasn't completely silent. Those tiny fans make noise, so there was no benefit to the system. I couldn't o/c very well with it.
 
I built my own watercooling setup 2 weeks ago and have been getting great results with it. The loudest part of my setup is my IBM Deskstar (Deathstar) harddrive. Especially after I surrounded the pump with dense foam. Originally I had planned to watercool the cpu, chipset, and Geforce4, but the thing is, once I took the heat from the cpu out of the case with the external watercooling, the temp of everything else dropped REMARKABLY. My chipset runs at 27 degrees C, and the P4 1.6A @ 2.544 runs at 32-33 degrees C at full load and it's the summertime in CA which means that those temps are barely above room temp.


Pics of my Homemade Watercooling Rig
 
I really was considering water cooling but then i don't want to deal with the condensation it can produce or leakage...sure it can be quieter...but you still got 2 120mm fans possible one on the radiator...which still makes noise...
but i would sure like a quieter system so i can have it on without hearing anything...
 
I really was considering water cooling but then i don't want to deal with the condensation it can produce or leakage...sure it can be quieter...but you still got 2 120mm fans possible one on the radiator...which still makes noise...
Click to expand...
You don't need much for the 120mm fan. You can get a slow Sunon or something and run it at 7v. Believe me, the 120mm fan is quieter than any hard drive out there.
This isn't refrigeration that were talking about. The coldest the water can be is ambient temp. So there can be no condensation.
I gues leaks could be a concern, but you test the system out before you put it in your computer. I would be just as worried about a heatsink falling off as I would leakage.

 
Dug
ture, but you have a few more things to worry about when go with water cooling...main thing is leakage...you can also worry about heatsink falling off as well...😉
 
Whitey,
Clever workmanship, looks a bit labor intensive - good job.
Worked on a (classifiied) system that used helium cryo coolers, and system synthetic silicon ester coolers for the power supply & imbedded boards. Leaks were the plague.
I would never go with the 'wet' cooler myself, but congrats to you on your perseverence.
Now if we could get a liqiud helium dewar system to a decent price ( they're over $35,000) that might be interesting.


He's dead Jim
What killed him Bones?
Tea, Lemon Zinger - Iced
 
Just don't expect to overclock to any significant degree with the Koolance kit. It sucks performance-wise, so I would only recommend it for a PIII, low MHZ AMD or a Celery rig. Water is going to replace air-cooling and has a long history in the industry. I have an aunt that is retired from IBM and the servers she used to work with used distilled water to cool the processing units and the enormous hard disks. This is not new technology, folks, but now it's trickling down to the consumer market. Haven't you heard of the Toshiba laptop that has a phase-change cooler? In the very near future air-cooling is going to play a minor role in the computing world. 😀
 
Just don't expect to overclock to any significant degree with the Koolance kit. It sucks performance-wise
Click to expand...

Really? you must own one then 😉 my koolance case keeps my cpu (1600xp @ 1743mhz / 1.95v) at around 50c full load from the diode and I also have my gpu connected as well (ti4200@300mhz). Whilst performance is not perhaps an overclockers dream in no way does it suck. I have added a small (80mm) radiator from black ice to the case between the cpu and the gpu and now the fans stay at 45% constant with a diode temp of 45c max, all at a whisper quiet noise level. If only my 10k scsi drive was as quiet.
 
If you want quiet, figure out what Compaq does to go noiseless in the model I have at work! It's an Evo model with a 1.8GHz P4 & 40GB HD. I can't hear a thing even at night when the building is empty! Prob is you can only tell it's on by the power button light which is hidden behind my keyboard. The footprint is tiny too 🙂
 
there is no water condensation to worry about as long you don't combine water cooling with peltier system.
 
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