What do you guys recommend? I am planning to spend max of 250 dollars.
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Tom's Hardware has the most thorough explanation I've seen of how to install a quiet and efficient water cooling system for around the budget limitations you've specified. The article is fairly recent, dated July 1, 2002. They even have a brief video showing the steps to build thier water cooling system. Hope this helps. <!-- BBCode Start --><A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/02q3/020701/index.html" TARGET="_blank">Silent and Ice Cold</A><!-- BBCode End -->
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I have Athlon 2100+XP with 2-seagate Bar-IV 80G, Radeon 8500LE, enermax 365 and (basically) Antec 1030 Case.

Our local FRY's Electronics has a Swiftech HT 202-C372 for $190. Is the Price reasonable? Will it be able to cool the beastie? I'm not overclocking, I just want to get rid of all the fan noise! Eventually I would like to add a water block on the Redeon and cool the Disk Drives. Will this still work?

Thanks for any assistance.

Try this site:

http://www.overclockers.com

They have a huge amount of information on water cooling rigs. If you're going to just get a pre-built kit, I'd go with the Innovatek (sp?) kit - I know that kit was also reviewed on Tomshardware, but that site is sort of marginal in really planning it out and implementing the whole project. [/url]

If you water cool a system, you'll have to be careful as you'll get some interesting chemical reactions going on in the conduit system. For instance, if you have copper tubing and an aluminum cooler block, copper and aluminum oxides will deposit in the cooler block and eventually clog it. If you add chlorine or salts to it to prevent biological buildup, you will be promoting the redox reactions and accelerating the chemical buildup by making your coolant somewhat strongly electrolytic. It would be wise to flush the entire system with deionized water every few weeks and disassemble it occasionally to clean off the inevitable scale. Also, anodize the aluminum parts and add a large chunk of zinc the resevoir, and that should reduce the amount that precipitates on the rest of the system, but you'll still have to clean that from to time and as the reactions occur, you'll be eating away the metals that are not being deposited on, so you'll have to replace the parts eventually. I wouldn't expect an unmaintained system to last more than about 4-8 months before clogging and a well maintained system might keep going anywhere from a few months to many years before leaking, depending on the construction of the metallic parts and electrolytic strength of the coolant.

Just watch out for corrosion.

Very interesting insights here, Willy, at least for one who's never used watercooling. I've never seen such comments elsewhere. You obviously have experience with watercooling?

Seems like http://www.innovatek.de/ has probably solved the electrolosys issue by not using any aluminium in the cooling circuit. Seems the issue comes up with extruded/machined Al cpu/vga blocks. The radiator is almost always copper tube based. Copper is WAY better than aluminium with water in all situations, especially using non marine grade Al. Copper usually just gets a thin film of friendly oxide and stops corroding. Aluminum eats and eats and eats away. Innovatek looks good. Maybe a 20% alcahol mix would stop the sliming, and you would get no bad corrosion. Just guessing:)

Just use something like car coolant or add water wetter to your water, stops corrision AND stops nice green slime from growing like what happened to paw dan http://www.dansdata.com/burning.htm

I actually don't have any experience water cooling. I just find the topic somewhat interesting so I've read quite a bit about it in the past few months and I have a strong enough background in chemistry to understand the problems a bit more than most of the reports I've read. I go tthe zinc idea from working on cars. Most of the time, they'll have caps or thermostats made out of metals more reactive than aluminum (almost always zinc in the form of galvanized steel) that to attract what would otherwise gunge up the coolant passage through the engine block and radiator, which are both ever increasingly cast from aluminum these days. Most of my guesswork comes from working on cars. (which I do only because trustworthy mechanics and new, reliable cars are just too expensive)

Hello, you should check out that site (and its forums) :
http://www.procooling.com

Forum members (including myself) will gladly answer your questions - provided you do a bit of search before.

I have been using watercooling for years now, with full success. Innovatek are quite good, but their Alu / Copper mix doesnt inspire me much (battery effect...). Try to compare with aquacomputer.de, low-noise.de (for EU residents) or dangerden.com , dtekcustoms.com (for USA residents), for example. They all carry great products.