I am concerned about liquid cooling, since it may cause electric shock

really, has anyone died from liquid cooling system?

I dont think anyone has ever died due to electric shock from a watercooling system in a computer but if your concerned about it just buy a non conductive cooling fluid.

If anyone ever died using liquid cooling, he never reported the fact.

Seriously.....computers have died, video cards have been ruined, expensive wall-to-wall carpeting has needed replacement, cats have died after drinking spilled liquid, not to mention other nasty stuff. So if you still want liquid cooling go right ahead. Probably won't kill you......

you really dont have to worry about killing yourself with spilled water in your computer. It'll just fry your components and then safety parameters in the electronics will power off the system before it has a chance to hurt anyone.

if your really that concerned with it, then just stick to air cooling. i've done both, and i can honestly say that air cooling is better in every aspect you can think up. price, effeciency, convenience, noise.

the only real reason to watercool is if you just want to do it for the sake of doing it. maybe for bragging rights, or the "cool factor", but for all practical reasons, its not better than air cooling.

In which case, be equally concerned regarding your car battery, washing machine, dishwasher, kettle and hydroelectric powerstations.



A completely subjective opinion applicable to one person only... the person who formed that opinion. Not a statement of indisputed fact. You try cooling 600w of heatload quietly with aircooling... water has it's purposes...

tell me indisputed facts please

Water is more efficient, and much quieter. And you can find as much data to confirm that as you wish

I'd surely like to see the proof that WC is quieter. You have the extra noise from the pump motor, plus you usually need a dedicated fan for the radiator.

For a normal computer running less than 200W, how will WC make it quieter? For sure it will make it more expensive, more complicated to construct, and more accident-prone. Where's the benefit?

Think about your poor cat.....it could drink the spilled liquid.

"the only real reason to watercool is if you just want to do it for the sake of doing it. maybe for bragging rights"

in what way? thermal efficiency? power use efficiency?



SPCR is a place for silence freaks. if the above was true one would expect to see a lot more watercooling setups on here than there actually are. In General Gallery I would say 90%+ are aircooled.

As I said, in certain conditions water has it's uses... define the heatload, define the ambient noise... define the desire for watercooling (performance, looks, or noise). In some cases water wins, in other cases it doesn't.

The majority here are noise freaks, rather than performance freaks... for performance (read: Overclocking etc), water exceeds aircoolings' performance levels across the board... all depends on what the PC is going to be doing and the individual users' requirements.

In SOME cases it's quieter
In SOME cases it can be more efficient (as in thermal efficiency, rarely power efficiency)
In SOME cases it's better...

But it's all on a case by case basis, therefore always subjective to the end-user.

Only if you use a pump.....

But not for many setups.....

My new PC will have (at least for my taste) high-end hardware in it.

I will cool the CPU with a Thermalright 120 extreme, and cool an 8800 GTX with a Reserator 2.
With a HR-03 Plus it will still pump the heat in my case, giving adverse effects to the CPU temp.

Hope it will do good, otherwise I will have to look for another WC setup.

To me, it only makes sense to go WC if some parts are very hot and can live with a higher temperature. Most CPU's can be more then sufficiently cooled with an aircooled HSF, some new GPU's are so hot it's very hard to cool them quietly with air. That's where (for me) WC came in the picture.

WR304's replies made me confident enough to try this setup with a fanless watercooling system.

VGA cards can run over 100c without any ill effects. It only becomes a problem if your trying to OC. OC'ing isnt really "SPCR Approved" though, now is it, which is the forum were all on.

The thing about water cooling in a home PC is that it's very dependent on how well it's assembled.

So long as the layout is carefully thought out, it's thoroughly leak tested before fitting in the case and you don't work on the PC whilst it's turned on you're unlikely to have any problems.

If you're worried about being killed by your PC take steps to make sure that all your house electrical wiring is safe.

Overloading your mains extensions is far more dangerous than water cooling.



Full article:
http://www.cepro.com/article/fire_destr ... s_learned/



The main causes of House Fires are:

". Cigarettes that are not put out or fall in a bed (never smoke in bed: you risk falling asleep and burning your mattress)

. Flames on the cooker : food that is left to burn, oil that catches fire, dishcloths that are too near the flames and catch fire

. Matches or lighters that are left in the reach of children

. Exceeding the electric circuit capacity : excessive use of multiple sockets

. Bare electric wires

. Chimney fires in heating systems (see Preventing chimney fires)

. Bad use of inflammable products : e.g. petrol, oil, grease, aerosols sprays" Service Départemental d'Incendie et de Secours de la Vienne

Full article:
http://www.sdis86.fr/anglais/feu_habit_gb.htm


Also pets can be extremely dangerous in unexpected ways.

"Sick Cat Causes Major House Fire

A pet cat caused a house fire after a TV caught light when he was sick on it.

Julie Morris' property in Byron Street, Normanton, Derby, was seriously damaged in the blaze in the early hours of Wednesday.

The fire spread from the TV to the living room when Felix the cat was sick. The rest of the property was left smoke damaged.

Ms Morris, who had no house insurance, and her pet managed to escape from the fire unharmed.

The cost of the repairs are not yet known and Ms Morris has been left temporarily homeless." BBC.co.uk

Full Article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/derb ... 205808.stm

.

Honestly, the above poster is right: there are so many more dangerous things in a house than a watercooled PC.
If anything the watercooled PC is not much more dangerous than a aircooled one, the main danger still resides in the PSU capacitors, and the mains outlet.
A properly assembled watercooling setup doesnt leak (leak testing has a purpose...) and wont ever spill liquid, anywhere, unless you start kicking your tubes around or let your animals in (that's why i like fully enclosed setups).

As for silence watercooling can bring down the fan count in a system to just one (for active radiator cooling), that's what i have, with a proper silent 120mm fan i dont think any air cooled system can get down to that overall level of noise. A good pump makes zero noise. The only noise coming from my computer is the 120mm fan on the radiator, and the faint HDD noises coming from their silent enclosure. And i have a power gamer system... THAT, is why watercooling is relevant. (but quite expensive)

Sounds like maybe you weren't that good at water cooling.
Not trying to be snide, but it's a different set of challenges, which it seems you hadn't appreciated.
There's much less of a noise-from-airflow component as you can use a quite large water->copper->air heat exchanger, which you have the flexibility of being able to put where a fan would go anyway but you now have pump vibration to deal with (so resonance gremlins, typically solved with a combination of isolation and adding mass to resonant panels).
I'll grant you "price", "convenience" is a bit of a toss unless you're using a really big case with lots of room for heatpipe heatsinks and already installed ducting. Again, you pay in complexity and get back in flexibility when you w/c.
No idea what you mean by "efficiency". Power usage maybe? Again, maybe so, maybe not. I'd guess it depends on your fan count as well. - BTW the HPPS (my favored pump as it's dead silent) is rated at 3W. You could also use an eheim 1046 (not quite as powerful but also dead silent) uses 5W - but that's AC. PC fans use...? They're often rated 1W, but probably use less then that if you're using PCM.

Well, I am not an engineer but a chemistry teacher (plus I must say my first tongue is french so forgive syntaxe).

I'll try to give a SHORT explanation of efficiency in heat management.

The thermal capacity is the number of Joules (unit of heat) required to raise temperature of 1g of a given substance by 1°C. The higher the thermal capacity, the more heat you need to raise or lower the temperature.

You can compare that to the volume of two bottles: a 250 mL and a 1000 mL. If you place them alongside and poor water over both, the 250 mL wich has a lower volume capacity will overflow the first.

So the lower heat capacity will overflow first wich means lower or raise it's temperature first (depending wether your heating or cooling the thing).

The heat capacity of water is 4,18 J/g°C where that of air is about one. And were talking grams here. One gram of air is a lot of air so air has a VERY LOW heat capacity. Go out at 10°C with shorts and shirts and dive in a 10°C pool and tell me wich you prefer un term of cooling efficiency...

So if you want to absorb as much heat with air than with water, you need to move a lot of air around the part you wish to cool. In order to move a vast volume of air, you need a powerful fan and this is were noise arises.

As water has such a great Heat Capacity and it is liquid, small volume transfers much heat. Small volume means lower displacement, smaller pump and lower noise.

When you have small engine, you can aircool it because not much eat is involved. When you have powerfull engine, so much heat is produced that you need water cooling.

=================

IMHO, the bottom line would be that if you are an average PC user (Internet, DVD ripping...) your PC has low watts to dissipate and water cooling is somehow overkill. But if you have the fastest CPU, the fastest GPU, the most powerful PSU, you can probably manage to dissipate the heat but you will have fan noise and liquide cooling would definitely help.


PS: a heatsink is just a SOLID part with a large number of fins to increase contact surface between the part and the air because air has a low heat capacity. You touch more air in the same amount of time using more fins.

this post string made me laugh

I rarely actually laugh from reading a post.

I use decent quality UPS systems. I also have an electrician put a brand new line dedicated to the computer that only the computer and its things like monitor, printer, etc use. This actually is rather cheap compared to the cost of the computer hobby. I probably should try and get a ground fault receptacle put in.

Power strips are ghetto.

they always fail. They ALWAYS light on fire. you just dont know it. they pop one day. That is a fire, it just didnt do much normally. there are no good power strips, i dont care what anyone says. UPS's can let surges through, yes, but they turn off when they need to. I just think they are better, someone will always say no.

Watercooling? Meh. One thing it might have over air cooling is more resistance to dust build-up. Maybe your components won't be as affected by dust building up as they would be with a constant circulation of dust-laden air. Maybe, maybe not.

It's kind of an expensive way to build a (possibly) less dusty machine, though.

On a different note, I've always wondered why folks bother with water in their liquid-cooling setups anyway, as we all know that water and electronics don't get along. What liquid coolant alternatives are there? How expensive are they?

a leak is an incredibly rare thing.

they really do not occur if you are careful and patient.

once you go water, you never go back to air unless you get corrosion and bio growth (aka, you screwed up) and its just easier to slap fans on the next time around.

Then you need to see my computer which runs even quiter then every laptop you can imagine. I use an Innovatek Konvect o Matic Ultra which is a gigantic passive radiator to cool my high end pc. The pump (Innovatek HPPS+) is literally silent. You simply can't hear it once the loop is filled and the bubbles are out. I use water blocks on mosfets, north and south bridges. I use quite drives (Sycthe) to isolate the noise from HDD's. There s not even a single fan running in my computer apart from my Elan Vital Greenerger's Hybrid PSU's which kicks in quitely with periods of 15 minutes .

Try cooling a 2900XT with air. You'll see how wrong you are...

considering the 2900xt can use up to 200W on its own if OC'd, that's not really the kind of computer Bluefront was referring to.

It has been proven by MikeC that an additional fan running at a similar low RPM does not increase total system noise to any meaningful degree that is noticable by the human ear at a seated position from the system.

So going from say 2X 120mm system fans running at 600rpm and a PSU fan down to 1x 120mm system fan running at 600rpm will not reduce your overall percieved noise signiture of your computer system.

My systems run with 2x 120mm nexus' at 600rpm, and then the PSU fan. You said 1 fan, i'm assuming you ment the one on your radiator, which means your system is a 2fan setup, unless your W/C'ing your PSU, which i have seen done, but its rare.

A W/C setup has everything an air setup has, except it will also have a pump. Reducing 1 or maybe 2 low rpm undervolted system fans is not going to noticably reduce your overall systems noise signiture, but the pump will definately add a new distinct noise signiture to your system. If you put a 600rpm nexus 120mm fan in your system, i guarentee you will not hear it, but you'll hear that pump when its on.

This is SPCR. This is not [H]ardOCP's forum. I'd say over 90% of the people on this forum are using systems with a total system power consumption under 200w. A W/C rig WILL NOT reduce your total system noise signiture on a computer rig pulling under 200w. So for the majority of us here using real world systems, air is king for silencing.

Bobkoure: Reguardless of if you think i did it wrong or not, my eheim pump (1280 i think was the model number), IS louder than 1. my HD's, 2. 600rpm nexus', 3. my psu. Back then i was actually using louder fans than i do now, and i could still hear that pump over those panaflo's. I did everything i could to silence that pump short of suspending it because i wanted the rig to be secure, and a dangling piece of hardware inside the case is not secure IMO.

The only time i ever hear a W/C'er saying that water is superior is when he's using some power hungry (usually O/C'd) monstrosity, and in that instance, maybe he's right. Maybe at that point, when you would have to have fans running at such a high RPM to keep up with the heat buildup that the noise from a pump would be a reduction in the total systems noise signiture. But his point is mute since the overwhelming majority of people on this forum will never have such a system.

This is, however, the ''watercooling'' section of SPCR, which suggests to me that people ARE interested in the quietest way of having a ''monster'' PC. After all this site is about being quietest in whichever level of performance they wish, and this section of the forum discusses watercooling...so it is extremely valid to talk about its uses here and not suddenly limit the scope of what this forum discusses to ''PC's using less than 200 watts''.

Well, don't use a 1280, then. Pump models vary in noise output - just like fans - only the noise includes inaudible vibration that can cause resonance.

I could arbitrarily pick a fan (or fan and heatsink combo), try hard to make that noisy fan quiet and use that experience to argue that air-cooling is louder than water-cooling.
Does that sound reasonable?
Does it sound at all familiar?