SPCR

How much would I expect to pay for water cooling for my motherboard/northbridge, cpu, graphics card, harddrive and possibly psu?? Would I expect to see a reduction in heat or would it just make it quieter? I am especially concerned about my hard drive which certain apps show as too hot (72degrees) currently no direct cooling on it, so i hope to see a difference there..

And are there any better cooling methods? that peltier thing i heard about? supposed to lower the temp by at least a few degrees i heard, maybe even liquid nitrogen?

Hi Ponty,

Define "better". All depends on your goals for a system, and a little on the context of where you ask the question. (Extreme overclocking forum might give you a different answer than SilentPCReview.)

Does the system need to be able to be used daily, and is simple part of the equation? Certainly one can go crazy and get very low temperatures, but I certainly do not want to go get out insulated liquid nitrogen bottles just to power up my PC. (Plus the liquid nitrogen is dangerous, and also care must be taken to not just wipe out your hardware. Too rapid a temperature change can destroy your CPU.)

On overclocking sites, folks are all about seeing just how much speed they can squeeze out of their CPU. The impression that I get is if you want to squeeze those last few hundred Mhz out of your CPU, that can require water cooling. To me, stock speeds, or mild overclocks are so fast today, that is not for me. I still have Athlon64's in the 3000 range that still seem plenty fast for what I do, so I do not need to push them that hard.

Peltiers are like solid state refrigerators; they take power applied to them to provide cooling. With enough power, they can provide impressive results, but they too can be tricky to design into a proper system as now you are using way more power, the cold surfaces can cause condensation (and as with water cooling, water and electronics don't mix), and you still have to remove the heat from the hot side of the peltier.

I hope I do not get lynched for saying this here , but I am even willing to give up a little bit of quiet to keep a system simple and inexpensive (or cheap as my friends would say). I see these huge towers that are popular here because they may cool a system passively or with a very low speed fan, but I have not brought myself to spend that kind of money on a heatsink. (And I do not fault anyone who does. I have bought entire systems just to experiment with; I just have not been interested in the huge heatsinks yet.) I have an Arctic cooling freezer that I got on sale on one of my two fastest systems and a Sunbeamtech clone of that on my other. I think $20 is about the most I spent for either of these.

With Hard drive temps like that (assuming that is in C, not F), I would start with a slow speed fan blowing across your hard drive, and then see if the rest of your system had reasonable airflow and temps.

There's never a reduction in heat. The more advanced the cooling system is, the more heat it puts out. The extreme is subzero phase-change, where the cooling system might put out as much watts as the rest of the system... same with peltiers, they add a significant amount of heat. Which often means more noise. The goal of those is to freeze the cpu, everything else be damned.

Generally trying to put watercooling or similar on *everything* is a waste. It's usually only the cpu and gpu that get watercooled. Just for those it would probably cost more than 200, for everything probably 400+.

IMO the best solution would be trying to get the proper airflow, which might involve getting a better case.

Get en antec solo or p182, forget about water cooling for non-extreme systems.

72C on the harddrive is very, very hot.

so u all reckon water cooling isnt worth it right?
i just want to be able to install something so that heat will never be a concern, whatever is the cheapest / most effective.
Dont want to ever find a game thats not working only to have sum1 tell me, maybe your system is overheating and restarting...

BTW im using speedfan. Not 100% sure that temp is the harddrive, coz it shows as "remotetemp" but when i click configure it shows as "max" which i figure to be maxtor (the hard drive) but there are two temperatures that show as maxtor, both high btw... when im not doing anything intensive, they should as about 50 and the other at 68. When the temp reached 72 was when i tried but failed to run a new game (two worlds)

it would help a LOT if you told us what components you intend to cool (ie CPU, GPU, MB, HDDs etc). the cooling required for a 125w CPU is very different from a 65W CPU.

go the cheapest to find zalman setup and pick the proper blocks for northbridge, chip and gfx.

it is worth it. you never have to fuss with anything for 2 years. you can change the water after a year if you would like but that's it. never upgrading, adjusting time involved, done basically except for a fan somewhere exhausting the heat.

it is worth it.

Ok sorry. Ive mentioned which parts I want to cool the most. But here is a complete list of what I have... I dont know of wattage.

amd venice core 64 bit 3200
nvidia 6800 gtpci
maxtor 250 gig hard disk
asus an8 sli

corsair platinum 1 gig x 4 = 4 gig pc 3200 ddr400 memory

~El~Jefe~ wrote:it is worth it.

for an A64 3200 and a 6800GT? I would have to say a big NO WAY. air-cooling will do just fine, cheaper and just as quiet.

Yeah, water cooling is excellent for silent cooling of high power components, but your system is pretty modest. You can easily cool it with air.

if thats true it doesnt explain the local temp 56c and remote temp 66c when idle.

if those are software temp measurements, they're not always reliable. where is the local temp and remote temp anyway? if that's the northbridge those are fine temps. if it's the CPU however we need to get that down. do you have Cool'n'Quiet enabled?

nope not that im aware of , ill check that in the bios but pretty sure it's turned off.
If those temps are in fact normal, then the problem with my game restarting must be something other than the system heat.

pontypool, can you give us detail info on your system? Maybe temperature results at idle and at load from SpeedFan? A screenshot would be ideal, you can upload it at Image Shack ( http://imageshack.us/ ) and put a thumbnail or link here.

72C for you HDD is way, way too hot. In fact, I am surprised it got that high. Most HDDs will not get past the 50s, even with zero airflow or contact cooling.

What case do you have? A reasonably well ventilated case and the stock heatsink on the CPU should keep it at maybe 55C max under full load. If it does not, maybe the heatsink is not properly installed.

thats when idle... goes about 5 higher when its under heavy load.

Your CPU and HDD temps are fine. I shouldn't worry about them. If you games are crashing, try running MemTest86+ and Prime95 for at least four hours each.

ok so that 67 degree one is actually the hard drive right? i thought it was coz it says max on the config page i uploaded... that seems a little high plus it got a flame next to it, sorta suggests its too high?? my bro got the same motherboard except its the non sli version and i didnt see any readouts that high on speedfan with his puter.
hes got the same cpu and graphics card 2, only difference is the motherboard.

pontypool wrote:ok so that 67 degree one is actually the hard drive right? i thought it was coz it says max on the config page i uploaded... that seems a little high plus it got a flame next to it, sorta suggests its too high?? my bro got the same motherboard except its the non sli version and i didnt see any readouts that high on speedfan with his puter.
hes got the same cpu and graphics card 2, only difference is the motherboard.

HD0 is your harddrive temp.

I have just updated to the latest Speedfan and am seeing the local/remote sensors as well. My guess is that they are part of some chip (i.e. onboard sensor and remote thermistor), but I have no idea where they are. Might be under the NB or something.

Probably your gfx, nvidia card?

Graphics card is show separately with core/amb temps, which are different to the local/remote readings.