Is water cooling a viable alternative to quiet aero cooling? I've seen Koolance case in local Fry's and it sounded like a jet fighter Almost.

Is the main advantage of water cooling the ability to cool better or to cool quieter?

Are there any setups that are quiet?

I've seen Zalman's water cooling setup on Comdex but it does not seem to be available yet in the US. The setup looked really cool though.

Thanks for your help!

Seal (from these forums) has a v.quiet watercooling setup, he'd be happy to answer your questions

Watercooling both cools better and quieter. The noisy watercooling solutions like the Koolance case one (with the 3 80mm fans up top) are simply not worth your attention if you're trying to go for a silent system.

Both my water-cooled systems are very quiet. 120mm fans at 7v are almost inaudible and the pumps are virtually silent. Kits like the Koolance and Hydrocool give water-cooling a bad name.

My watercooling system does not use fans (just a 5V one in the PSU) so it is extremely quiet.

So what systems are you using? Can I buy it as a kit somewhere? Thanks!

Water cooling can potentially cool both better and quieter than air cooling, but the trick is in the details of how the system is setup.

Most of the commercial 'pre-packaged' solutions tend to be poor examples, I suspect because they cut to many corners in an effort to meet a price point.

A reasonable home brew system will start with comparable noise and cooling to the best of air cooled systems. This assumes putting water blocks on the CPU (absolutely) and GPU (probably) and optionally the NB and or HDD's, coupled with a medium to small rad mounted in the case, with one or two fans cooling the rad. This isn't much better than an AC setup noise wise, but will probably be cooler overall.

But if you start playing games with the system, you can improve the cooling slightly, and make the noise much better. You have the option of putting the rad and fans in a seperate box, which can be put elsewhere. You could even do a 'Bladerunner' and go for a geothermal solution with no fans. If you increase the size of the rad, you may be able to get enough cooling to be able to go semi-passive. You might also find some other way of sinking the heat that avoids the fans.

To me the big difference between AC and WC, is that with AC you have to get rid of the heat at the point where it's generated, which limits your options for quieting. With WC, you still have to get rid of the heat, but you now have a chance to move it around to where it is easiest / quietest to get rid of.

Gooserider

Yeh definitely. The problem I'm having with my (AC) system atm is trying to balance temperatures out, and adjusting the balance between the various fans to try to achieve optimum temperature compromise.

If I was watercooling it, I wouldn't have to care at all where everything is; I would only have to deal with 1 hot thing to cool; that being the radiator.

When there are more watercooled PSUs and HDD solutions available, I'll definitely switch to watercooling.

ColdFlame, as Gooserider points out, when I was surveying components earlier this year, all of the commercially-available watercooling systems were poorly designed for quietness, so I made my own. You can read about it here: http://herosformula.org/watercool.htm