In my case, blowing air to the radiator was much quieter than sucking. I'd like to hear from others... Interesting. Did you measure the temps? I mean, if pulling is more effective in terms of cooling per fan power, you could run the fan lower and end up having same temps than pushing -> might count...

ZeroR3D wrote:There may be diminishing returns when shrouding 120mm fans on a commercial rad's lower fin-density design.

Isn't the point of the shroud to remove the "dead spot" at axial fans hub? However thin/thick your fins are, still the fan has the hub and thus a dead spot.

so would you say that the ddc with plexi top is a better bet than a d5? I don't think any of the SPCR folks have done apples to apples comparison, and there seems to be some sample variance, so hard to say for sure. What I can tell is that my DDC with plexi top is *very* quiet.. equals in noise to ...

I tried google DDC+ but didn't get any result of pictures of informations.. Try searching these forums for DDC :wink: . It's Laing Delphi DC pump, also sold as Swiftech MCP350. The original version (that I have) is very quiet, if you install the acrylic top to it. Nowadays there is also two higher ...

The Reserator ... waterblocks are aluminum which may not be that favorable. If you ever think to upgrade, most of the premium waterblocks out there are copper, and ideally you don’t want to mix different metals because of corrosion. To be exact, Reserator CPU block is gold-plated copper where it ...

Yea, I guess you can do that, you can flip the fan and make it exhaust outwards rather than inwards. By default thermaltake has it so that it blows inwards rather than outwards. Hence the perplexity.. For what I know, almost all the radiators have been designed so that you can easily attach fans to...

are there non-metals that insulate heat as badly as copper? Unfortunately it's hard to beat the metals.. silver does a bit better than copper, but additional 20% of conductivity does not exactly justify the 250-fold price except for die-hard enthusiasts. Diamond is a lot better heat conductor than ...

Here are some thoughts: -Swiftech nowadays has 1U version of their Apogee CPU block, that should fit any case -If you have enough room in your chassis, 1-2 dual-80mm radiators might do it. Often rackmount chassises have number of 80mm fans in the middle; if you have room there, you could add radiato...

I like the Swiftech Apogee's bang-for-the-buck. And not just bang for the buck: it's also a lot less restrictive than Storm. For pump I'd go with Laing Delphi with acrylic top. It has a lot of pressure head, which is the kind of power you want to have; flow rate matters a lot less, what you need is...

warriorpoet wrote:Tubing size does have very little impact on performance (although 1/8" to 3/8" is much more dramatic than 3/8" to 1/2").

You meant 1/4", not 1/8", right?

If you can spare a few $ jump for a DDC with a plexiglass top conversion (found at Alphacool or Performance-PCs); it has the power of a D5 with the lower heat dump and higher head pressure of a DDC. And it looks like the plexiglass top also reduces noise noticeably. No wonder, it's a bit harder to ...

My chip is NEVER under 39 degrees at idle with a reserator. What graphics card you are using? Remember also that we are reporting temps from uncalibrated sensors, they can easily make 10 degree difference. In the Xbit Labs test, with the minimum power input of 100w, barely enough to cover a decent ...

Nice report! Its still running on 12V, rated 6-12V, and wont run on 5V, so i would need to get it lower than 12V. Ideas? How about going for mCubed T-Balancer miniNG: http://www.t-balancer.com/english/produkt_tban_mini.htm ? They promise it's designed to handle load of 12V pumps and it can be adjust...

Ahh, forgot to mention this: fin density and thickness vary greatly depending on how they are cooled. The less forced air flow, the thicker fins and wider spacing. As Reserator is meant to cool passively, it sports thick fins spaced pretty far from each other.

Can someone explain to me the fascination of the Reserator as a water cooling system. It's (reasonably) cheap, ready all-in-one solution that is able to cool modern PCs with very little noise. As such, it's almost one of the kind, as all the other all-in-one WC kits I know of contain fans for cooli...

seems like firewire should offer the best price/distance/speed combination? As with so many other things: it depends. In normal house it makes more sense to draw CAT6 cable to every room than firewire cabling.. And gigabit switches are fairly cheap nowadays so it's really not an issue to share the ...

drag: Very thorough indeed!

<wishlist>
I wonder if there was any NFS-eSATA bridge available . Maybe when the virtualization technology comes more mainstream we could run Linux and Windows in parallel in the same machine and have Linux route FS traffic for the Windows box..
</wishlist>

BarakaBloke wrote:I think you'd be better off with zinc.

Oops.

Yeah, naturally I meant zinc, but due to some brainfart translated it wrong.

As mentioned in the article, it might indeed be hard to squeeze add-on video card to work with PicoPSU. But, there are nowadays some graphics cards that come with power supply: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=201 Also there exists graphics cards PSUs that are sold separately from the card. Whil...

Nexus at 7V significantly outperforms the AcoustiFan DustProof at 5V at about the same sound level. I guess the reason I had taken so long to try these fans is that I just don't like the color. Why can't they make some plain black ones like everyone else? If you live in states, try this: http://sto...

Hmm, I wonder could you use sacrificial anchors in PC water loop? Just attach small piece of tin to components made of lesser metals..

Devonavar wrote:I notice that it generally takes a second or two to open a networked directory, but that second or two is not there with a USB drive.

I guess the reason is NetBIOS protocol used by Windows shared directories. It's frankly quite abysmal performance-wise.

there is dedicated cabling between any two points (remember, USB uses bus) Not completely true, it assumes the network is idle. I said *cabling* is dedicated.. This means in each piece of copper only two chips are talking to each other, while they might transit data for several pieces of software. ...

Best of all, performance is MUCH better than any of these NAS devices I seriously doubt this unless you give me some hard numbers. USB was designed as asynchronous bus that is cheap to implement, which means that in reality it's hard to get transfer speeds near the theoretical maximum. Firewire doe...

Interesting review indeed. It would have been nice to see performance numbers with gigabit ethernet, thou, as anybody seriously considering this kind of setup will certainly have one, and most motherboards nowadays ship with one. Too bad the noise level was so high; not a big problem to mod but as t...

One question is why make the ATX cable detachable? There's no situation where this cable isn't needed. Customizing the cable with out risking the PSU unit. Exactly. With detachable ATX cable you can mod it to fit your needs *without* voiding PSU warranty, Apart from the obvious bling reason, this c...

My question, then, is ... Do these hard drive fans RELY on the case's three fans to attain cool air? In installing the Reservator, I would hope to eliminate the case's fans, keeping only the power supply's internal fan and the two tiny fans attached to the [two 10,000 RPM] hard drives. But again, d...

If you have enough budget, you could also consider using TECs to enhance cooling. If you can for example double heatsink temperature gradient (versus ambient), you should be able to do with just over half the heatsink. But the caveat is that to do this, you need to get some serious TEC power, like t...

I have a large casefan in my Antec case. Never used it. Any pointers on how to undervolt this ? Do I just put a small device between the fan and its powercable ? I can always start using it if my system does turn out to get too hot. I strongly recommend going for some known ultra-quiet fan and inte...

Ahh, I think I misundestrood you. Now that I re-read you, I conluded that you meant sticking with your old card. Anyway, as NVidia has now shrunk their process from 110nm to 90nm, they are able to give you more power per watt. The VR-Zone has some interesting numbers: Geforce 7900GTX 89watts Geforce...