Water cooling over hyped ?

echn111 said:
The correct and fairer comparison is between high end air and high end water. A properly built high end watercooling system will blow away high end air for performance and quietness.
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no, the correct comparison is between two products within the same price range which is what they did.
 
I am rather amazed at how far air cooling has come recently. Two of my friends just built quad-core systems, one with a Q6600 on a zalman 9700 and one with a Q6700 with a Thermalright XP120 Ultra Extreme. I was able to overclock them both to over 3Ghz easily. I got the 6700 to 3.4ghz with some minor voltage tweaks and it never went above 46C under full load using OCCT and coretemp. The Q6600 with the zalman ran even cooler but the ambient temps were also a bit lower. Still incredibly impressive since I get nearly the same temps on my E6420 core 2 at stock speeds on a Zalman 7700. I still plan on watercooling once I get rid of this useless unoverclockable intel G33 board just because I have always wanted to and I would enjoy the silence.
 
annaconda, I wonder if you already asked yoursef if it's a good idea to step here since you often look out of place with advices (too expensive there, not worth 1-2C here and silence is the only thing) ?

Do you go post in the exotic cooling area saying phase change is overrated or call people stupid to cool something with liquid nitrogen ?? It's the same here. If you aren't happy with watercooling, nobody is attaching you to the pole and you are free to get back to air cooling.

Personnally, I sometime find someone's else hobby to be a waste or plain stupid but I don't make comments in their forum about that. I just ignore them and I would like to get the same treatement from those who think watercooling is overrated.

 
I love the reduced noise.

If you don't care about noise, you can probably get an air setup that's as good as a mid range water (and better than the POS thermaltake and co. out there). However, I'd only do that if you want 1) cheap 2) performance.

If you want 1) performance, just get a good water setup AND a lot of high powered fans for it. Of course there's TEC, Phase, LN2, etc...

What I love about my 2x120 setup, is 1) my GPU is about 20 degrees colder than air, at minimum, and 2) I can get good temps and OCing possibilities on my CPU at the same time with very few fans and very quiet ones at that.

I was never a fan of venting the hot air straight onto the next component in the computer, I much prefer venting everything together from the Rad out the back.
 
The answer to which is better is a very complicted question. :confused:

The article that started all this crap was IMO tired and unfair to WC'ing. Give me a friggin' break here, saying a Swiftech H2O-120 Compact and a Corsair Nautilus 500 is first rate WC'ing and should equal or better first rate air HSF's. You gots to be kiddin' me. I have a lower mid range WC'ing setup (MCR220, MCP350, Apogee GT) and I love it.:rolleyes:

What I do is WC' my main boxen (Q6600 OC'ed 3.0 GHz) and air cool my other two (2) boxen (E6600's, Zalman 9700 HSF's). The reason I do the above is I don't think water would be all that beneficial and IMO is too expensive for my two E6600's because they are pretty much dedicated 24/7 folders for the [H]orde. :p

Although I do fold on the quad, especially during the Chimp Challenge competition, I like the steadiness of my temps between idle and load, I like the appearence of WC'ing thru my cases window and I like to tinker with my boxen. (the steadiness I was talking about is very mild water vs air, I could really give a "rats patoot" whether my boxen are silent or not (of course I don't want it to sound like living next to JFK airport) ;)

 
It really depends on the kit that is used. However, I will tell you the pump in the swiftech kit is obnoxious if it is not dampened. It is similar to the pump in the koolance pc4-1025 kit and at full tilt it is by far the loudest thing in my computer. Louder than two raptors seeking for porn.

However there are some simple wc designs that are quite effective if all you want is to cool the cpu.... Asetek LCLC comes to mind. About 70 bucks from various online retailers.

Although the need to watercool the cpu is questionable at best.
My e8400 runs at 1.05 watts at 3.6 ghz. Which is well insanely low. Not to mention a l ot of the 50 dollar air coolers will get you there without to much of a hassle. Zalman makes a few.

But there are some scenarious where it becomes attractive.
If you have a nvidia 680/780i and that 90nm northbridge, that requires an obnoxiously loud fan. Or maybe the thought of the pending nvidia gpu... with a tdp of 250watts.... Imagine trying to run tri-sli.... You know that the fans are going to be quite loud since they have to fit in two slots.

Basically if it wasn't for nvidia; I wouldn't water cool.

Nes
 
I have built 2 machine using water cooling.

The first was ~550 bucks using all top of the line stuff (roughly 3 years ago). I bought a 120 video card block, and a nice 478 block from those water guys in Oregon. It works really well - but was much louder than I expected. The fans were quiet, but the water "swooshing" sound drove me batty. And - after spending all that much - my 3.0c only went from 3.6 to 3.8 or so. I sold that system and dropped back down to my meager 3.6 OC.

My current setup is a 4300 that is overclocked to 3.3 using a bigwater 735 (or something like that) in an Antec 900. I have a rheostat setup to control the 4 fans in the machine (one controlling the 120 on the heatercore) and it is darn near silent.

I think that one thing that I took from watercooling - the bigger bore line setups (3/4 ID vs 1/4 ID) don't net you all that much - except in the most extreme conditions. Then again - I am not looking for my stuff to run at room temperature, just overclock a bit and run quietly.
 
Shlomo said:
Most

Awesome

Thread Necromancy

Evar

(In the last few weeks or so)
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Thanks. :p It's only a few months though, tbh. I've seen a lot worse.

I was searching for threads about a topic I needed info on and just couldn't pass this one up.^^

Nomad said:
The fans were quiet, but the water "swooshing" sound drove me batty.
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Sounds like you had air in your loop? I dunno, I hear "swooshing" when bleeding a new loop, but once the air is gone it's completely silent. Just a low whine from the turning of the pump.
 
Russ said:
Sounds like you had air in your loop? I dunno, I hear "swooshing" when bleeding a new loop, but once the air is gone it's completely silent. Just a low whine from the turning of the pump.
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there's no swishing in my loop either. i can watch some water move around a bit in the reservoir but i don't hear anything..
 
Water cooling is not overated... its just another effective cooling alternative to air cooling. If you get a simple water cooling solution like corsair natalius... you can set it up and be worry free for a long time.
 
plot said:
there's no swishing in my loop either. i can watch some water move around a bit in the reservoir but i don't hear anything..
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I don't hear any kind of a swooshing sound on my small bore setup - just on the large bore kit that I assembled. No worries now - dumped it years ago.
 
Not saying anything about your loop, but mine's "large bore." It's not full 1/2" ID, but it's still 3/8" ID, which is pretty large compared to the small kits out there.
 
i have sensitive hearing and I like silence. I don't OC much these days as I preferr rock stable and cpus/gpus are fast enough at stock or modest OC. If you need to do mad OC for performance gain it usually means time to upgrade anyways.

Silence is truly golden. :eek:

which is another reason I don't give a shit about running a friggin garden hose and 12 horsepower honda gas engine driven pumps on my system. 10mm aquacomputer/small bore stuff with those nice push fit fittings works just fine, thank you. Plus they look pretty neat. I use the bonny HC or black ice rads instead of AC rads, though. Makes all the difference as far as sound v colling power. Most times I do not have fans hooked up to my rads, I just have airflow through rads as case exhuast and all case fans as intakes. Works great.

Nomad said:
....I think that one thing that I took from watercooling - the bigger bore line setups (3/4 ID vs 1/4 ID) don't net you all that much - except in the most extreme conditions. Then again - I am not looking for my stuff to run at room temperature, just overclock a bit and run quietly.
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Exactly.
 
Anandtech should have that Wesley Fink guy rewrite the title, introduction, and conclusion.

It's funny how that guy bases the merits of watercooling over 2 mediocre pre-built kits.
 
Here are the reasons I wen't to water.

1) Looks
2) Lack of Noise
3) Cooling

Was hoping to hit 4 ghz on water, but I found out its pretty hard to significantly beat high end heatsinks. With my processor anyway.
 
Wow

Back from the dead. Really kind of appropo considering [H]'s recent testing of high end air coolers. Some of the results were pretty amazing I have to admit.
 
Randominal said:
no, the correct comparison is between two products within the same price range which is what they did.
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Well since someone resurrected this thread I'll answer this and the guy who said "totally agree". Unless your world revolves around money, and mine does not, that is the wrong comparison, especially for something which is more of a hobby than a business. The price of high quality air is the same as rubbish watercooling.

Guess what? The rubbish cooling solution does worse than the high quality one. Not a surprise.
 
I water cooled for fun. I wont do it again...likely only re-use parts i have. Though, 4.0ghz on my quad is nice.

Edit: Forgot to mention my OCed GTX260 is in the loop, and its dead silent.
 
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I will admit WC'ing has always seemed cool. However, I've never found myself temperature limited in any of my OC'ing -- it's always been a component limiting me. And, my rig is pretty quiet to boot.

Is water cooling overhyped? Well, if you think you are suddenly going to get a 50% better OC automatically, then yes. But if you think you're going to have a really cool and quiet set-up, that is a bit geekier than your run of the mill TRUE, then no -- it's not overhyped. Expensive though? Sure.
 
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