I'll certainly be looking at what is available given the room I have. Though, would I get better performance for the price if I went with the water cooling system, mounting the rad on top of my case?

Much, much, much better cooling performance.
And you would get the benefit of better system cooling that you won't get with a better air CPU cooler, no matter how good it is.

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Grant
Darwin NT

That is probably the way I will go then. That way I don't have to worry about space restraints, and I can move it to a new case if I decide to go to a MicroATX for better airflow for the other components.

Ouch! The ones I see at my local tech dealer are at least 2 times more expensive than the air coolers. I guess better performance stuff costs money, huh.

so i have an i5 with a liquid cooler and an i7 with an air cooler but they seem to perform about the same. the i5 is open air by design and the i7 is case side off because i'm running a lot of wires outside of the case and i didn't want to figure out how to route or extend or modify the cabling to keep the case side on.

in your case you have a gpu exhausting heat into a tiny case so liquid cooling would make a big difference if you didn't mind the extra expense of the liquid cooler itself as well as the effort required to get the radiator outside the case. the alternative would be to run fewer cpu work units

I don't mind paying a bit more for liquid cooling. I really am interested in pushing my contribution to the max, plus I can move the liquid cooler around to other systems I build. I think it won't be too hard to mount the rad on the outside for now, and then I can get a slightly better case later on if I want to stick everything back inside again. Plus, with the water block, it opens up the option to overclock for a bit more performance.

EDIT: To keep your GPU cool you need a HVAC blower.

I'm using my comupter with

1) side panel open.
2) 4 GPU's (NVIDIA 2x980+2x780)
3) an overclocked watercooled CPU
4) a Hih Voltage AC (230V) air duct blower (280 m³/h @ 38W) aimed directly to the GPU's (a picture is somewhere here in the forums)
5) a 16" table top fan resting on the floor just outside this room blowing fresh air in to the room, a door wide open, and an intake vent at the ceiling to take the hot air via pipes to a heat exchanger to cool the out going air and to warm the house in-take air that is delivered to the other rooms.

It is 7 months a year cold in here where I live so Seti helps me to keep the house warm.

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To overcome Heisenbergs:
"You can't always get what you want / but if you try sometimes you just might find / you get what you need." -- Rolling Stones

Reversing the air flow of the front fan may improve things, but there's a good chance it might actually make things worse.
If you're going to be pumping air out of the case, it has to have somewhere to enter. Reversing the flow of air at one of the current entry points could result in significantly worse cooling- particularly if the sides are on.
With the side off, it may help.

I've kept the case sides off for now, and swapped around the front fan. I would say there has been no noticeable improvement to the CPU temperatures, but the GPU has really cooled off a good 15 - 20C with the panels off.

I'd have to agree with you on reversing the fan as well. There is no other fan in the system that helps air to flow, aside from the CPU/GPU/PSU fans. And none of those are directed in a way that would help push air out of the front case fan.

If that's what you are after, you have to get rid of the lowest denominator first.
Open the case up......
If you are not willing to do that first off, you are on your own.
Nothing breathes better than a cooler in free air.

If you are looking to keep your case bottled up tight, and yet still want to keep things cool.........I cannot help you with that.

Cut as many holes in it as you can, and mount the highest flow fans you can find.
The rest is up to you, my friend.

Meow.

You know Priscilla here has a point mount some high flow fans

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

If you want to continue using the mini-itx case, see http://www.takesontech.com/corsair-h5-sf-brings-close-loop-water-cooling-to-mini-itx-in-an-easy-way for a water cooled solution.

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Too tall

I came across this water cooler on my local kijiji. Any thoughts?

Coolermaster seidon 120m

Looks great! I really like the idea, but it really is much to tall to fit underneath my PSU.

Can anyone give me an idea of some decent HAF fans so I can look into that option?

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find what temperature it is rated for.

That is a real problem with ALL coolers - there is no way of knowing how many watts of cooling they are, or any other criterion. I wish the industry would come up with a rating system so we could truly compare coolers.

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I came across this water cooler on my local kijiji. Any thoughts?

Coolermaster seidon 120m

I'm running with a Coolermaster Seidon 120V V2.0 on two machines here, one an Intel i3-530 that I use as a computer next to my TV, for light gaming and streaming of series/films, the other I have on an Intel i5-2500K on which I do the heavy gaming and run BOINC on.

I haven't seen the CPU temperature go over 55C yet on either system, even under heavy load. But then both of these are living in spacious cases with lots of additional case fans. Perhaps that that matters as well.

The i3's radiator is attached to the back of the computer case; the i5 has the radiator on the top side. Both suck air into the case and thus into the radiator. As that's a weird thing, if you add the fan as it says in the instructions, it's blowing out over the radiator. So then it blows the hot air out of the case over the radiator, which I feel is wrong. So when testing on the i5 at the time, I turned the fan around and went from mid 60s to mid 50s Celsius.

I've been running with these for about a year now (29 May for the i3, 9 July for the i5). Using SpeedFanv4.51 to control the fans in the systems is also very useful. When the system are idle, all fans run at their lowest speed, while when under load and stress, they can go to a max of 70% of total. That's enough to cool things down without making a load of noise.

I'm running BOINC now, crunching Seti Guppi's on my AMD HD 7870 GPU.
Room temperature is 26.5C, CPU temp is 47C on the hottest core, but the GPU isn't going much over 60C with a fan speed of 58%. A slight whine, but not too irritating and certainly not as noisy as when I turn SpeedFan off and everything only knows 100% speeds. The ability to set SpeedFan up so that case fans and even the CPU fan work together to get rid of GPU heat is -for me- precious.

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EDIT: To keep your GPU cool you need a HVAC blower.

I'm using my comupter with

1) side panel open.
2) 4 GPU's (NVIDIA 2x980+2x780)
3) an overclocked watercooled CPU
4) a Hih Voltage AC (230V) air duct blower (280 m³/h @ 38W) aimed directly to the GPU's (a picture is somewhere here in the forums)
5) a 16" table top fan resting on the floor just outside this room blowing fresh air in to the room, a door wide open, and an intake vent at the ceiling to take the hot air via pipes to a heat exchanger to cool the out going air and to warm the house in-take air that is delivered to the other rooms.

It is 7 months a year cold in here where I live so Seti helps me to keep the house warm.

Similar to what I have to do to deal with the heat of 9 computers crunching 24/7.
Two attic fans cut into the ceiling of the garage move massive amounts of air and heat out into the attic. Hundreds of CFM. A large bathroom window is kept open to allow the makeup air in. This feeds into a 22" box fan on the floor that wafts the cool air down the row of crunchers.
The heated air then rises to the ceiling where a 16" circulating fan kicks it down the hall to the kitchen and out the door to the waiting attic fans.

It got up to 84f here yesterday, and it only got up to 86f in the crunching den.
One rig did not like it and shut down, but I put some cooler running GPUs in it, 680s instead of 580s, and it settled down and has been running since.
Only 63 outside this morning, so everythings as cool as a cucumber today.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Ageless wrote:

I'm running with a Coolermaster Seidon 120V V2.0...

I haven't seen the CPU temperature go over 55C yet on either system, even under heavy load.

I'm now using Handbrake to convert some movie ISOs into HEVC MKVs, this process uses all 4 cores of my i5 at 100% load. Even with the fan running at 90%, CPU temperatures aren't going above 54C on the hottest core, coolest core is 44C. With the fan at 90% (2155 rpm), I still don't hear it. I do hear it when it's at 100% (2450 rpm).

Room temperature is still 26.5C, but I've now opened a window and cooler outside air -22.1C- is flowing in and over the top of my case.

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I think I am going to pick this one up from kijiji. Ill try to thread the cables into the case, but I will probably end up leaving the side off anyway. I've been told that it is possible to remove the cpu block in order to thread the cables, but I am a bit wary to try that. I'll get back to you all when I manage to get it all installed, to let you know how it turns out.

So far, no go on the new Liquid cooler. It was sold before I managed to get to it. I think I'm going to pick up a brand new H55 or H60 from my local tech guys. Again, I'll let you all know when it is all up and running.

So far, no go on the new Liquid cooler. It was sold before I managed to get to it. I think I'm going to pick up a brand new H55 or H60 from my local tech guys. Again, I'll let you all know when it is all up and running.

Greeting ensignandy,

Be careful of the H60. I replaced my H50 with the H60 and could not get my temps below the high 60s low 70s. I reseated the water block 3 times and no results. It could just be my motherboard, or the block is not flat. It seems to be closer to the IHS on one side plus it doesn't look to be making any contact with the heat spreader at all. I put my H50 back in and my temps are low 50s.

My H60 could just be a fluke. If others here have no problem with the H60 or have a similar problem, please let me know.

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

LOL...
Of course, the coolest running cards I have are the couple that are running whilst sitting on TOP of the case, free air, via PCIE extenders......
Just saying.

. . Do you have a photo of that setup? I am curious about how you would get that to work!

you can add an optional 120mm fan on the hard drive cage, that may or may not help with improving airflow

I am kind of wary of putting a fan there. That is where some of the cables sit due to the fact that my PSU is not modular. I just noticed that the 120mm fan on the front of he HDD cage seems to be an intake fan. It might be worth a couple of degrees to swap directions there.

. . I would think not, it is important to move cooler air in as well as hotter air out. The intake fan will help create an airflow stream which is what you want. Can you fit any kind of fan on the rear? I found a useful little 40mm fan that I could mount on the grill of the back panel. It is a little noisy but with the intake fan creates quite a strong airflow through the case, it only dropped the temps on my SFF Compaq by 4 or 5 degrees but in cooler weather as now it is running at a very nice 60 deg C.

. . All you need is sufficient open grill area and a source of power to run that sucker.

. . Air in as well as air out is the formula.

Is there much of a difference between going with an all aluminum cooler vs. a copper aluminum one?

Coolers are a 'black art'...
I remember the old Sempron coolers.
Little blocks of aluminum with a tiny fan mounted on top.

I still run Thermaltake 'Big Typhoon' coolers on all but two rigs.
They have done the job for years now.

Except for the 'Frozen Penny' years...LOL.
It was rather fun running a CPU at -30 centigrade.
Not without it's associated problems, but a fun experiment.

. . -30 C. Now that is cool!