Hello
system
AMD Phenom II 970 BE quad. cpu
Asus M4A89GTD Pro AM3 mainboard
am going from air cool to liquid cooling on the cpu and would like suggestions on quality liquid coolers @ reasonable prices. pros & cons ?
Any and all suggestions and help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kevin

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There was a thread about this.
Cannot locate it now.

Check SciManStev's posts......

He is the master of water cooling at the moment.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Cons: noise, potential catastrophic system failure from leaks, maintaining fluid level, treating fluid periodically for bacterial and/or fungal growth, uses a lot more electricity that a standard HSF, initial outlay of $$$ vs a larger HSF

Pro: efficient transfer of heat.

The one thing you have to keep in mind liquid cooling is great of you are an extreme OCer. IF that isn't the case a new larger HSF will be more of a benefit for you

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Noise is less, but depends on parts used and cooling level needed, no need to treat the water for 8-10 months(depending again on what coolant is used and climate of region where you live), maintaining water level can be from few milliliters monthly, to few milliliters once per 1/2 year if needed at all. Electricity can be neglected as its is 20-25 watts, depending on actual setup also. In fact, its even lower, bcs cooled parts consume less.

Cons: can damage your systems permanently(need regular observation, leaks can be detected visually in most cases and until they are small, you can react on time. In most cases it starts with small leak, just tearing, not some huge water spring inside), good setups are expensive, once a year(or half year) needs serious maintenance, lot less speed gain with overclock than you maybe expect.

My cooling system consists on:
EK Supreme CPU block, EK NB/SB5 NB block, EK GTX470 - two blocks, two radiators, Thermochill PA120.3, XSPC RX120.2 and pump MCP 355 with custom cover(Petra's some model, I forgot already).
When everything is "SETI-fied", CPU reaches 72-74 degrees* peak(i7-920 4.2 GHz with HT on), GPUs(overclocked, with very little voltage added) - around 47-48, ambient was usually 23-24. Main exhaust fans are two 200 mm fans, 700 rpm, which are bundled with Coller Master ATCS 840 case. On small radiator I put two NB XL2 fans, with lower rmps at 1100-1200. Fans cannot be heard, the only noise coming out is from pump, but I stopped to notice it long ago.
Last time it was rebuild bcs of modification was in late September previous year. Until now its not touched, except once or twice some more water. As bactericide I use anti-freeze liquid for cars(20-25 ml per liter water).
Im extremely happy with it, bcs compared to my air cooling before(Prolimatech Megahalems + two NB XLP fans) it very quiet, I would call it inaudible. As for cooled Fermi's - its clearly pure gain. Also, I gained some 150MHz oerclock and if needed I can have some 200-250 more, still maintaining CPU temps far bellow dangerous(90+ = dangerous - where systems hangs bcs overheat, not literally dangerous)

*Degrees are in Celsius.

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Noise is less, but depends on parts used and cooling level needed, no need to treat the water for 8-10 months(depending again on what coolant is used and climate of region where you live), maintaining water level can be from few milliliters monthly, to few milliliters once per 1/2 year if needed at all. Electricity can be neglected as its is 20-25 watts, depending on actual setup also. In fact, its even lower, bcs cooled parts consume less.

Cons: can damage your systems permanently, good systems are expensive, once a year(or half year) needs serious maintenance, lot less speed gain with overclock than you maybe expect.

Cooling is overrated these days.
Back in the day, my frozen cpus would do many times what anybody else's could do.

Now, it's a wash.
Most can achieve CPU speeds on air that I could only achieve at -30c.
I mostly keep it running now because to do otherwise would require me to tear the whole rig down and fit a conventional heat sink to it.

There is still some reliability there though.
The Frozen one will keep crunching when the ambient temps get up to 85f or more.
When the other crunchers had long since shut down.

But, Vic has shown speeds upward of 4.1Ghz.......on air.
So, the speed card is no longer an advantage.
Besides, CPU speed is no longer what it was back in the day.
GPUs rule now.
The CPU is just a minion serving the Cudas.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

There was a thread about this.
Cannot locate it now.

Check SciManStev's posts......

He is the master of water cooling at the moment.

Thank you for the confidence level, but there are many who use water cooling here. I also agree with Skildude, in that water cooling is mostly useful if you are planning to extreme over clock your system, or if your ambient room temperature is rather high. I did put together an extreme system, and even used an aquarium chiller to further cool the CPU loop.

The fluid levels do drop a little bit, but I top them off every few months. I used equipment that is very robust, so I don't worry about leaks, and there is definitely a dollar cost with starting up. I do use a fluid called Feser One that lasts a year, and is well suited for the function. It even comes in blue, red, and green.

The up side is that your system can be made almost bullet proof as far as heat goes. With the fans, CPU cooling loop, and GPU cooling loops, I maintain temps many would get at idle while being very heavily overclocked.

Much of my equipment came from Danger Den, however ther are many stores that sell top notch water cooling supplies.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Hello
system
AMD Phenom II 970 BE quad. cpu
Asus M4A89GTD Pro AM3 mainboard
am going from air cool to liquid cooling on the cpu and would like suggestions on quality liquid coolers @ reasonable prices. pros & cons ?
Any and all suggestions and help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kevin

I would save yourself a bundle of money (if you're just looking at the CPU) if I were you, and drop a Corsiar h50 in. Mine keeps my 1090t at low to mid 40s, running @ 3.96 GHz on very low fan speeds (you really cannot beat the value of those things). That way, you get the advantage of a completely self-contined liquid cooling setup - at a fraction of the cost.

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Thank you for your responses.
I am currently using the stock fan/heatsink and its just not quite enough. An aftermarket heat/sink and fan might be the better way to go (so many choices out there)as apposed to liquid cooling. All of the aftermarket air cool units appear to be so bulky and weighty, my concern would be undo weight stress to the mainboard. Have found the Corsair H70 liquid cooler which is billed as a zero maintenance unit.I would like to ask suggestions on air cool and liquid cool units that are tried and true. Once again, thank you for suggestions.
Kevin

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Thank you for your responses.
I am currently using the stock fan/heatsink and its just not quite enough. An aftermarket heat/sink and fan might be the better way to go (so many choices out there)as apposed to liquid cooling. All of the aftermarket air cool units appear to be so bulky and weighty, my concern would be undo weight stress to the mainboard. Have found the Corsair HD70 liquid cooler which is billed as a zero maintenance unit.I would like to ask suggestions on air cool and liquid cool units that are tried and true. Once again, thank you for suggestions.
Kevin

Seems the H50 or equivelent has been spoken about.
I still run old Thermaltake Big Typhoon phase coolers on all of my rigs.
But they are way outdated.
Not a failure, though. Just keep the kitty hair outta the fans, and it's cool, bro.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

I had the same questions four years ago and had a very limited budget. I opted for a self-contained cooling system. I think they have the advantages of the bigger water cooling block systems, but at more reasonable cost both in the card and xtra equipment involved. These devices have improved over the last four years and the prices have dropped as manufactors are finally getting serious about them. Check out the Guru3D web site or some of the others for reviews and comparsions on these devices. I ended up installing Corsair's H50 & H70 products on all three of my machines. They fit all of the current intel & AMD MBs.

Depending on your MB you may want to find one that has fan control. One of my active machines (Q6600/DP35DP) does not have a user type fan control, but the system does manage it quite well. The other (i7 950/DX58SO) does have it and I have adjusted it to the max speed and it is very quiet. Because of where the machines are located in my house, it can get very hot and the machines are kept very cool even when running 24/7, which is why I go rid of the air cooling. I get more noise adjusting the fan speed on my video cards. BTW, these machines only crunch, no gaming allowed.

One of the things that I like about these devices is if I upgrade my MB, I don't have to worry about a cooling system, I just move it to the new MB. There will be others that will disagree with me about this, but it is what it is.

http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product.php?product_id=2694

I use that HSF and have 1 120 fan attached. It keeps my 965 around 45 in the winter and 55 in the summer under a full load. It is slightly OCed

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

It's one of the things that always fascinated me about crunching.....

Transferring the CPU heat to air.

If I was to start out now, the self contained liquid systems would be the way to go. The Thermaltake units were about the same thing, but they use a closed system refrigerant to do the same task. It condenses on the cold side, evaporates on the high side, and circulates on it's own.
So does the Thermalrite on my air cooled 920. Same principal.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

All of the aftermarket air cool units appear to be so bulky and weighty, my concern would be undo weight stress to the mainboard.

Aftermarket heatsinks typically include a backplate that provides the support necessary to make sure your mobo doesn't get ruined. Think about it this way, if they were breaking people's mobos then no one would buy them. For my next rig I'm going with an all-in-one (maybe one of the corsair units). The all in ones don't really povide any better heatr transfer than a good air cooler but because the size of the pump is smaller than the air cooler towers, the unit will fit in a case easier. Cost wise they are in the same ballpark with all-in-ones a little more expensive.

Looking forward, if your next CPU is an Intel Sandy Bridge, they are running much cooler than previous generations anyway so there is less heat to dissipate to start with. We'll have to see what Bulldozer brings in this arena. I think aggressive cooling for ambient temp over clocking will be less important in the near future. As crunchers we typically are looking for the sweet spot OC for energy efficiency rather than artificial benching runs. Don't get me wrong, I do bench on occasion and it's lots of fun but I wouldn't dream of running my rigs with the volts necessary for good bench scores 24/7.

All that being said, I still think overclocking your CPU is important because while phrasing it as they "serve" the CUDA disguises the fact that they often are the bottleneck. CUDA has to wait to be serviced by the CPU to work at peak efficiency.

Steve

I´m using a Skythe Rasetsu heatsink with Slipstream 120/1700.

Cools my 1090T at 49°C and is not that expensive.
No need for water cooling on such a system.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

The all in ones don't really povide any better heatr transfer than a good air cooler but because the size of the pump is smaller than the air cooler towers, the unit will fit in a case easier.

I totally disagree with you on the heat transfer. When I initially installed my i7/930, it was with a massive Thermaltake cooler and my cpu was running about 80-85c @ 90% when ambient temps was in the high 90f. After a week, I installed a Corsair H70 and the cpu temp had never been above 65c @ 90% (7 cores) even when the ambient temps reach near 100f as it did last week. Even when I upgraded to a i7/950 o/c 3.8 GHz, using the chiller @ 70% the cpu temp has never been above 77c. I do limit the number of cores when ambient temps reach this high to keep the cpu temps in the green.

One of the reasons that I have maintained these temps is because of the cases that I use (Coolermaster HAF32), with the exhaust fan at the top directly over the chiller exhaust. Regardless of whether you use air or a lqs good air circulation is a MUST.

Have found the Corsair H70 liquid cooler which is billed as a zero maintenance unit.I would like to ask suggestions on air cool and liquid cool units that are tried and true.

[edit] Two of my machines have been using the H70 for 4 years with no problems. The H50 is sitting in a machine that is inactive, due to be upgraded as soon as finances are available. Once it is active again, I will use the H50 as its cooling solution. I have built several machines for friends over the last year or so and all of them have either the H50/60/70 in them and there has not been one complaint concerning cpu temps.

Some of the information in this thread is hear-say, speculation, or simply not true. So I'm going to lay out what I know about it. and think about it, and my experience. You can judge for yourself, there are plenty of forums and sites out there about water cooling and you can see the walls of shame, fame, and examples of what you want and don't want. Even articles discussing line sizes etc.

My water cooling system is dead quiet. If you pay attention to what you are doing or use compression fittings you will have no leaks. The permanent damage folks in this thread need to quit reading the horror stories. Yes if you have a leak you will have issues. This is the third machine I've water cooled for myself and I've water cooled about 14 customer machines(For disclosure I am a DangerDen Reseller) and I've never had a problem with leaks. This is why you test the look before installing it. Install it then test for 24 hours before power on. That way if you have a leak you can fix it and dry up the system before applying power to the motherboard and socket etc. Once you get it leak free, depending on how paranoid you are, you never need to check it again unless you have bounced around or rudely moved the case. Once it's sealed it's sealed, and no the tubing doesn't randomly sprout holes or cracks, buy quality tubing!

I generally check my tubing once a month, and that's more to wipe the dust off than anything. I've had to add fluid to my system once, and that was when I first set it up. So I wouldn't call maintenance an issue.

As far as bacterial growth, it isn't an issue if you put the right stuff in it to begin with like Feser 1, a silver coil, or PT Nuke. Don't put mixing metals into your system like copper and aluminum it causes galvanic corrosion IE rust..

My system uses less energy that before on the video card. Even if you include the new pump and the fans it still isn't enough to matter. Water cooling the video card took about 16 watts off the system load, when you add the pump for the cooling, depending on the pump, mine only uses 18 watts. So you have a 'lot more power usage' of 2 watts. Add in the additional fans you may have to add, in my case 2 120mm fans then my system uses a total of 12 more watts.

Now talking on CPU cooling only the fan you take off the HSF, depending on what you have, will just about equal the fan wattage. 18 watt pump replaces a 5 watt fan. I don't think I would call that a large increase. IF 15 watts kills your budget or your power bill you have more serious problems.

Obviously this is largely dependent on what type of water cooling you do. If you start talking about a Steve style setup with aquarium chillers, multiple radiators, fans, controllers etc. Or especially if you start looking into peltier cooling and adding another 300-600 watt power supply to power it somewhere then yes you will have major issues.

Changing to water cooling is relatively no more dangerous than air cooling dependent on how much attention you pay installing it and testing it before you go power hot on your box. It uses no more power than any other component your going to place inside your box as long as you don't go extreme with it(Steve lol). And the maintenance required is no more than you would normally do. IE take the case side off and blow out a bit of dust from time to time. Add liquid to the system about every 6 months to a year(less than 1/8 cup on a dual bay res).

Now the outlay of cash is a biggie, because getting into a decent kit you are looking at ~$300+ meanwhile a great air cooling solution can be had for ~$60. That is the one thing you need to think about in my opinion. Is it worth the money to you, and remember if you water cool your cpu and video card those blocks often are not usable on anything that changes, IE sockets etc. Especially the video cards. So when it's time to upgrade to that next video card or socket you kit will mostly come with you but you will need new block and most can be had in the $40-150 range depending.

I went with an actually custom built loop this time around, with nice parts, and it has far exceeded my expectations. I will never go back to air cooling unless for some reason I simply can't afford the water solution.

As far a reasonable, cpu only cooling, don't expect miracles but most report does a good job is the Corsair H50-60-70 line. Can be had for ~$150 and under and get it done. Won't be much better than air but will be better. A custom parted kit will run about $150+ depending on the quality and name brand of parts you buy. I think the kit I parted together I'm currently running was ~$500 but has two radiators and compression fittings.

My 9650 @ 4Ghz + GTX 480 in the same loop run 49c under load with 22c ambient temps. On air my 9650 was running ~75c(Tuniq Tower x2 120mm fans) and the 480 was at ~85-90c(Stock eVGA cooling). Water is nice ;)

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

I've not heard one horror story. I correlate liquid near my electronics as a huge red flag. You are an excellent example on how to maintain your system. The average user here doesnt take the cover off to check for dust bunnies.

The idea that an average user would operate the machinery properly is wishful thinking. I have no doubt that chromespringer knows enough to build a system but to assume the casual user would pay attention long enough not to have catastrophic results is shortsighted

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

There is some great information on here. I might start some research on those corsairs for my I7. Not to overclock just keep cooler.

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[/quote]

Old James

I've never done liquid cooling, but aren't there non-conductive liquids that can be used that would mitigate leak problems?

-D

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Tell the U.S. Navy that water cooling electronics is bad juju. They've been doing so with their high-powered shipboard electronics for decades. Current "green" server farms are also using the heated water from their server cores to warm up the people in the attached office spaces during cooler months.

If you don't pay attention to what you're doing, then yes, you should be concerned about leaking coolant inside your computer and shorting things out.

Luckily, the state of liquid cooling home PCs has advanced to the point that you have to purposely ignore the instructions to cause havoc these days.

I've been water cooling my SETI crunchers for the last 3+ years now, and change out the fluid once a year at most (It gets cloudy).

I have an odd hobby, I buy off-lease IBM workstations with dual hyperthreaded Xeons or dual dual-core Xeons, and stuff the fastest CPUs that the BIOS will allow into the sockets. IBM believes that their 80mm fans and stainless/copper heatsinks running at high-bypass turbofan speeds and volumes are just fine. I don't, without wearing earplugs around the things, especially during the warmer days of summer. I live in a house, not a server farm...

So I bought Koolance Exos units for all 4 IBMs in the house, along with their gold-plated waterblocks and blue coolant. Save for the yearly coolant changes and blowing the dust out of the external radfan assemblies, I've had no problems and no huge increases in maintenance effort over air-cooling. The wattage draw of the pumps and radfans is negligible, especially when you factor in the juice needed to run a pair of Xeon 5160s and an overclocked MSI Radeon HD6870 24/7. (I don't run 24/7 as much in summer, the systems can really bump the room temperatures and they don't need to fight the wattmeter when running air conditioning)

Overclocking is one good reason to liquid-cool a CPU. Noise abatement is another. While I'm partial to Koolance external systems, there are plenty of other options that have proven track records - Danger Den, Thermaltake, Corsair, you name it.

When I took the pic below with all 4 cores of my dual Xeon 5160s running 100% on Seti, the cpu temp showed 29C, while the water temp displayed 30C, with the 120mm radfans set at 7/10 speed. That's nice, cool and quiet, compared to the stock IBM option. Granted, these are only Woodcrests, but they still do a fine job on my important programs like SolidWorks, Fallout New Vegas, and SETI BOINC. If you're thinking about water-cooling a computer, I'd say go for it - just do your homework and buy coolant for the yearly change-out.

(IBM IntelliStation Z-Pro 9228, 2 each Xeon 5160 dual-core 3.0Ghz, 10Gb FB-DIMM memory, 1Tb Western Digital Caviar Black, MSI TwinFrozr Radeon HD6870 1Gb video, Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit, Koolance Exos-2 external liquid cooling)
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