You don't have to sacrifice performance for silence - and the Res's were designed for uber hot P4's - so all oc'ed C2D are easy and low voltage C2Q are simple with an improved block. – heck there’s a thread on here with two C2Q in a skulltrail board with a res2 (aka fully passive) cooling both AND the chipset.
It's only when you want silent SLI / Xfire they just can’t cope – and why should they.
When gaming your either wearing headphones or using speakers. So just use aftermarket active aircooling on the cards (S1 or HR-03). When idle they are near silent / or running passive, when gaming run the fan at 7v as it’s not an issue as ambient noise level is 2 or three times higher anyway.
It’s all about the right tool for the job – it doesn’t have to be one complete cooling system – if you think about it most people use active air-cooling on cpu and gpu and passive air cooling on chipset, ram, HDD, etc anyway.
So why should adding a water-cooling loop be any different.
If I did game heavily on the pc I would use the same loop I use now + one or more actively cooled cards – it’s a lower cost, win-win solution.
Just my 2cents worth – as my views are bias towards silence as ambient noise levels in my area at night are extremely low. For most, fan at 7v or 5v are below ambient even at night.
In reply to matt100 - the reservoir is the radiator – aka why Zalman called them reserator – and the q6600 is one hot chip – much hotter that a QX9650.
And as WJA96 said above the Res XT is a hybrid system with a fan massively improving that performance of the four passive rads within the XT.
It’s an overpriced but very underrated bit if kit - Quote from xbit labs
Conclusion -The new liquid cooling system from Zalman is a definite success. For the first time in our tests a liquid cooling system has managed to outperform an air cooler. The Reserator XT was better by 10°C than the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme (with two fans) in my tests. It also won the test of the maximum CPU frequency while being within comfortable limits in terms of noise. Zalman’s progress in designing water-blocks is especially praiseworthy. My tests suggest that the new ZM-WB5 water-block is 7-8°C more efficient than the ZM-WB4 Gold under peak CPU load.
– says it all really, was a
[email protected] btw with Scythe Minebea fans also note how the revised blocks make such a big difference as both myself (using a Apogee GT) and Bomag (EK supreme) can confirm.
quad + single card on a XT is do-able with new blocks
quad + twin cards - no
