is water cooling really worth it?

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:27

JonJ678 said:
So many options. I want to move to a ground floor apartment and submerge a radiator in a water butt, massive heat capacity instead of fans, and it'll cool down at night. Can't wait

No, it's too ill defined a question for us to give a sensible answer to. Watercooling is hugely varied and you've told us nothing about your current set up. Does it help if I tell you my amd 7750BE was loading at one degree higher than it was idling when it was watercooled?

what rad, fans, pump, CPU block, and where is ur rad?
Oh, and what was the OC?

twist3d0n3 said:
christ what is that saying 78oC in speedfan?!

get coretemp/real temp and see what your core temps are, i bet they're higher than you think...

realtemp doesn't recognize cpu

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twist3d0n3 · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:28

puma luke said:
what rad, fans, pump, CPU block, and where is ur rad?
Oh, and what was the OC?

realtemp doesn't recognize cpu

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and what about coretemp?

edit just looked

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:28

Phunky Phish said:
Below room temperature with air?

Erm........ no!

Think about it, does not matter how fast you push the air over the cooler, it is still at room temperature!

so how can water? or cant it???

and yes i know that water is a better medium for 'carrying' the heat away from the chip hence it reduces load temps.

twist3d0n3 · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:30

also, just spotted your pci-e freq is a bit higher than i think is considered safe... if it's set too high you can get SATA corruption apparently

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:30

twist3d0n3 said:
and what about coretemp?

edit just looked

core temp is on in the screenie

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:31

twist3d0n3 said:
also, just spotted your pci-e freq is a bit higher than i think is considered safe... if it's set too high you can get SATA corruption apparently

hmmm good spot, its set at 105. the oc must have altered it...

twist3d0n3 · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:32

puma luke said:
so how can water? or cant it???

and yes i know that water is a better medium for 'carrying' the heat away from the chip hence it reduces load temps.

water will only go below ambient if you place it outside, under the ground, setup a heat exchanging system (as in 2 loops, with 3 rads, 1 rad outside, connected to another rad, with fans pushing the cooled air into the rad from the cpu, does that make sense?), or as jonj678 has said by submerging a rad in a large(ish) vessel of water

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:32

twist3d0n3 said:
water will only go below ambient if you place it outside, under the ground, setup a heat exchanging system (as in 2 loops, with 3 rads, 1 rad outside, connected to another rad, with fans pushing the cooled air into the rad from the cpu, does that make sense?), or as jonj678 has said by submerging a rad in a large(ish) vessel of water

ye that makes sense

twist3d0n3 · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:32

puma luke said:
hmmm good spot, its set at 105. the oc must have altered it...

upping the FSB will cause the pci-e clocks to raise with it, set it to either 101 or 103 to be safe

Ricardox1 · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:32

Absolutely

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:34

twist3d0n3 said:
upping the FSB will cause the pci-e clocks to raise with it, set it to either 101 or 103 to be safe

ok cheers

i hadnt set to 105, it was on auto so increased proportionally with the OC
down to 1.3 to be safe

Phunky Phish · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:37

I think jonj678 wants to USE the water butt as the rad! As it will never heat up due to the volume of water it holds.

As twist3d0n3 says, water will not get below room temperature in a normal PC install, ie rad in PC or fitted to the outside of it, but it will keep the CPU much closer to room temp when pushing it hard because its a better medium.

If you want to go below room temp then you are talking rad in a different room, the use of multiple rads in a cascade heat exchanger, or refridgerating compressors.

But if you go to far below room temp then you get into condensation issues, and the water that producess (god my spelling sucks!)

Phunky Phish · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:39

Ricardox1 said:
Absolutely

Thats helpfull
Great input there mate

jaybee · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:44

I don't believe it's at 35c at load. I would check that and check again. Is water cooling worth it? I've ran a few loops myself over the years and whilst it is nice to run one, I personally wouldn't do another one as I don't think it is worth the costs anymore for a dedicated loop.

philip j fry · 3 Feb 2010 at 18:42

35 underload then no you dont need water cooling ,but bth sounds like i need 1 of your coolers

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 21:23

jaybee said:
I don't believe it's at 35c at load. I would check that and check again.

check it against what??? amd overdrive, core temp, speed fan and occt all say the same temp. what do you propose i do next? :confused:

before i had the antec 300, load temps were reaching 50 degrees with an oc of 3.7 GHz, just proves how good a case it is for the money

Phunky Phish · 3 Feb 2010 at 21:49

Puma, with load temps like that I would save the money and hassle and stick with air mate.
You have real good temps, you have checked and double checked.

CPU temp does not seem to be whats holding your oc back so I would stick with what you got.
Now if you up'd the vcore to increase your oc and the temps started going up, then I would consider it.

Think the general consensus with your set up is no, its not worth it.

NoNameNoNumber · 3 Feb 2010 at 22:14

ok then cheers

now stress testing p95 at 3.9 GHz... 37 degrees

will post screenies if its stable

buttkinz · 3 Feb 2010 at 22:57

lock it to 100 in bios, save you frying the card or messing the HDD up

you must be in a chilly room, your hdd is at 19 degrees lol, mine sit at 29, im guessing that your idle temps are around 23?? at idle im at around 21-23 and load is 31, thats in a 19-20 degree room, you using your pc as a heater this winter??

running a swiftech h20 220.

JonJ678 · 3 Feb 2010 at 23:20

Phunky Phish said:
Below room temperature with air?

Erm........ no!

This qualifies as pedantic, but given people have achieved sub ambient temps using deltas and a wind tunnel it has to be mentioned. Air going into the fan is at ambient temperature, ambient pressure. Air leaving the fan is going a lot faster, so by conservation of mass (wind tunnel) is at a lower pressure. Gases cool down as their pressure drops, so the air leaving the fan can be cooler than the air going in. This leads directly to sub ambient heatsink temperatures and hearing loss. I might have cocked up the thermodynamics there, been a while since I looked into this.

puma luke said:
what rad, fans, pump, CPU block, and where is ur rad?
Oh, and what was the OC?

This was a feser 120, scythe s-flex 1600rpm running at 7V, laing ddc 18W, ek supreme without impingement plate. Rad was sitting on my desk. Processor was not overclocked nor overvolted as it turned out my ecs motherboard was having none of it.

As a crude rule of thumb, you need at least a 240mm radiator to beat a large heatsink like the TRUE, a 120mm radiator will equal it.

Phunky Phish said:
I think jonj678 wants to USE the water butt as the rad! As it will never heat up due to the volume of water it holds.

If you want to go below room temp then you are talking rad in a different room, the use of multiple rads in a cascade heat exchanger, or refrigerating compressors.

Half rad, half reservoir. It'll cool itself down via evaporation at some rate, and as long as it's in the shade I imagine the water temperatures will be below ambient outside. At an overestimated heat load of 500W, 200 litre butt full of water, ignoring transfer coefficients and all heat loss from the butt, it'll need about 2 1/2 hours for the water temp to go up by 5 degrees. I'll probably work out evaporative, radiative losses etc at some point but I'm pretty sure a 30m coil of hosepipe in a waterbutt is an excellent way of keeping a computer cool.

And you missed peltiers/thermoelectrics from your list