Watercooling gallery at [H]ardOCP
Watercooling Gallery at amdmb
Watercooling gallery at overclockers.com
Gallery at Pro-Cooling
Gallery here at OCUK
Water-cooling reviews and tips from overclockers.com
Overclockers comparative waterblock tests
Pro-cooling's Interactive block comparison
What should I buy?
Kits:
Basic kits like WaterChill are fine for beginners who do not want to design their own systems. They will happily cool a reasonably over-clocked system.
The Waterchill kits now use Hydor pumps and Black Ice radiators but be warned that the supplied Black Ice Pro is the poor relation of radiators. The Power kit comes with a good Hydor pump and the new Antartica block is a much better one than the one usually supplied with the cheaper Waterchill kits.
DIY:
The major manufacturers are DangerDen, D-Tek, Swiftech and BeCooling. The really hard-core make their own blocks but this is not for the faint of heart. Buying individual components to make your own system will yield better results than the kits above. You will also have the satisfaction of having your own personal system.
DangerDen do kits which are available from a number of UK retailers who obviously cannot be listed here. These kits will likely give better results than WaterChill-type kits but we are talking a few degrees at best. Their RBX and TDX blocks are very close in performance to the WhiteWater (see next).
D-Tek now sell the Cathar-designed
Little River White Water (LRWW) and this is one of the best mass-market blocks available today. It costs around £45.
Swiftech's new 6000 blocks are very good and are exceptional value. Tests put the 6002 at the very top of the heap. Swiftech are also now manufacturing the Cathar-designed Storm G4 and at a very reasonable price! Available from OCUK!!!
The best block is unquestionably Cathar's Storm G5. It is made in extremely small quantities and is most definitely not cheap! Production is currently suspended so get the Swiftech Storm above.
Chipset blocks are not common and the most used is the DangerDen Z-Chip. Unfortunately it is also proven to be a flow-killer considerably damaging the overall cooling of the whole system.
GPU blocks come in two different formats for ATI and NVidia.
Pumps:
Eheim make the most commonly-used pumps and the two main contenders are the 1048 and 1250. The 1250 is more powerful but quite a lot larger. These can be bought from specialist water-cooling stockists but also (usually cheaper) from fish-tank vendors. Other manufacturers include Hydor, ViaAqua and MaxiJet. The very best pumps are Iwaki but are not easily obtained. A new arrival is C-Systems which make a very small powerful 12v pump. 12v pumps are also now being sold by Dangerden and Swiftech. They are re-badged Laing pumps. Make sure you get the D5 version not the D4.
Radiators:
Radiators can be bought from specialist companies like
HWLabs who make the BlackIce range or Thermochill who now sell the Cathar-designed PA160. These are basically copies of car heatercores (also known as heater matrixes). Heatercores from Vauxhalls seem to be the most popular amongst the watercooling community and can be bought from scrapyards for under £20. They would then need slight modding of the inlet/outlets which is a simple matter of cutting off some of the copper piping and then gluing in some barbs. Pre-modded heatercores with barbs pre-fitted are available for around £40.
Tubing:
Tubing is normally either 3/8" or 1/2". Tygon or Clearflex60 are the only decent choices. It is very common for beginners to try to save money on tubing and then end up buying Tygon/Clearflex anyway. Just don't buy cheapo silicon tubing and expect wonderful things. Clamps can be bought from B&Q for a couple of pounds for a pair.
Fans:
Most rads fit 120mm fans and there are many available. The cheapest are Evercool fans which give around 80cfm at roughly 30dba (manufacturers numbers). More powerful fans are available but these are usually much noisier. Since better performance can be obtained if the fan is slightly away from the actual radiator, it is common to use a
shroud. 38mm-deep fans are the best for restrictive radiators.
Water & Additives:
Do not use ordinary tap water as it contains large amounts of minerals such as calcium which will build up in your block, rad and pump like cholesterol in your arteries. Use distilled water available from Halfords for relatively little. You can also buy Coolant Conditioner from Halfords to prevent algae growth. Commercial additives such as WaterWetter are expensive and gimmicky. They do not aid the cooling efficiency of the water at all.
TECs:
TECs are clever little widgets using the Peltier effect to provide sub-zero cooling to cpus. It requires specialist power supplies, very powerful water-cooling to cool the TEC and insulation on the cpu to prevent condensation. Avoid.
Phase-Change:
If you want cooling to TEC level, you would be better off buying Phase-Change such as
Vapochill available here at OCUK.
A simple kit for a beginner is as follows:
A Swiftech Storm or Dangerden TDX or D-Tek LRWW
Eheim 1250 pump or Swiftech MCP655
Nova Heatercore
Evercool 120mm fan
8' of Tygon
This should come to well under £150. Before trying to cool chipsets and gpus, start with the just the cpu and see how you get on. Water-cooling is not for everyone as can be seen from the amount of second-hand equipment for sale here. Bear in mind that much of the for sale items are from people who have upgraded to better components so buy with care - there is likely to be better stuff available for new and for not much more.
Finally, the best aspect of water-cooling is the individuality of it. Just like modding, it is much more fun to design and build it yourself from your own research than to simply copy somebody else or ask for someone to tell you what to use.
