Air or Water - how do you cool yours?

n3crius

n3crius

n3crius

Soldato
Joined
2 Aug 2004
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Location
London, UK.
I'll be thinking about a rig toward the end of the year but still need to weigh up which solution will be better. Never tried water before but having no noise seems like a good way to go. Thought I'd fire the question to you lot, how do you cool yours? :p
 
Air, currently. I'm looking at buying one of the cheaper watercooling kits though, just to get some experience and try it out.
 
The cheap H2O kits are not much better then high end air cooling. I dont like the possibility of leakage as well as needing to top up on fluid every now and again. There is also the large price tag! and all this for what kind of benefit? 100mhz???
 
the primary benefit of watercooling, for me any way, is the reduced noise levels. Especially with the graphics card. It's nice to not hear the whirring of a graphics card fan when i start playing bf2 or something.
 
snow patrol said:
the primary benefit of watercooling, for me any way, is the reduced noise levels. Especially with the graphics card. It's nice to not hear the whirring of a graphics card fan when i start playing bf2 or something.
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I usually have my games so loud i cant hear a thing!
 
Always air, never used water. I know it's vastly safer nowadays but putting water inside my case would just feel wrong.
 
Just making a transition over to water. Just need to mod my case so the rad fits!
The pump (DDC-ultra) is basicly silent, no louder than my psu, and testing it out on a spare motherboard + cpu, the temps are great.
Had nearly 1.6v going through the AMD64 and temps were still great, and it was still quiet!
 
I think water users usually have top end rigs so spending what for me is a small fortune on water seems quite acceptable to them.
 
BAMBI said:
I think water users usually have top end rigs so spending what for me is a small fortune on water seems quite acceptable to them.
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My current rig is a Barton 2500+, ATI 9600XT, 1GB RAM jobbie that I've had for 3 years. Cost me about £100 to build the WC setup but besides adding some coolant to the system every 6 months its not been touched. Saying that.. I've watercooled for years but to be honest I'm thinking about switching to air when I upgrade. There's no real fuss involved when its setup its just when it comes to upgrade or change things its difficult to get around the pipes and stuff.

Maybe I'll design a better system that allows me to disconnect it without too much trouble!
 
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Water cooling is really cool, but I'l probably never get it. It gets you maybe an extra 100MHz or so over air. And it's easy to make a quiet air-cooled PC nowadays.
 
In order from the first PC I built:

Air
Air
Water
Water
Water
Air

;) Waters better, but I discovered the hard way that puppies like to play with pipes, when a PC is switched on. Bye bye Opty 165 (mobo, PSU, and RAM too) :( .

Its air for me for now I think. Besides C2D's run cool. :)
 
Water :D Got Core 2 E6600 and X1900 XTX in the loop. It is near silent with the single 120mm fan on the radiator. The pumps are very quiet as well.
 
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