Best BEGINNER watercooling kit?

Nitrojan

Nitrojan

Nitrojan

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12 Jan 2008
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Ok, so I may think into watercooling my system in the future. What is the best IYO water cooling kit for a beginner/starter. At the moment I'm a bit curious as to putting anything involving water near my rig that just cost me £1.4k lol.

Are they very safe? And how hard are they to install?

Thanks,

Adam
 
Get some decent fluid (rather than using distilled water mix) and it should have very low electrical conductivity so a leak shouldn't be a problem unless your unlucky...

Also most kits will need some distilled water which isn't usually shown in the requirements... infact most of the "ready to go" "just 8 screws and your done" watercooling kits I've seen are anything but ready to go... you will need to remove your motherboard to put in the backplate, cut/measure the tubes, clamp them with whatever system yours uses (make sure you do this properly), fill/run it out the case and then top up, etc. which usually requires jumping a powersupply...

Unless you go for some fairly advanced kit I'm not convinced of the benefits personally - I got just as good results as a sub £100 all in one kit by lapping my CPU IHS and the bottom of the heatsink, maximising airflow and some AS5 properly applied... (tho the water cooling setup doesn't spike to as high temps on full out orthos)
 
Rroff said:
Get some decent fluid (rather than using distilled water mix) and it should have very low electrical conductivity so a leak shouldn't be a problem unless your unlucky...)
Click to expand...

If you buy real distilled water it has almost zero conductivity. It's the dissolved ions in it that makes it conductive. Deionised is OK, but the moment you add copper sulphate, you make it very electrically conductive, which is a bad thing. The newer products are now moving to formalin as an anti-algal I believe.
 
I was using de-ionised from halfords - as nowhere around here sells real distilled water - and didn't have great results with it (mixed with coolant concentrate) - got some feser one stuff that OCuk sells and it worked much better but I don't know how good or bad that stuff stacks up against other coolant fluids...
 
Is anyone actually using this watercooling kit? It looks good imo, I might buy it soon.. Although I havent tested my Thermalright Ultra-120 yet..

Anyone got any personal reviews on the watercooling system?
 
the Ultra120 will beat the Big Water hands down tbh.. I know, because my water setup contains the big water CPU Block and Rad, and it's no cooler than my AC7pro

:)
 
You are having trouble installing Air cooling and you want to try Water cooling? :o

Have a look in the sticky for advice. Stay clear of Thermaltack.
 
Well, I install it but then when I go to boot, the LCD Poster just stays on "CPU INNIT" and none of the chassis or system fans turn on.. I recently swapped to the factory heatsink that came with my mobo and it works fine.. well.. recently until my mobo started smoking >_>
 
fornowagain said:
Looks can be deceiving.
Click to expand...

Lol, so true.

Nitrojan said:
Well, I install it but then when I go to boot, the LCD Poster just stays on "CPU INNIT" and none of the chassis or system fans turn on.. I recently swapped to the factory heatsink that came with my mobo and it works fine.. well.. recently until my mobo started smoking >_>
Click to expand...

I would hazard a guess that you created a short somewhere which prevented it from intitally booting up and then adding the stock HSF just stopped the short but created other problems which probably burnt the traces from the mobo (hence the smoke). Look for any metal touching the motherboard - front and back.
 
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Agreed. Take the mobo out the case then put the heatsink on and check for extra standoffs in the case or whatever.
 
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