Looking to go for watercooling...

LordShadow · 23 Dec 2006 at 22:35

I'm looking at maybe getting watercooling for my current PC (see sig).

Having had a look around, Im fairly happy with most of it and it seems simple enough, however I havent found a common consensus as to whether it is worth cooling the chipset using a watercooling kit. Now given that my current DS4 will not OC further due to the chipset, I was thinking it would be, but using search function and looking at others opinions, I'm not so sure.

What do you guys think? Worth cooling the chipset or not?

Thanks.

Hades · 23 Dec 2006 at 23:21

It's probably not worth watercooling the chipset if you can fit a bigger heatsink and fan on it, or passively cool it with a large heatsink. At first I didn't bother with mine. Then I added it into the loop because I was aiming for near silence.

So watercool it for relative silence but for performance you may be better off just putting a lager HSF on it. Bear in mind that if you add it into your loop then the radiator has to cope with more heat.

LordShadow · 24 Dec 2006 at 10:17

Thanks for the reply. I think at the start I will go for just the CPU and GPU, and then add in the chipset later if needs be.

Another question - How large a radiator am I likely to need to effectively cool an OCed E6600 (looking for 3.6Ghz) and an OCed X1900XT?

w3bbo · 24 Dec 2006 at 11:20

Hades said:
It's probably not worth watercooling the chipset if you can fit a bigger heatsink and fan on it, or passively cool it with a large heatsink. At first I didn't bother with mine. Then I added it into the loop because I was aiming for near silence.

So watercool it for relative silence but for performance you may be better off just putting a lager HSF on it. Bear in mind that if you add it into your loop then the radiator has to cope with more heat.

Same here, I watercooled mine for the sake of silence. Watercooling my old NF4 chipset helped my overclock but on the 680i its done squat apart from silence.