Spec Me A Water Cooled Setup For This System Please

Associate
Joined
15 Oct 2007
Posts
2,186
Location
Bedfordshire, UK.
Am considering having a water cooled system for my next build, do not have a clue about water cooling as never have looked into it before, am going to overclock the cpu to around 3.0-3.4GHz. Would like it to cool better than the current heat sink i have in the list below and be as quite as possible. Dont know how much water cooling costs, so not sure on my buget, but would like it to be under £100, below is the system i shall be building, minus the heatsink of course. So what do i need? thanks

basketre3.jpg
 
Last edited:
That case won't be straightforward to water-cool. It can be done, but it won't be as easy as some other cases could be.

There are several excellent water-cooling specialists that wil build you a case with the water-cooling system in it. I would strongly recommend you look at something like that. Or buy a second-hand case with the radiator already installed as that takes most of the hard work out of the first install.

For Quads the top CPU blocks right now are the D-Tek FuZion with the Quad Nozzle kit installed or the Swiftech Apogee GTX.

In terms of pumps I would recommend getting a 10W Laing DDC2 unless you are really wanting to cool a huge amount of stuff. The 18W version has given problems with cyclones forming in reservoirs and bubbles in the coolant wherever I have seen it used in simple loops. Many users are seduced by the power and the big numbers for liters per hour and head heights, but you're water-cooling a PC and these are central heating pumps! If you want the daddy of pumps then get a Laing D5 Vario (the 8-24V version), but again, it is likely to give you whooshy sounds in the pipes and bubbles in the reservoir.

You really cannot beat Thermochill for radiators, whether you want a 120.1 or a 120.3, they just outperform everything else, but they are a bit pricey and they will insist on using a different thread to everything else in the loop.

If you can specify barbs, I like the Danger-Den type as I find these are very secure and you can usually get away without clips on these if you use 7/16ths of an inch Masterkleer tubing.

For a reservoir (and you don't need one - a t-line will do) I would suggest the Swiftech MicroRes as this fits just about anywhere and works really well at avoiding the whooshy cyclones and bubbliness that I've talked about above.

An Akasa Eclipse and Swiftech Apex Ultra Kit would suit you very well, I think. There are plenty of photographs of Eclipses with the MicroRes and D5 pump tucked away beside the hard drives at the front of the case and the radiator mounted on the back using the radbox. The lid also comes off extremely easily if you need to send the top off to be cut to mount the radiator internally (about £35 from a specialist). It's not as flashy as an Antec 900, but it's a better case for water cooling.
 
Thanks for the help, some of the terms you are using though leave me at a loss, lol, as i said im a complete newbie when it comes to water cooling. So it is possible to get a complete kit that has everything i would need rather than buy stuff on its own. Can you recommend any sites that have cases design for water cooling please? I would probably also want to water cool the graphics card and north bridge on the mobo aswell
 
Unfortunately - any sites I recommended would be competitors, so I can't. But if you try something like "ready2go UK" into google, you'll find something appropriate.

As for the terms I've used, give it a couple of days of research and it'll all make sense.
 
Oh - and water-cooling the northbridge on that motherboard will take you into a world of pain - it's on a single heat-piped cooler to the VRM. I'd leave it alone to be honest.
 
Ah ok so would you recommend getting a case from said site what has a water cooling system built into it already?? Are these classed as good water cooling systems, as i dont want to get one that doesnt cool very well
 
Alphacool own the brand 'ready2go' but it's not especially good stuff. Send me an e-mail on my trust email.
 
Back
Top Bottom