water cooled PSU?
- Thread starter elfy
- Start date
Deiwos said:
Because if you've water-cooled everything else you wake up one morning and think - "I've watercooled the CPU, GPU, NB, SB, PWM, HDD (all 6 of them), RAM - what's left? Right. I need to watercool the PSU"
Soldato
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A watercooled PSU sounds like the worst idea in the world.
Sounds great in theory but they are usually very expensive and underpowered when compared to there air cooled counterparts. You could try watercooling a decent psu yourself but this goes without saying(I'll say it regardless) that it would be highly dangerous, a fire hazard and a distaster waiting to happen should there be even the slightest leak.
Just buy a decent psu with a quiet fan, the money saved could improve your current loop.
Just buy a decent psu with a quiet fan, the money saved could improve your current loop.
I've got a pair of 500W Silentmaxx ones, they tend to get very hot if you stress them with a full load system (I was using quad core + 8800GTX off one PSU), but if you're looking for as near a silent system and still have plenty of oomph for a 8800GTX then they're great.
Jokester
Jokester
The one place in the UK that lists it is £350!!!!!
That's a lot for a PSU, even if it is 1200W with a self-contained cooling system. And the various Corsair/Seasonic/Hiper/Tagan stuff that I already have is pretty darn quiet anyway.
That's a lot for a PSU, even if it is 1200W with a self-contained cooling system. And the various Corsair/Seasonic/Hiper/Tagan stuff that I already have is pretty darn quiet anyway.
elfy said:
I have ten on three loops. 4 to cool the CPU, 3 to cool the graphics and 3 to cool everything else.
In the summer I can plug in a long entension pipe and have them outside. They are very easy to work with and they can look remarkably like part of the furniture, rather than IT parts.
You might also like to check out the Preytek Serenity for a multi-loop silent system. They're about £60 a pop for the radiators and you just plug them in to the loop in place of a normal radiator and they cool quite well. Not as good as a Zalman Reserator 2, but a third the price so you can forgive that and have three of them at which point you get twice the cooling capacity if that makes sense.
hmm...
water cooled PSU, I've seen it tried on an amature scale to disasterous effect.. but some of the implimentatios around seem workable.
Personally the PSU is one part of my system I would never get water anywhere near. Too much at stake, if the PSU goes and starts throwing 240v down the wrong rail... well... *shudders*
CPU, GFX, NB, HDD, MOSFETS, RAM and Soundcard are all viable recipents of the old W/C, and even a 120.3 with 6 fans push/pulling would be feeling the load under that.
PSU's are all designed with sufficent cooling to dissapate all the heat generated, all the way to their maximum load (if not then legal action come into play). I have my PSU drawing air from outside my case, and exausting it outside as well... its a completely seperate cooling situation to the rest of my PC.
The heat dump would be intense, so we're probally talking seperate loop stuff here, or at least another radiator 1/2 way round a loop to ensure the water is cool enough to deal with components in order. I'd feel the need to make sure I had cooled (at least ~ambient) water on both the PSU and the CPU, hence multi-loop, or two (even three) stage cooling.
/discussion
water cooled PSU, I've seen it tried on an amature scale to disasterous effect.. but some of the implimentatios around seem workable.
Personally the PSU is one part of my system I would never get water anywhere near. Too much at stake, if the PSU goes and starts throwing 240v down the wrong rail... well... *shudders*
CPU, GFX, NB, HDD, MOSFETS, RAM and Soundcard are all viable recipents of the old W/C, and even a 120.3 with 6 fans push/pulling would be feeling the load under that.
PSU's are all designed with sufficent cooling to dissapate all the heat generated, all the way to their maximum load (if not then legal action come into play). I have my PSU drawing air from outside my case, and exausting it outside as well... its a completely seperate cooling situation to the rest of my PC.
The heat dump would be intense, so we're probally talking seperate loop stuff here, or at least another radiator 1/2 way round a loop to ensure the water is cool enough to deal with components in order. I'd feel the need to make sure I had cooled (at least ~ambient) water on both the PSU and the CPU, hence multi-loop, or two (even three) stage cooling.
/discussion
The heat produced by a typical PSU isn't that much, with efficiencies over 80% these days, if you're talking about a full load system, say 300W being consumed by the PC, the PSU is only generating about 60W of waste heat. PSUs only get hot becuase the cooling employed in them is very basic in standard models, little more than aluminium heatsinks over key components with a fan providing air flow through the overall unit.
Jokester
Edit: I've had a QX6700 @ 3.6GHz (talking about in excess of 200W at 100%), 2 8800GTX, chipsets and 2 500W PSUs all on one loop, cooled by a 120.2 and it never struggled to cope.
Jokester
Edit: I've had a QX6700 @ 3.6GHz (talking about in excess of 200W at 100%), 2 8800GTX, chipsets and 2 500W PSUs all on one loop, cooled by a 120.2 and it never struggled to cope.