Water flow rates?

ramdor · 22 Jul 2007 at 11:38

What is best in a water cooling loop? A high or low flow rate? I am guessing at high, but it is a trade off vs pump noise I guess.

At the moment, I only have a swiftech storm cpu block, a blackice pro3 rad and a swiftech MCP655 in the loop. 1/2 inch tygon tubes.

Richie.

Jokester · 22 Jul 2007 at 12:14

Higher is better, but for most setups it makes little difference to overall temps, the key things that affect cooling are the blocks and the radiator fan combination. But with Storm blocks you want high flow because of their design (impingement).

With D5/DDC type pumps noise isn't issue even with high flows.

Jokester

juno_first · 22 Jul 2007 at 16:07

I've got my Swiftech pump on high (4300 RPM) & its very quiet / low vibration.

The width of pipe also affects the flow rate.

Cupra · 22 Jul 2007 at 16:39

my 18w ddc is silent with alphacool top, flow rate all depends on what rad, blocks your using

pastymuncher · 22 Jul 2007 at 19:36

Here's a quote i found the other day from the water cooling god that is best known as Cathar:-

"With everyone using IHS capped CPU's nowadays, pumping power has less of an influence than it used to. From what I'm seeing, both in theory and actual testing (which are aligning nicely), you can pick almost any single pump with 2-5mH2O of pressure head, and 8-15lpm of flow-rate, and the temperature differences at the CPU at the end of the day will not vary by more than 0.3C between them. We are now in an era of relative flow-agnosticity with respect to pump choice. On bare-die CPU's, low-flow, small tubing, weak pumped w/c systems lost out. On modern IHS capped CPU's, the differences are now small enough to be counted as being insignificant by many." - Cathar over at XS