PC - Watercooling

Anyone using Watercooling on their PC ?

I've just come close to burning out another Athlon cpu yesterday. Luckily this time I had the motherboard set to shut down, and it saved it just in time. In this weather I'm exceeding 90 degrees on the CPU (Athlon 3200+ which is a notoriously hot chip) when rendering video

I'm about to go the watercooling route, so if anyone has any experiences . . .

cheers

You could also try 'heat pipe'... which is like a little rad for your CPU, cheaper then water cooling.

Yeah I've done it. My experience is that special kits are all well and good, but at the end of the day you're shunting heat, not electrons, so the bigger the better. Apart from the CPU blocks, you can get everything else from B&Q and the scrap heap.

TBH, a decent heat pipe cooler and good air flow will be a lot cheaper.

...Or you might be better off considering a newer chip (and board... and ram...)... new dual core systems will kick the cr@p out of the 3200+ and run cooler while doing so. Like thor said, a decent heat pipe cooler will be cheaper and quieter than a proper water cooling solution.

On another thought... what case are you using? NOX make a Coolbay case with a 10" side fan you might want to check out.

[northwind]

Yeah, it'd probably cost more for a decent water cooling setup than it would for a faster, newer system running on air and doing the job faster. Or you could probably underclock your existing processor, it'd obviously slow things down but a fairly small change can mean a big difference in heat.

If you can get one of the assorted monster coolers for your socket- stuff like the Tuniq Tower, Titan Vanessa-L, Thermaltake 120- they offer performance not far off proper watercooling and better than the cheap kits, usually, and for around £30. Huge, though, you need about 140mm clearance above the board for it. My Pentium D runs cooler at 3.5ghz with the Vanessa than it did at stock 2.8ghz with the standard dell cooler.

[the_lone_wolf]

or start being as geeky as me and frequenting the "bargain bins" at your local maplins until one of these turns up:



best £15 i ever spent on my PC, silent and very cool

Hi mate,

in the process of getting a kit list together to build a liquid cooled PC myself and I run the same chip, I dug up some links for you as a helpful guide I hope.

http://www.spodesabode.com/content/article/watercool
http://www.overclock3d.net/articles...._testing_guide
http://www.btinternet.com/~jhpart/bkwtrclb.htm

I am a techie but I hope these are not insulting but a handy reference for you.

Cheers

Rich

[Viney]

I render video every now and again, i have some to do tonight, and i run a 3700+ AMD64. How do i know if my chip is running hot?

Originally Posted by Viney

I render video every now and again, i have some to do tonight, and i run a 3700+ AMD64. How do i know if my chip is running hot?

Reboot the PC and press either F2 or Delete to enter the BIOS and go into the PC health option (or similar named).

Or download this freeware program:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2720

Cheers

Rich

Originally Posted by Viney

I render video every now and again, i have some to do tonight, and i run a 3700+ AMD64. How do i know if my chip is running hot?

Yo Viney

I run a little utility called Speedfan - a quick search on Google should find it for you

The prob with going into the BIOS setup to check the temp is that your PC isn't under any load, therefore the temp will be fairly low. With a utility you can monitor the temp in real time. Also check the settings in the BIOS - make sure that it is set to warn or shutdown if the temp is exceeded