Dracos said…
Danger Den is great stuff, but don’t rule out kits like the Evercool Wc-202..
Danger Den is great stuff, but don’t rule out kits like the Evercool Wc-202..
I had a DD kit in mine, but I was screwing around with it and poked a hole in my black ice rad… no damage to comp, but rad is shot..
Anyway, I ripped apart the Wc-202 I had in my attic and am using that now, and by ripping it apart I mean literally… all the electronics are gone except for the pump/res combo, and when you take the rad out that is in the bay section, it improves cooling over 100%, with the 2 rads in line from one another I get very good cooling…
Just something to think about!
Got a pic of the damage to the black ice rad? I have fixed several of those that had holes punched in them. 
my current picks for watercooling:
swiftech storm CPU block — it is Cathar’s (Stew Forster’s) design and the current top of the line for readily available blocks.
don’t worry about liquid cooling the chipset on the mobo
danger den maze 4 (with the delrin or brass top for functionality, chrome if you want some more bling) for the GPU if you want to watercool the vid card.
rad: if you are not into modding your own, thermochill makes really good heat exchangers but the radiator you go with depends on what you want out of your cooling system. If you want a quiet H2O setup and you are willing to give up a little performance to get silence, you need a thinner heat exchanger with lower fin density. If you can tolerate some noise from more powerful fans, you can use a thicker rad and get a little better overall performance. I still use a modified ’77 b’ville heatercore in most of my H2O systems as the noise from twin San Ace 120mm fans does not bother me and the heatercore has more than adequate cooling capacity for anything I have thrown at it so far. Of course, if you want just plain silly levels of cooling, you can go with something a bit larger…for example:
thermochill rads:
pump:
Do not underestimate the importance of the pump – modern CPU blocks are very restrictive and your pump needs to have enough power keep up the water flow through the cooling loop.
tubing – tygon is great but a bit expensive, clearflex is really good and a little less $.
reservoir or T-line…
If it is your first H2O system, the t-line is a bit harder to fill up and to bleed all the air out of the loop. On the other hand, a T-line takes up less room and you don’t have to worry about commonly seen reservoir problems (i.e. cracked plexi or other plastic that leads to leaks). If you go with the T-line route, take a look at danger den’s fillports as they are a great way to tie down the end of the t-line and they make filling the loop much easier.
Now for the reservoir side of the argument — the reservoir can provide extra water volume to the cooling loop and a loop with a res is usually a no-brainer when it comes to filling, refilling and getting any air out of the loop. Newer reservoir designs are made from thicker plexi or other more crack-resistant materials like High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE).
give me some idea as on the price range for the cooling loop, how much cooling performance you want out of it, whether you want to do some old fashioned case-hacking to make it all fit and I will mod the parts list as necessary. back to playing with the DFI LANParty/A64/SATA RAID/gig o’ Corsair XMS system that is on the bench before I have to head out for court this morning…
