Silence or Coolness?
 

What do you guys go for mostly?

1. Silence
2. Maximum cooling
3. A delecate balance between the both.

A not-so-delicate balance of both. I use a large dual-fan (side-by-side) radiator with the fans at a silent 5V. Keeps the water typically at 3-5C above ambient depending on the CPU load. If I blast the fans at full noise I get 1.2-2C above ambient water-temps, but I only do that if I'm just doing some crazy "overclocked to the limit" benchmark.

agreed,

btw, i thk u only need compromise when choosing a smallish / lowperformance rad like the BIXes. then u go for sound or performance.

when picking the rads slightly overkill, it is very easy to get the temps cathar states at 5V.

in my case, if i use computernerd W calc for a 1700+ at 2060MHz @ 2.2V i am getting somewhere near 135W, at that time my watertemp gets 6°C over ambient at 7V.

these are crazy settings, when running moderate OC : 2.025V i can easily get 2-3 over ambient at 5V. so i guess u could call it a delicate balance.

cheerz

What rads are you guys using? my water temps are about 10 deg c over ambient at 5v. BI Pro.

AAAH!
OK, I´ve seen pictures of Cathars block, but, hey, *what* kind of gear do you guys use except for the block?
Pumps, tubing, rads, etc?
5 degrees above ambient load temps with heavy overclock. Please, enlighten me!
I´m just about to order some watercooling stuff (ignoring the strange sound from the gearbox in my car, it´s not there, I´m not listening), and I really want best value for my money.
regards
Mikael S.

Heh cool.

Im guessing:

Cathar White Water block
1/2" tubing
Heatercore (something along the lines of a dtek im guessing)
and pump i reccomend something like eheim 1048.

Note that 5C is Ambient to Water temp, not Water temp to CPU temp.

2 heatercores in parallel (1 big momma, and 1 double sized big momma)

I want both and then some. My problem is that I only have enough room for a rad that is 6" wide and 7" tall (I want everything to fit in the case) so performance is a little tuffer considering my added constraint of size. Any suggestions or ideas that you come up with from this post please post the info. Bottom line though is both+compactness.

u will need to make compromise somewhere.


xcuse me for the dutch, but somewhere down at the page, my mate shows off his lian with HC mounted under the floorplate. that buys u another inch or two. this way u might be able to get another HC into the case (at bezel). that would get u passive cooling at vcore over 2.0 and MHz tbred b over 2400

http://www.overclocking.be/forum/sho...&threadid=4733

edit; better give u the pic right away:
http://users.pandora.be/deridex/posts/epox02.jpg

A DTek heatercore or equivalent, cooled by a 7V Papst 4412 N/2GL, will keep things overclocked to the max and stable, without producing much noise at all...
That's what i have and the only limit to my OC'ing is the motherboard voltages (i need to vmod it). I can pretend my PC is both quiet (not "silent" yet) and and wildly overclocked (TBird 1000@1449, FSB@207 / CAS2, all stock voltages). The CPU runs @41°C full load in a room at 22°C. GPU and NB are both watercooled as well. I still have two fans, the rad one, and a Papst 8412 in a Seasonic PSU that i cant hear over HDDs and the 12cm fan.
Do i need cooler components ? I don't think so. It would not improve anything to the system performance.

Quiet. Not silence (yet), but quiet.

As long as the temps stay below my previous air cooling (~55c), I'm a happy man. So blissfully quiet. Right now, with only 1 fan in PSU (panaflo L1A), and a homemade rad its 34. But I crashed NFS:PU (no pun intended), and I'd been playing for some time (driving fast it quite addictive).

If I get to stay home tomorrow (come on SNOW!), I'll work on my PSU WCing.

Hey gmat what is your whole setup, if you don't mind me asking?

I'm using a heater-core from a '87-'94 Toyota Camry. The core itself is manufactured by Nippon Denso (Toyota subsiduary). This is important, as there is a Natrad equivalent which is a lower performing core. The core itself has a fin area of 22cm x 14cm, is 32mm thick, but has a very high fin per inch density of 24 FPI, whereas the DTek cores are more like 12 FPI, so although they are thicker, there's actually far less fin-air surface area.

The DTek cores offer around ~1.1m^2 of fin-air surface area, while the Camry core I use offer ~1.85m^2 of fin-air surface area. A Black Ice Xtreme in comparison offers around 0.75m^2, and a BI Pro around 0.6m^2.

The final setup looks like this:

http://www.employees.org/~slf/ba/bba-done2.jpg

You see when your picking out a heater core how do you know the surface area, hell they all look the same and you might have (2) 6x6x2 rads where one performs twice as good as the other. It's like rolling dice :mad: This is why I made a post asking for the best bar none and still I'm confused :shrug: :cry::mad: :confused: :mad:

Well, there's always this monster that I made up. It's a car radiator from a Morris Minor. Perfectly suited for 4 x 120mm fans in a square arrangement, and I made up the shroud to suit, with internal baffles so each fan acts on its own separate section of the radiator for equalised air-flow.

http://www.employees.org/~slf/amon/amon1.jpg

http://www.employees.org/~slf/amon/amon2.jpg

http://www.employees.org/~slf/amon/amon4.jpg

Can't go wrong with this monster! ;)

Sadly I sold it before I had a chance to test it, but with 600CFM of fannage (at full noise) over a fin surface area of almost 3 m^2, but even with some quiet Papst fans pushing just 200CFM total through the radiator would result in the ability to cool a few 226W pelts without grief.

OK. You scared me a bit there.
I first thought you ment 5C ambient to CPU temp. Hey, I´m new to this, you can trickst me anyway you like. ;)
So what about ambient to CPU temps? 15C? 25C?
regards
Mikael S.

Yeah i get about 20 deg c above ambient -> cpu temps. BI Pro which isnt the best but does the job at 4V. with 1 120mm fan on it.

psychofunk:
Case = YY Cube, fully modded, interior padded with noise insulation, exterior polished then re-painted smooth black
Pump = Hydor Seltz L30 II 1200lph
Rad = DTek Pro/Core with shroud and 1 Papst 4412 N/2GL
CPU = watercooled with (currently) a Maze2.1 (ye old one). I ordered a TC-4 a month ago.
Mobo = A7N8X. Watercooled north bridge -> Aquacomputer Twinplex NB block (in 3/8")
GFX card = GF2 GTS. Watercooled -> Aquacomputer Twinplex GPU block (in 3/8")
PSU = Seasonic 400W, modded with a Papst 8412 NGL (and the pump relay+switch). Doesnt even spin at startup :p
1 Adaptec 29160, with rounded cables (LVD 68pin & USCSI 50pin), and those drives:
- Seagate Cheetah 15K.3
- Seagate Cheetah 10K.6
- Plextor UltraPlex
- Yamaha CRW2100 (USCSI)
Add 1 small airtrap (PVC, homemade), 1/2" Tygon, some 3/8" Tygon, a purge valve, and Corsair XMS 3200 C2 memory.
The rad sits above the PSU, pulling air into the case. The PSU fan is pushing air into the case (doing otherwise would create a 'short-circuit')
Currently the air drawn by the 2 fans cools down the HDD bay. As i plan to build a fanless PSU i'll get HDD waterblocks as well.
Total fan count = 2, both quiet and 1 is voltage regulated (PSU) and the other runs at reduced speed. So i can pretend my system is quiet. And yet it's a ultra-high performance rig (vid card apart, i'll change it this year)

Arent your hard drives noisy? I used to have same scsi controler and seagate cheeta 12gb drive but it made a right fuss! very noisy. My seagate barracuda IV (silent one) is the noisiest thing in my computer and am trying to find something to silence it even further as i can hear a slight high pitched whine which gets to me a little.

Seal: They are about as (or even more) silent than the barracuda IV. The 15K.3 is a marvel indeed. Get a look at storagereview.com and see by yourself :p Fluid bearings rulez :cool:
(just a quick comparison: WD800xB = 45dB, Cheetah 15K.3=41dB)
Seek noises are 'distant' and not 'metallic' - more like a faint clicking noise.

Cathar, doubling the rad fin density isn’t always better, as that means a higher backpressure on the fans. That translate into a lot less airflow, cause common axial fans are very weak in that way.

Agreed, there are other factors involved too, but the Nippon Denso rad even at 24FPI does not appear to be that restrictive to air-flow for axial fans.

Also, even though there may be less air-flow, it's all about balancing off the improved convection from greater surface area due to a higher fin density vs a slightly lower flow rate from increase back-pressure. I don't see radiators in this respect being much different from water-blocks.

Cathar I was looking at the Dtek, $32, it looks good, I won't have to do anything cuz it comes with the barbs installed but how does it perform and are the measurements inclusive of the tanks? What is your opinion?

Gmat, how is your pump, do you like it?

Does anyone know about that pump that Dtek sells, the via aqua 370gph?

Search "Hydor vs Eheim" threads in this forum to know my full, extensive point of view.
In short, i like its 'bang for the buck' factor, and in absolute it's a rather good pump.

As for the DTek HC, its price is very attractive, it's well finished with those barbs pre-installed and a nice layer of paint all around. If you cannot get your hands on a 2nd hand heatercore it's the best option IMHO.