Taking the plunge
 

ok, im getting ready to water cool and i want some advice on my system. I want to water cool my CPU, Northbridge, Video Card, and my Hard Drives. Well i want to know if that is to much for a single pump system.

Im going to be using copper tubing instead of hoses because i think it will look better. im thinking of running 1/2in to the CPU and Video with 1/4 running off of it to my hard drives and to the north bridge (north bridge first of course). And will copper tubing give me a cooling advantage over hoses, because the copper can tranfer heat as the water is moving, isntead of insulating it. Also should i use some hoses between the copper and the video card so if i have to i can remove it easier.

Number of pumps doesn't matter, just the pressure they generate across the blocks. If you're planning on a restrictive loop, a larger pump would make sense.

Copper pipe is doable, but not often used. It would be a pain to tweak or upgrade. Theres really no advantage to it over tube, but if you have the time, it won't hurt.

Northbridge and harddrive cooling generally doesn't make sense since power is so low, but some people do it anyway. I'd start with just CPU and GPU, and then scale from there if you really can't make do with air cooling for the rest.

Copper tubing - very nice. Just beware it wants to pry off your CPU block if the bends aren't set perfectly. If perfect, it will actually help support things.

Polished copper pipes,,,,,,BLING!!!

Depends upon the pump you buy. If you get an Iwaki of sufficient power, sure, you can go with one pump, it'll just be pretty damn big. Or you could get a couple Laing D4/MCP650's and run them in series, or even better, set up a separate CPU loop and NB/GPU loop and use two rads. A single 120mm would be fine for the NB/GPU and a dual heatercore would be best for the CPU. If you have decent airflow you shouldn't need to watercool your hard drives since you'll have nothing in your case adding to case air temps.

Copper pipe, while nice looking and potentially beneficial to your temperatures (though probably not measurably so) will most likely be more work than is actually worth. Not to mention routing all of it with that much stuff in your loop(s) would be insane. CPU/NB/GPU/HDs with copper tubing? Madness.

i want to cool my HD's because they produce a ton of heat. Plus one of them is SATA so it creats heat madness. And the north bridge, well i could take it out of the system and just put a large passive cooler on it.

Im still not 100% on the copper tubing, it would look so nice though, but it would be a pain to install

There are no SATA drives that put out a whole lot of heat. Certianly none that require active cooling. Maybe if you case doesn't have good airflow and you have a Raptor, but otherwise its not going to do much. With a decient case theres no need.

I've made 1/2" hybrid systems using 45° street ells for 90s, worked out quite well for bringing 3 tubes to a WW in a Lian Li case w/o loading the wb mounting system
no bling with the cover on

For someone not used to working with copper tube, or wanting less collateral tear-out for changing components, any kind of flexible hose is better. Flex is forgiving, and, well, flexible.