h2o setup, HDD cooling, and AMD unlocking
 

For my H2O cooling setup, I don't want to take the risks and effort (and the cost in electricity!) for supercooling, so I'm going to go with basic watercooling. I want to cool my hard drives, though, since they get pretty damn hot in the summer.

Does anybody know a good source for harddrive water blocks? I've seen a couple on the site, but has anybody tried them? Cost is an issue too, though, because I have three hard drives to cool, plus the CPU :P

I was thinking of a MAZE1 waterblock from dangerden.com for the CPU, which is an AMD TBird 1.2ghz 266 (feel free to suggest something else :) I may try overclocking to 1.4ghz..

So in short, I need to cool three hard drives and a CPU with 1/2" tubing. Ambient temperatures are about 90 degrees in the summer.

1) What GPH pump should I be looking for to power all of this? Brand/model would be helpful, too. My tower is a big, vertical beast and there'll probably be about 2 feet of lift max.

2) What's a good, economical radiator that would handle this load? :) What about a quiet, but powerful fan for the radiator?

3) My chipset has a fan (and maybe heatsink?) on it already (Abit KT-7A board)... is cooling the chipset worthwhile?

4) Is a MAZE1 ideal for this?

5) I need three waterblocks for my hard drives... the hard drives are far apart (my case holds 6 or 8 hard drives, so they're spaced out.. about the size of one hard drive between each drive), so size shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Sorry for the load of questions, and thanks in advance!!

whoops...
 

... Forgot I was still in the Peltier/TEC forum ...

Answers would still be appreciated, though :)

oh yeah...
 

Do I need to worry about my processor being "locked"? I saw some articles on this, but since a lot of people are running overclocked tbirds and probably haven't been soldering stuff on their CPU, it seems like it's not a problem?

tbirds 1.2Ghz and up come with the L1 bridges connected. i.e. ready to overclock.:cool:

awright
 

Cool, thanks :)

no they don't resago.....

when the tbird 1.2 was the top of the line cpu it's bridges were connected. as soon as amd starting producing 1.3 and 1.33 chips, the 1.2's became locked, while the 1.3 and 1.33 were unlocked. Same when the 1.4's came around.

Now that the XP's and MP's are out, the only unlocked cpu's that amd is producing are the MP's

damn...
 

Damn, that sucks :/

Well, I bought my 1.2 when the 1.4 was top of the line, so it's probably locked, but I'll try it anyway (who knows how long it was sitting on shelves from the factory to me...)

Thanks for the info though :)
That's helpful

just have a look at it, it is fairly easy to tell if they are locked or not

That is actually a very clever "trick" for lack of a better word... from Amd.... how do you get an overclocker to buy the fastest CPU you have.... you make it the only CPU that's unlocked :) soon did they find out that we ocers are not that stupid..... :D:D

I think it's more a practical thing for AMD, they don't bother to lock the fastest cpu they have because there's no need to.