GPU and NB watercooling: innovatek?
 

Ok, I am finally going to WC my NB and GPU and get rid of those two loud fans. I was thinking a little bit today about my setup. After the whitewater there are two lines, each having 1/2 of the water as the inlet (theoretically, if my pump actually pushed the rated 350gph, each would recieve around 175gph). 175gph is most commonly found in a low flow type of setup, much like in the innovatek kits. I thought about running dual innovatek Graph-O-Matics after the whitewater to cool the video and northbridge and I cant see a reason why this wouldnt work.

What kind of restriction do these blocks have? I know they are probably very high restriction, but running them in parallel would alleviate that some.

The main reason I want to do this is cost. A Graph-O-Matic at sharka with 10mm (3/8") fittings is $28, so getting both of them is only 57 bucks. Dually dtek blocks comes out to be around 90.

Plus I prefer the anodized aluminum tops to the clear ones or the all copper ones. These blocks are also very high quality as I have heard, but nobody tests the performance characteristics of the block.

I would be extremely surprised if actual flow rates in Innovatek kits was more than 30-40 GPH.

I have used the graphomatic before in a PC and it performed reasonably well. I swapped out the stock fittings for 3/8" hosebarbs though. 1/2" didn't work because I couldn't get the hose around both barbs (they are close together).

I'm using one Innovatec GPU blocks, changed to 13mm. I needed to cut off some of the hose side to make it work.
I also needed a dremel to cut some of the inner (massive) copper plate, to keep the flow OK.
The are cheap, and do the job, as I'm not into huge GPU oc'ing :)

They do the evil mixing of metals (Cu & Al) the same way Swiftech does, but as long as you run plenty of corrosion inhibitors you might get away with them, especially on the NB, though you might want something better on the GPU.

Note that just about anything will cool the NB - over on SPCR the most common treatment for noisy NB fans is simply removal and possibly replacement with a Zalman passive unit. The general conclusion is that the NB fan is mostly a marketing and 'bling-bling' gimmick, not something that's actually needed for cooling.

The other thing noted was that NB's seem to be very bad in terms of TIM joint quality, with major temp gains possible just by removing the sink, cleaning and reinstalling w/ ASC or other good compound.

Gooserider