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Originally Posted by Lope
oh also, i wanted to mention that thats not true what you said about going aircooled for quietest operation. even with a quiet cpu cooler like the skythe... hard drives still make a lot of noise, power supplies make a fair amount of noise, and then u have to keep the mobo chipsets cool, and make sure you're keeping air flowing through the case.
with an aircooled setup you need at least 4 fans. psu, cpu, gpu, case
assuming you get a fancy northbridge cooler.
then you still have unsmothered noisy hard drives.
it may not be obvious by looking at the pic, but i've WC'd everything from the psu to the mosfets on the motherboard.
i even thought of doing the cdroms, but that was a bit of a ridiculous idea.  |
It's certainly open to debate as to whether you can do better silencing with water, but saying that the hard drives make the difference is a bit odd. Do you have different hard drives in an aircooled case?
My ideal aircooled computer has two fans: PSU and case. The CPU and GPU are passively cooled by case airflow. This is possible depending upon the graphics card that you buy. You can get passively cooled nVidia 7600GT (I think, but I know you can get 6600GT passively cooled), a Scythe cooler on a cool CPU (undervolt or use a cool CPU like the newer Intel chips), and the case fan can move enough air through the whole system to keep things under control. This might be easiser with a low-powered hard drive (laptop maybe?) and a good case such as the Antec P150, P180, or Fusion (or the cheaper version of the Fusion which is NSK3000?).
Stepping up in power, you get into cases where water starts to become more attractive because you need to add fans for localized hot spots or to increase the case airflow. I've always said that water rules when the heat load is large. This is the case when you overclock, add lots of hard drives, use a high-powered GPU and/or use high powered CPUs.
I watercool my HTPC based upon a Barton 2500+ and 2.5TB of disk.
It's a spectrum, not a black and white question.