I've gone through two watercooling systems now.
The first one consisted of the following:
- Rio 800 in a self-built tupperware reservoir
- Case-mods-built 0.5 kg copper WB
- UHAUL light duty transmission cooler (4 pass fin and tube radiator)
- generic 3/8" tubing
- generic low speed, ultra-quiet 80mm fans shrouded over radiator
Temperatures hovered around 55C at idle and went down to 51C when I replaced the fans with 120mm fans that moved about 70cfm and sounded like lawnmowers.
I was sort of dissatisfied with this temperature drop, and extremely unhappy with the pump, which was loud as all hell.
Like an idiot, I bid on a Black Ice Extreme kit on Ebay and won the damn thing. I was impressed with the res/pump, as it was extremely quiet. The block, on the other hand, was about as ugly as I expected it to be - machining marks all over the base. Good retaining mechanism, though.
The radiator looks nice, but it's about half the size of the old one and my quiet but dinky 80mm fans taped in series can't push anything but a breath of air through it. It's much quieter than before, but still not quiet enough to my liking.
Because of piss-poor air flow, I'm getting idle temp readings of around 59C.
I ordered a cheap fanbus off pcmods, so with that I might take these 120mm demons and stick them on either side of the rad. Otherwise, I might be forced to switch out the BIX rad for my old one. Even then, I might not get enough improvement.
The <i>smart</i> thing would have been to replace the pump/res earlier and stayed happy with the system as it was.
I use this computer for pretty much everything, so I can't afford to shut it down again to replace anything in the cooling line, at least not for a while. For now, I plan to see how much I can improve the airflow across the rad without making my ears bleed.
So, who has recommendations for fans balancing high air flow, good pressure, and low sound?
Alchemy