Water Cooling Kits vs. Air Cooling

[jaydee]

As I read this page I was rather bothered by the price of the The Aqua Computer XT Complete CPU Water Cooling Kit. $360.00US.

If you look at that page the XP120 with a 7V Pan-L keeps the CPU at pretty much the same temp. Actually cooler than the stock 6mm tubing. But more importantly look at the dBA! The XP120 is right there.

But what is even more disturbing to me is the STOCK AMD cooler is only 10C warmer at the same dBA.....

Of course <35 is not to specific but anything under 35 is pretty quiet.

So why is it a kit that is 10C cooler costs $360.00US more? Or about $300 more than a XP120 (with fan) for the same performance + more reliability from the XP120.

What is also bothering is this kit is a pretty high performance kit. The water block is right up there with the best....

Crazy stuff. Usually if your product is no better than the other guys you could not get away with charging $300 more for it.

[TerraMex]

thats an somewhat old rev kit, afaik ... for 359 bucks? way overpriced. All innovatek stuff is, btw. But then again, so is the Koolance, and so forth.
Alphacool has, imo, better blocks, rads and alot cheaper.
Still, in the end, expensive.

Crazy stuff. Usually if your product is no better than the other guys you could not get away with charging $300 more for it.

Doesnt that happen all the time? It's called marketing.
Else, stamp it with the "exclusive" thing.

[Shoebox9]

I think water cooling is going to take a back seat for a while.

Lots of kiddies are going to buy poor performance water kits (another one seems to emerge every other month), fiddle around with it cause it's fun, have a leak, get pissed off, buy a really good air cooler and get the same temps...

Once quad core CPUs starting hotting things up, maybe the scene will be set for water to really shine again.

[msv]

CPU:s are getting cooler now, OK, we´ll see what the quad cores will give us, but I think the graphic cards are the next objekt for watercooling. Just take a look at the immense heat sinks on a new high end graphic card, and still the noise levels can be bothersome, to say the least, when You´re pushing them through latest-and-greatest games.
The replacement GPU-cooler market is increasing everyday, etc. Plus ventilation fans to get the heat from the cards out of the computer case.
I think water cooling still has a place, not on the CPU:s but on high end graphic cards.

regards
Mikael S.

edit: Back in a few mins with power consumptin values to back up my thesis.

back again: http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=3335&s=8
a few graphic cards and their power consumtoins. You can overclock an Intel 2 Core quite a lot before it eats more power than 2 Crossfired X1950 XTX

[BGP Spook]

I have heard that the latest ATI card based on the R600 core will consume as much as 230 watts.
Although, that may be an incorrect figure.

Graphics cards do seem to be headed down the same path as CPUs were a year or two ago; where performance and features are king and power concerns are a joke.

I still think CPU water cooling has a future, but I think GPU water cooling may have more immediate growth.

Water cooling kits--in general--are very rarely worth their price, as they tend to have poor performance for the price.


The future of DIY water cooling--for me at least--is on the cheap end of the scale.

I will not buy $80 water blocks, $120 radiators, $90 pumps, nor will I run it all in tubing that costs $2 per foot.

Where did the "do it yourself" go in DIY water cooling?

I can get nearly the same performance--within my ability to tell the difference--for easily less than half the price.

$40 water block, $20 radiator, $20 pump, run it in tubing that costs $0.15 per foot.

On top of that I will enjoy the experience of building my own personal water cooling loop.

[jaydee]

One thing to keep in mind is power consumption. There is a limit to how much power a PC will be able to use dictated by the power outlet of most homes. There will be a point were they cannot make higher power parts for just this reason. Here is an article at OC that can better explain it than me. http://www.overclockers.com/articles1412/

Right now PC parts manufactures are using high power consumption parts because they can not because they have to. Eventually they will have to start producing lower power parts. Especially when times come to a point when electricity demands can't meet supply. Remember the brown and black outs in California and WA?

The thing is this power limit is not higher than the point of actually needing water cooling. Also GPU air coolers are just starting to get better. They have a LONG way to go before water cooling is necessary. Check out the R600 heat pipe blower system: http://www.overclockers.com/articles1411/

Also a top of the line PC vid card costs as much as a PS3. If this is the case I feel many gamers would rather opt to go console making less of a demand for such high power vid cards. Maybe a shift in the way LAN parties work. Instead of computers they just bring their LAN enabled console and a TV. Would be easier to carry around.

[ricecrispi]

Air hsf have improved but realize one thing, HSF have improved by two methods, either
increasing the size of the rad and number of heatpipes. Not alot of innovation

HSF have reached a max size that they can. Compare the tuniq tower, the best air hsf, to arctic freeze pro 7, to cnsp 7700, xp120, to xp-90, and stock 60mm AMD XP hsf. The trend show the hsf have become bigger and practically take up all the space they can. The other trend is increase the number of heatpipe which has also reached a maximum using 6 to 8 heatpipes.

It comes down to the hardware manufacture to making parts that use less power. The midrange products perform very well and don't use too much power but the extreme parts like the g80 SLI (200-220watts alone) and kentsfield (130watts) are energy sponges and heatkillers. The kentsfield when overclocked (I don't why) is forcing users to watercooling but even WCing isn't good enough.

[BGP Spook]

@ricecrispi: People are still overclocking because they can.

People will continue to do so as long as they think they can benefit from it.

Most people won't benefit from it but some do.

Most programs have many times more processing power than they need.

Yet, there are a few programs which seem to have an insatiable appetite for more processing power.

Games mostly, but Vista, and certain media related software see continued benefit from more processing power.

The move toward multicore CPUs may have agitated this problem.

For higher numbers cores you also get lower clocked cores.

Programmers are still not used to dealing with the shift away from higher clock frequencies as the sole means to better performance.

Basically, programmers are don't want to relearn how to write programs.

This leads to continued benefit from pushing clock frequencies up in programs which can still see improvement.

I believe there is also a general attitude of, "Gee people sure have a lot of processing power just sitting there maybe we should invent [next must have application/device] so they can get more use out of their computer."


@jaydee: Thank you for the link but I had already read it.


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Something that we may be forgetting is the constant push to shrink the physical size of the chips.

Yes, there is a limit to how much power can be drawn from regular house circuits and some enthusiasts are nearing that limit.

However, every time there is a die shrink there is an increasing likely hood that products will push the thermal density up.

Even if the power draw goes down if the die area goes down disproportionally then the next generation chip is in a worse situation than the last generation chip.

[jaydee]

Originally Posted by BGP Spook

However, every time there is a die shrink there is an increasing likely hood that products will push the thermal density up.

Even if the power draw goes down if the die area goes down disproportionally then the next generation chip is in a worse situation than the last generation chip.

Yeah this is true unless the die shrink also includes more efficient architecture. I remember the Thunder Bird CPU's were pretty hot, yet the XP came out after it and was considerably cooler yet faster and smaller. And now they have an IHS which helps some with the heat density as well.

I have been looking at this as well: http://www.intel.com/research/platfo...supercomputing

Also I think it is just a matter of time before GPU manufactures considerably lower their power requirements. They are using pretty old die technology from what I understand.


This thread is a little out of context though as I posted it almost a year ago. GPU's have stepped up a lot since then and multi-core CPU's had yet to appear.

[ricecrispi]

The big problem with multicores like the kentsfield is bad IHS contact. Combined with the two cores that are seperated down the line this creates cooling problems. The 130 watts for the KF is bad enough but people need to overclock it when there is not need to overclock it because there is little improvement exept for two apps, encoding and vid compression. Then they bitch about and complain air cooling isn't enough and
watercooling isn't enough. The rational is missing and it's an arms race, pissing contest, and whatever analogy you can comeup with.

Video games show a small improvement and sometimes no improvement or perform worse with kentsfield compared toa good a c2d. Hey, intel is selling two cpus at one time if you want to buy it and same with SLI with the inherent problems that come with it like bigger psu, bigger HSF, bigger case, and bigger fans etc they'll keep selling it.

When it was overclocking old celerons, PIII and amd durons and t-birds there was a decent reason for it. Now it's seems just like an arms race to shoot super pi times.