Is water cooling practical?

Just for everyday computers.

How low maintance is it? And what are the risks of leaking with a decent system.

Also, how small can you get water cooling setups?

Hey Fronic,

I think the answer to your 1st question is yes. WC is practical for everyday use. My main system (XP1700@2400 1.8v) has been water cooled for a little over 6 months now and has been running 24/7 since I built it. It is much more quiet and stable than it was on air cooling.

I have had no "critical" maintenance issues with this system. I do think it would benefit from being taken apart and re-built, just because it is my first WC system and I learned a lot of lessons building it and then asking questions about it on this forum.

How small can they be?? Here is a link to a water cooled Shuttle SV25 small form factor system. That's pretty small.

UPDATE: I can't even remember to add the link. (Thanks necro)

Here it is: http://www.overclockers.com/tips1075/index02.asp

I think you forgot the link...

No it is not pratical for everyday basic use. I interpert everyday use as use on a non-OC'ed system. If you mean useing it 24/7/365 then hell yes, WC'ing is not something constantly removed based on need.

The main reason behind watercooling is lower temps, an alternate benefit is that you can get temps that are lower than air with far less fan noise; ATM my rig is 30dbA by fan specs watercooled; with my Volcano 7+ air cooler I was 10c warmer (31c load now vs. 41c load then, this is at 3200+ speeds) and then I was listening to a whiney 48dbA!!!

Now I see alot of people saying that you should WC to lower noise alone; to that I must disagree; Zalman heatsinks and fans alone can even cool a mildly OC'ed PC very well and be only 20 - 25dbA loud (a few 92mm case fans, 38cfm @ 20dbA, CNPS-7000 on CPU and heatpipe on GPU along with northy heatsink and your there, 25dbA max)


the smallest WC setup (that still has quality) would be a Koolance system. The smallest WC setup that is hand picked would be a Black Ice Micro, whatever Waterblocks you need with 1/4" maybe 3/8" tubing and a Hydor L30 in a closed loop system

Yes very practical and yes low maint unless u don't oc .just cahnge water every six months or so. Some don't do it that often. Use teflon tape on fittings. It's the stuff most plumbers use on connections in your house. haven't had a leak since I finished building my first wc'd rig a year ago.

I ben running water coling for over two years now. And runing my rig 18 hours to 24 a day no problem with leeks yet. Take youre time and make it right. There are more varables with it but runs cooler at hier speeds.
PS i overclock50% too

What do you concider everyday and practical? If its a pc you use everyday and its overclocked then yes its practical IMO.

If its a pc you use everyday and it isnt overclocked then the question is what $$$ amount do you concider practical? If your not OC'ing why spend the money on a WC setup when you could get a top line air setup thats fairly quiet for around $50? In most cases Ive seen, if the pc isnt being OC'ed stock cooling is suffice as long as the case cooling is good.

It is practical if you do not move your pc case. You do however have to take it apart and clean it every 4-6 months if you want to keep it on top performance, you dont want to know guys what i found in my watersystem (especially in my waterblocks) when i opened it up for cleaning. Because i had a submerged pump small garbages were droped in the pumps pool, these garbeges were taken in to the block and some times stuck in the output hole of the cpu block, put that together with the small plantlife that starts to occur in hot watered systems nad you got a pretty messy water. All these stuffs sometimes block you hoses or get stuck in your cpu block and drop wc performance. If you have a copper waterblock and a aluminum radiator then no mater what you do elctrolisis is going to take place ( its something like rust that occurs on the copper, analytically when you have 2 metals in water , like copper and aluminium in our case, electrons leave from one of them, the most active, aluminium, and go to stuck on the other, copper. This phenomenon eats apart aluminium and covers copper with a rust like thing, this thing can block your copper cpu block and drop performance.You can put several chemicals in your water that are suposed to slower electrolisis , also deionized water slows it down. But in the end it will hapen anyway. So you have to break you block apart every 6 months and clean it with copper polisher. If you hapen to disasemple a copper cpu waterblock after 6 months of activity you will be amazed with what you will see inside. The copper will be black and full of rust like thing on it, this thing dropes heat absorption very much so its got to go. tomorow I will post some pictures of my block when i opened it up for cleaning.)

Bellow is my watercooling history , you can understand by reading it, what watercooling is good for, when it works best and how it can be made cheap - efficient and noisless...




"Guys there is a misiterpretation with water cooling. There are just so many variables while building a water cooled pc. What i mean is that maybe you get the best (theoritically best) cpu waterblock, the best pump, a good radiator but your final results are not good, and why ? maybe because you chose small hoses.. There are so many variables that mast be all working great to have a good watercooling system. Just think, Variable 1: waterblock, variable: 2 hoses, variable 3: radiator, variable 4: pump....
They all have to be good and stick good together.

listen to a real fact i had. Firstly i want to state that curently i am running a P4 2.4C at 3.4 stably WITHOUT ANY FANS IN THE CASE EVEN ON THE RAD!! do you know what that means? that i hit my pc power button and i hear totally NOTHING! i mean after i managed to do this and i firstly booted i thought the pc wasnt working cause i couldnt hear anything!! then i saw my monitor and realized that i had a totally quiet pc..

How i did this? Well, 1 year ago after reading for 2 months these forums and learning all i could about watercooling i decided to make my own hand made watercooled system. I bought a cheap submerged pump, some hoses, a small bike's radiator, and the swiftek watrblocks for cpu and grafics card. After i set up my system i realized that all were good, the temps were slightly lower than my air cooled system ( from 46-47C droped to 40).
At that point i wasnt overclocking my rig. I was almost happy with my setup except from the fact that sometimes my waterbox (the one i had the pump in) leaked water and i had to reaply silicon to stop it. There were 2-3 times that i came back from work to find my pc's box and workbench flooded with water, and the pc still running, so this shows that watercooling is not that dangerous, if you use deionized water that is.
Anyway, after i overcloked i realized that my temps werent rising as much as i would expect. And i explain, from 40C they were at stock cpu speed and volts, after going to 3.4 at 1.7 volts the temps rose to 42 and to 45 at full load. Do you know what my temps were when i overcloked once with my aircooling, 49 idle, 60 full load (with just one fan on the cpu, no case fans)!! The point here is that watercooling shines out and shows its power and capabilities in HIGH temperature conditions. Water is capable to take away heat easier, and it takes heat quicker when there is more heat to take, while air cant cope well with high heat conditions. So unless you overclock you dont need to change from air to watercooling.
Finally about noise. The watercooling setup i mentioned above used 2 fans on full load on the rad to cool it. if i turned them off soon the rad would overheat and the cpu temps would rise greatly , even more than with aircooling. So my system wasnt noiseless, i would say it was almost as noisy as with aircooling, if not more. 2 months ago i had some money to spend and decided to make some changes to my wc setup. Firstly i got rid of my cheap noisy submerged pump and got an eheim 1045. That pump is GREAT!! it can work outmerged, is noisless and very powerfull! Secondly i threw away my small bike rad and bought a car's rad ( its not so huge, almost half as big as my pc case, so i screwed it on the outer side of my case) . After i put my sytem on do you know what i found out? Fisrtly the small bike rad was blocking my waterflow VERY MUCH!! after i put this car radiator, water was running like hell through my system!! Secondly the rad is so big that even without any fans it doesnt heat up enough to raise the cpu temps ( and just think that also a greatly overcloked ti4200 GPU is in the watercooling system and adds extra heat). Results? I have my cpu temps droped to 32 idle 42 full load with totally NO FANS!! My cpu and gpu are overclocked like hell and my noise outputt is zero, i recently bought a seagate baracuda sata drive which is the most silent hd on the market (toms hardware said so) and now the only thing i can hear if i come close to my windowed pc case is the elctricity running through some transistors or something (my psu is a noisless one) .. TOTALY OVERCLOCKED! TOTALLY COOL!! TOTALLY SILENT!! "

From what I have read..... Water Cooling is not practical, even with the simplest setup.

I'm about to do water cooling because I was motivated by more MHz possibility at lower temp. That the only motivation factor.

I'm still using fans and I'm very close to go water cooling. My water blocks should arrive this week but I might withdrawn my plan completely. Too much hasle for a person with 10 hours of working in office daily. And the leaks factor while I'm away..... aarrgghhhh !!!!

Nobody can guaratee the noise radiated from the pump as well as the noise from radiator fans. are quiter than Intel CPU fans. OMG !!!

Look, about the leaking problem , if you get a good pump, like all eheim models, that can work not submerged, then you have minimal leaking possibilities as long as you make the hosing connections well enough. I, as i wrote above, in the beginning i had a submerged pump. that was hard beacuse i had to put a small box filled with water in the pc. But now most people use online pumps that are capable to work just by pluging the hoses in them. Choose this way, its greatly superior.

About the higher CPU speeds then there is nothing you cant achieve with air, the point is that in order to achieve extreme oc with air you need at least 3 case fans, one very good cpu fan (tornado, sl900 etc.) and one gpu fan. Total, at least 5 fans blowing at their full. That means a lot of noise. By then you will have pushed your CPU to its limits. It doesnt matter if you turn to watercooling . It will drop your cpu temps by 3-13 C but that wont make your cpu go faster, it will already be at its limits. Now if you want to turn to peltiers then you will have a great drop in cpu temp, great enough to make your cpu raise a little bit more. 200+ Mhz , but if you turn in to peltiers then you absolutely need water cooling because air cant cope the thermal output of a descent peltier (180+ Watts)...

So watercooling isnt that dangerous or unnesecery, it depends on what you wnat to make out of it.