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!!