I want to take the plunge!

Hello all...

Well it is time for me to take the plunge. I'm absolutly sick of having to crack the volume on my speakers just to hear things over the very loud 75 cfm fans I have in my case. I mean I am very happy with 2.6 on my mobile barton with air cooling, but not if I have to have fans roaring all the time.

So I have been reading up slowly about water cooling. For the last 2 months I have been reading stickies and this forum etc. However I just can't make any decisions as to what I want to do cooling wise. I figure I'd like to spend less than 200 dollars and I know that I don't want any of koolance or whatever prebuilt bs. I want a really simple system. All I want in the loop is cpu. I dont really have a need for chipset watercooling or vid card water cooling because I am going to pick up a x800 soon. All I want to do is achieve the same or better cooling than my slk-900a and the same or better overclock on my XP2500M at less noise. I figure I won't do that much better than the current 2.65 clock with this chip but what the hell, gotta give it a try.

I have just a couple of questions.

• what list of components would you put in a sub 200 dollar socket a w/c setup
• what specs should I look for when looking for a pump
• do you guys drain your rigs before you move them (ie if your going to a lan party)
• my current case is an chenbro/chieftec style server case.. do you think it is necessary to have a removable motherboard tray for w/c

I had some preliminary thoughts on what I was going to get. Dangerden waterblock of some sort. BlackIce 2 dual 120 rad. and either swifty pump or something. Figured I would go 1/2 inch just because. What are ur thoughts or great water gods?

Start by focusing on the 3 main components: rad, pump, and block. Everything else is just accessories. The pump is up to your budget and your needs. 2 main things to look at are head and flow. (ie- head is usually 4-8ft and flow is 150-300gph) Head is slightly more important than flow. Sort of like pressure and cfm's for fans. I don't see how a removeable motherboard tray makes a difference for water cooling, although it depends on the setup I guess. Sounds like you've got everything together, most research can be done through a search as for what people like and don't like.