Water Cooling Kits

[avzay]

Are water cooling kits such as offered by Corsair worth looking at? I have been considering a water cooling setup and saw those things. Do they generally perform as good as watercooling system built from scratch? Has anybody had any experience with those?

[dicecca112]

No, watercooling kits don't even come close to DIY kits. Build your own, it's cheaper and performs better.

[Alacritan]

The Corsair is supposed to be damn good (for a kit), but of course, it's kinda noisy, especially at high speed. You're better off getting a cheap loop from Dtek or doing it yourself with inexpensive parts. It's not that hard. All you need is a pump, block, tubing and rad. Zip ties are fine for securing tubing to the barbs. All a kit does is put it all in a small, neat looking package, but as a result your rad and pump are smaller and the waterblock generally isn't that good.

And they are much more expensive than DIY. It's really not that hard.

[avzay]

does DIY watercooling usually outperform high end air cooling?

[aftermath]

most certainly if done correctly.

water is better at removing the heat (due to higher specific heat capacity) with out all the noise that fast, high flow, small fans on heat sinks create because the water moves the heat efficiently to a radiator/ heat exchange / heat core with a larger surface area compared to a heat sink.
This in turn means that lower noise fans can be used to remove the heat from the radiator and still give you the potential for lower temps.

You must just pick good tried and tested components.
if done badly water-cooling could result in a higher temperature

edited for spelling

[hkh]

The Corsair is not that good if you want a kit like that go with the koolance it kooks alot better to.

[Alacritan]

Actually, at full speed the Corsair is much better than the Exos at full speed. It will never be as quiet as the Exos but it will always cool better (and probably be louder). I was going to get the Exos, but $186 from NewEgg was still too much when I could put something together for just over $100 that would perform better. Get a Swiftech MCW6000, a Supreme (Danner) Mag 3, a heatercore or a dual 120mm rad, a couple 120mm Sanyo Denki's (or even Panaflo's) and you're already doing better than the Exos for MUCH less.

Did I mention the Exos doesn't even come with a waterblock?

[avzay]

where do you get the heatercores from?
how do they fit into cases?