**Advice Needed - Best Lanparty UT Expert Water Cooling Kit**

[Cosmo-R]

Hi guys,

I have just upgraded to a DFI Lanparty UT Expert and I'm looking for some advice on the best water cooling kit to buy for this board, budget is £250 as I live in the UK. I am worried about the Chipset cooler with it being situated in between my 2 XFX Geforce 7800GT's, there isnt a lot of room and certainly not enough height from the board to the bottom of my cards for some of the waterblocks on the market. I have an Akasa Eclipse-62 Aluminum Case which has 1 x 120mm fan on the back, no real room for a 2 x 80mm radiator (see pic 1). There is quite a lot of room at the side of the drive bays as the case is wider than most (see pic 2).

Pic 1 http://www.cosmo.f2s.com/back.jpg Pic 2 http://www.cosmo.f2s.com/case.jpg

Machine specs in signature. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Luftwaffle]

I would say don't worry about water cooling the NB. You're not going to see much improvement in OC performance by putting a block on it. But, seeing as how I have an Ultra-D and would LOVE the option of throwing something on the chipset, just put something small on it that doesn't get in the way of your SLI blocks. A Maze4 would be my suggestion, but it's kinda pricey for not really doing much better than an Evercool Twinkling VGA Cooler...

[CoreGamer]

I would have to agree, Water Cooling the NB isnt really neccisary in most cases

[Cosmo-R]

Cheers guys, it's more noise factor than anything else. My Opteron is overclocked by 1100Mhz on air passing Prime and Super PI 32M so it's not a cooling problem as such. Really want to get rid of as many fans as I can especially on my 7800's, the stock ones are loud, even at idle. Thought about the NV Silencer but I had one on my 6800GT and they take up an extra PCI slot and I just dont have the room.

[Luftwaffle]

I think there are some passive cooling solutions for the NB. Some guy at DFI-street made this huge heatpiped passive heatsink from some other larger heatsink for the Ultra-D.

[maxxpehling]

I think there are some passive cooling solutions for the NB. Some guy at DFI-street made this huge heatpiped passive heatsink from some other larger heatsink for the Ultra-D.


I think his dilema is that he needs something microscpoic to fit in between the XFX beasts that nearly poke his hard drive in the front. So I'm just guessing that a "huge heatpiped passive heatsink from some other larger heatsink for the Ultra-D" won't fit.

~Maxx

[Cosmo-R]

Maxx is right as you can see by this pic.

http://www.cosmo.f2s.com/DFI.jpg

Room really is a premium, one of the reasons I upgraded to the Expert from the Asus A8N SLI Deluxe was the fact DFI redesigned the board by moving the cpu and memory sockets to enable them to open up the gap between the 2 PCI-E slots, which funnily enough is the exact same distance (6cm) as the Asus, though the extra overclocking options were a telling factor.

After messing about I have my 7800GT's (which are one, or should I say two of the biggest culprits when it comes to noise) running nearly silent in desktop usage using the fan controller in RivaTuner, fans are running at 10% heat doesnt exceed 47c which is fine. I dual boot for gaming where the noise doesnt bother me so the fans are left alone to spin at the default. The noisiest fan in my sytem is my MB Chipset cooler and the more I look at I feel it's going to be hard to replace, even with water cooling.

[Luftwaffle]

I think his dilema is that he needs something microscpoic to fit in between the XFX beasts that nearly poke his hard drive in the front. So I'm just guessing that a "huge heatpiped passive heatsink from some other larger heatsink for the Ultra-D" won't fit.

~Maxx
There's actually less room on my Ultra-D than his expert board since the video card actually hangs directly over the chipset cooler. (Worst.design.ever.)

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6577

It's a long thread, but there are some big pictures on some of the pages that show how he converted the heatsink to fit.

[Luftwaffle]

Maxx is right as you can see by this pic.

http://www.cosmo.f2s.com/DFI.jpg

Room really is a premium, one of the reasons I upgraded to the Expert from the Asus A8N SLI Deluxe was the fact DFI redesigned the board by moving the cpu and memory sockets to enable them to open up the gap between the 2 PCI-E slots, which funnily enough is the exact same distance (6cm) as the Asus, though the extra overclocking options were a telling factor.

After messing about I have my 7800GT's (which are one, or should I say two of the biggest culprits when it comes to noise) running nearly silent in desktop usage using the fan controller in RivaTuner, fans are running at 10% heat doesnt exceed 47c which is fine. I dual boot for gaming where the noise doesnt bother me so the fans are left alone to spin at the default. The noisiest fan in my sytem is my MB Chipset cooler and the more I look at I feel it's going to be hard to replace, even with water cooling.
The Evercool Twinkling VGA Chipset cooler seems to be the choice for noise reduction among the Ultra-D owners. I haven't gotten it myself, but I plan on buying one soon. Everyone says that it's MUCH quieter than the stock fan and cools better. Looking at that, I *think* you could cram a Maze4 in there. But, that's 42 bucks on Danger-den versus 8 bucks for the fan cooler on Jab-tech. It's your computer, you make the call.

Edit: Oh yeah, and the Evercool fan will definitely fit.

[Cosmo-R]

Thanks for all the help guys, never actually thought of putting a VGA cooler on it. The Evercool looks small enough, just need to find a UK supplier. Maze4 looks interesting. I still feel I could squeeze a waterblock in there, the fact the mounting holes are not centered between my graphics cards doesn't help.

[demonR6]

I would say don't worry about water cooling the NB. You're not going to see much improvement in OC performance by putting a block on it. But, seeing as how I have an Ultra-D and would LOVE the option of throwing something on the chipset, just put something small on it that doesn't get in the way of your SLI blocks. A Maze4 would be my suggestion, but it's kinda pricey for not really doing much better than an Evercool Twinkling VGA Cooler...

Agreed, the Evercool lowered my temps by 3~4c and the NB never goes above 36c on full load while gaming for hours.

[Luftwaffle]

I just ordered my VC-RE yesterday. It should be here sometime next week.

[Millzee]

I bought one of those Coolriver all in one kits (I can guess what you're thinking) but it has a chipset cooler that is only 10mm high. It slips right under the tail of the graphics card. It's fitted to a DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra (modded to SLi) with two BFG 7800GTX's. It all fits and its all cool (CPU 31 idle/39 loaded, chipset 30 period, GPU's 34 idle/55 loaded)

[speed bump]

Maze 4s are nice and fit in there properly. With the expert board however you should be able to fit silencer in there considering you can run 7800GTXs which take up two slots with ease.

[Millzee]

This might be of interest. The SLi NB block

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Alphacool.html