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Installed Cool by Corsair

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planoser

Member
Joined
Jan 31, 2006
Location
plano, tx
Hey, first post. My friend @ work directed me to this page and I love the wealth of information.

Anyways, I bought a system from my brother real cheap and have been playing around with overclocking it. p4 2.6C on an albatron 865pe pro board with 1GB PC2700 (i know, sucky!)

It started off with a vantec hsf that was fine at stockish speeds but when I o/c'd it up to 3.25 it ran very hot under load - over 65C!.

After some research I went with the Big Typhoon and got the machine stable at 3.4 after days of tweaking around with it. Idle temps were around 38-40C while load temps were barely reaching 55C. I was very impressed with the BT!

Always intrigued w/ water cooling, I was pokin around @ microcenter w/ my brother through their WC section and discovered a Cool by Corsair kit at a crazy-good price so picked it up as an impulse buy. Took it home and was eager to get it running. The components seem to be of good quality, think I read most of the parts are of swiftech origin?

Anyways, was disappointed to find that the kit I picked up was for socket 775 while I had a socket 478 system. No biggy, b/c I am actually making the move to a socket 775 next week; been thinking about the D 920 route.

All in all, the installation instructions on this kit are pretty crappy, but I figured it out pretty easily. Anyways, I had to drill some holes in the water-block bracket in order to get it to work with my 478. Also had to drill some holes in the back of my case in order to mount the Radiator back there. Those 2 parts of the install were the hardest/ most time consuming. The rest is all basically plug and play simple.

I have some AS5 but used the Arctic Ceramique included with the kit. Now, being that the bracket/clip to hold the waterblock down to my CPU isnt made for mine and I had to drill new holes in it, I don't feel it is providing the best contact/pressure possible, but it seems to be sufficient for now. Idle temps are actually about the same as the Big Typhoon, but I did notice a difference in the load temps. I am now averaging ~46C under load but have seen it spike to 49C.

The watercooling actually enabled me to overclock another 100Mhz out of my CPU stably :) 2.6C @ 3.51 I think I pretty much maxed it out and havnt tried it higher for now.

Wanted to ask though, if anybody knows about the pieces of this kit, what would they recommend I upgrade to make the biggest improvement -- a different block? radiator? pump? The 120mm fan on the radiator is made by Panaflo and it seemed to not be pushing all that much air, can anyone suggest a better fan for the radiator or anything I can do to get some more RPMs out of that one?

Sorry for such a long post!!!!!!!!! Am just excited with my new 'hobby' and resparked a love for overclocking that I have been away from for years.
 
:welcome: to the forums.

Anyway, this is the kit he's talking about Cool by Corsair

Is that tubbing 3/8 ID? My suggestion would be to upgrade the radiator first. The Panaflow is actually a pretty good fan, you probably have the L1A (I think).
 
Thanks for the quick reply!
Yeah, 3/8 tubing...any suggestions as to which radiators I should be looking into (damn, I bet there's a faq about this I should be checking!!)
 
I first would be making sure that you are getting good contact between the CPU and block. If noise is not an issue, you can always get a higher cfm fan. If you don't feel much airflow, they probably did use a low cfm fan, in which case more airflow would probably be the cheapest thing to try first. You can pick up fans pretty cheap if you look around.
 
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Would it be beneficial to have a fan on each side of the radiator ( one pushing thru, and one pulling out?)
Also, what kind of CFM's should I be looking for?
 
What cfms to look for is going to depend on desired noise level. If you don't care too much, something in the 80-90cfm would be in the range i would suggest. You can go push/pull, but it doesn't make that much of a difference, usually a couple/few c or so.
 
Well considering you had to custom fab your mounting plate holes for the WB I am betting that your block is not making perfect contact.

Before you go about spending money on upgrading any of the parts in your kit I strongly suggest you buy the proper mount for your WB. However considering the fact that you said you are possibly going to go with LGA 775 next week you could just hold off on buying anything and see how the kit performs on your new set-up.
 
planoser said:
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Would it be beneficial to have a fan on each side of the radiator ( one pushing thru, and one pulling out?)
Also, what kind of CFM's should I be looking for?

the most that will get you is 1-2C, maybe even nothing. It's always good to have lots of fans around. there are silent ones that push around 50CFM, and you can go over 200CFM. check some out at www.sidewindercomputers.com

deltas and panaflos are always good choices.
 
Now that I think about it, my kit came with P4 mounting hardware. RyderOCZ has it now. The only thing I didn't care for was the "permanently" attached hose clamps.
 
The kit I got came with hardware for socket 775 & socket 7. I looked up some info online and looks like there is another version of the kit that has the hardware for socket 478 & 939.
 
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