2 radiators and no fans?

[pood]

I already ordered my WC, but wondering if you can use 2 or even 3 radiators and use no fans at all to get the same performance of a system that uses 1 radiator with 3 fans?

I bought the Thermochill PA102.3 radiator.

[Vengance_01]

Not going to happen. You better off running fans at 5 volts vs no fans.

[ziggo0]

Especially yate loon lows...you can't even hear them

[updawg]

I know they are expensive but scythe sflex fans have high airflow and low DB.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185004

[Mycobacteria]

I reckon if you had a large car rad you could run passive without the use of any fans.... Probably one large car rad will cost the same as two PC thermochill rads.

[pood]

I know they are expensive but scythe sflex fans have high airflow and low DB.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185004

wow! those are nice fans! If I had known, I would've bought those instead of the yate loons

[n3xu5]

Voights was running his current setup with dual MCR320's and his fan controller burnt out. So everything in his system was passive until we realized an increase in his temps. Even though he was in the 50ish Celcius range ... without fans, that is still better than most systems on air cooling. It is what it is ... but you want to use fans if you can, it's kinda the point of water cooling, unless you're water chilling.

[voigts]

The PA120.3 is optimized for use with low cfm fans. On my last setup I used yate d12sl-12 loons from Petras undervolted to about 5-7 volts, and they about as quiet as you are going to get. They make virtually no noise at that level. Before that setup, I used a small car rad passively and it worked fine as far as temps go, but there honestly was no noticeable difference in noise between using the car rad passively vs PA120.3 with the undervolted yates. With the background noise in the room and outside, it simply made no difference. And I'm a noise freak.

On my current setup with the dual MCR320s, I am using the same yates from petras (he gets his direct from yate loons and they perform better than yates from other distributors-have curved blades) undervolted again to about 5-7 volts and it is very quiet even with 6 fans. I did have the deal with the fan controller going out and running passively without knowing it, but for the little bit of increase in sound due to the fans which isn't noticeable, it isn't worth the temp increase running passive.

They scythe fans are good fans, but they are about the same as the yate loons performance/noise wise at 3x the cost, although since they have ball bearings vs sleeve bearings, they probably will last longer, especially when mounted horizontally.

It takes a car sized rad to be able to run completely passive, and to me it simply isn't worth it given the added size.

[updawg]

They have them on the egg for 12.99 a pop, that is a pretty good deal.

[shachar2]

I already ordered my WC, but wondering if you can use 2 or even 3 radiators and use no fans at all to get the same performance of a system that uses 1 radiator with 3 fans?

I bought the Thermochill PA102.3 radiator.

let me start by saying that there's no data on passive cooling (I've checked) theoretically you can do what you said

in order to cool as passively as possible (ignore performance & overclocking please) you'll need as large a radiator as possible (480 120x4 fans radiators are the best commercial available radiator at the moment besides car radiators)

you can setup some fans with a fan controller to make sure that when you game etc your system (cpu/gpu) won't reach a critical temperature

and last thing about passive cooling that's a bit less obvious. different cpu have different heat load (thermal design power) and different thermal specification (maximum critical temperature).
for example if you look at intel's cpu on the same family they have similar cpus that might have the same heat load but different termal specification.

if possible when building a new system you'll want to buy a cpu that has the minimal thermal design power (heat load) and maximum thermal specification as possible


*the terms above are taken from intel's site, you might find similar terms for AMD & VIA