should i switch to water cooling?

[JayP]

I'm running a Duron 850@1.13GHz, idle temp at 40°C, load temp at 45°C, 1.90 volts. System is very stable running Toast.exe for 10mins. I have also tried other stability testing programs and none of them crashed my system; folding@home, Sisoft Sandra, Burn6, and others. I would like to switch to water cooling, but would like to know why it is better other than not being as noisy as air an cooled system. Would it be practical for my system to have water cooling OR should I just stick to my air cooling system?

[azhari]

Besides the noise issue, I feel that water cooling is really a precursor to peltier cooling. There really isn't a big difference in performance between water cooling and some of the top air cooling HSFs.

[Yodums]

I would recommend water cooling but your heatsink looks like it is way up to par.

Before actually go water cooling I would recommend you lapping the heatsink to bring the temperature down abit since I think your system are being crashed because of heat since the diode may not be correct and your CPU temp maybe 50.

Yodums

[JayP]

what would be the cheapest and most efficient way to find out what the actual cpu core temp is at full load?

[FrozenInHI]

a 14 dollar compunurse from any good cooling site. install the probe under the heatsink next to the core, NOT on top of the core. make sure the probe isn't real thick so as to impede the heatsink from sitting flush on the core. best way to guage that is to move the probe once the heatsink is on, it should move pretty easily, but not be bound in there.

[Tiger]

From your sig I would say you don't have a real noise problem. That fan is fairly quiet in comparison to the delta. You have a lot of spare capacity in terms of increasing the cooling capacity by adding a higher volume fan.
Having said that there is not a lot more you are going to get out of the proc in terms of speed. Water cooling will at best give a another 100MHz. The big plus about water is that it has tremendous heat capacity and therefore the proc is not subject to the sudden changes in temp and therefore expansion and contraction that it suffers with air cooling. An example is with air the differential between the temps at full and idle can be be 5 or 6C while with water it is not more than 2. My system is 1C. In practical terms it means that the machine is far more stable. Since switching to water I have not had a BSOD.