Thinking about going water this summer...newbie questions

I'm thinking about going to water in preparation for a possible San Diego or X2 setup further down the road, and I've got a few questions. but first, my requirements: gaming performance, cool looking case, quietness, in that order. I need to cool, at minimum, both GPUs, the NB, and the CPU. With that said:

1) Cost: Am I looking at $150-$200, or even more?
2) Space: I have a few (like 4 or 5) extra 3 inch drive bays, but I'm out of 5.25s unless I get a new PSU (ive got the slave taking up 2 drive bays). How much room do I need for a rad, pump, etc? I don't want to put anything outside of the case.
3) How much better performance will I get vs my ginourmous XP-120?
4) Do they make MOSFET or RAM blocks?
5) WTF is a bong?!?!?

A bong is essentially a large piece of pvc pipe that, if I understand this correctly uses the pump to force water through a shower head on top, while a fan forces room temp air up the pipe over the falling droplets of water. Because of the water evaporating as the air goes past it, with a good setup you can get sub ambient water temps, but I don't know how low of sub-ambient. and AFAIK the water continuously evaporates so you have to refill it as it does.

lets do this in order

1. yea, the price for a full coolign system for both 6800's and your cpu might run you as much as 300 buck maybe as little as 200. depending on what you want, of course

2. depending on the size of the heatercore and pump, you might be fine, i reccomend a t-line over a resiviour though.

3. youll see some good benifits, the more you pay, the better it will be.

4. they do make ram blocks. akwaflo i think they are called, xoxide useda have em, but doesnt anymore. mosfet blocks are kinda obsolete i think, i hear the difference is negligable, and not with the time, cause youd hafta make your own.

5. answered by redwraith

redwraith94 said:

A bong is essentially a large piece of pvc pipe that, if I understand this correctly uses the pump to force water through a shower head on top, while a fan forces room temp air up the pipe over the falling droplets of water. Because of the water evaporating as the air goes past it, with a good setup you can get sub ambient water temps, but I don't know how low of sub-ambient. and AFAIK the water continuously evaporates so you have to refill it as it does.

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Wait, so you've got a vertical tube with a shower head on the top and a fan on the bottom...if the water evaporates, how does it get back into the cooling system? how does this help cool your water?

Not all of the water evaporates at once. Only a little bit does. You have to refill it every so often.

1. After all costs are tallied for most do it yourself setups its generally around $200 for a very good performer, prolly $250 if you want to cool both your 6800's would be a reasonable budget.

2. You can fit a radiator either on the bottom, top, or wher the 3.5" bays are. Anyway you look at it though you need to cut a hole in the case to do it

3. Not sure what your XP-120 temps are now, but with modern blocks and a good setup for the price i listed above you'll prolly see Idle temps of 5C over ambient and load temps of 10C over ambient

4. I've never seen any personally for sale. Doesnt mean they're not out there... You can always make your own

5. Yeah, bongs are vertical tubes with showerheads on top and fans blowing on a res at the bottom. They evaporate water on the rate of I think around a gallon a week. You can usually get your bong temps about 5C below ambient which keeps our CPU at ambient on idle and +5C at load. Properly setup bongs make for some awesome temps, but require a lot of do-it-yourself desire, and a lot of maintenance to use. If you want a fire and forget system, wcing is for you

Just for information's sake, here's what I believe is the origional bong article (aka evaprative cooling tower).

http://www.overclockers.com/articles389/

I use a different sort of evaporative cooling. I have a pump inside of a 10 gallon fishtank that feeds water to a water block and then it empties out into the fishtank. My only concession to spreading out the surface area of the water is to have the outlet spill over a gallon jug. Then I just have a box fan on low blowing at the fishtank. Its pretty darn silent and I get great temps. The most I've had is low 40'sC at about 1.78v, at 100% load.

The theory behind evaporative cooling is that it takes x amount of energy to transform a liquid into a gas and it gets this energy from the heat of the water. So when the water evaporates it uses up the heat of the water to power the transformation. A chemist or physicist might disagree with my terminology but that's basically what happens, I believe.

So as regards the bong, here we go:

1. You're looking at about $200 or more I'd say just to pay for the blocks for your cpu and 2 gpu's. The bong itself is little more than pocket change, maybe $30. Of course with a closed loop you're looking at the cost of the rad (which will have to be pretty big) and a couple of good fans.

2. A bong will almost definitely require it to be outside of the case. Probably a closed loop will to but not necessarily.

3. I used to have a XP-120 and I wasn't really impressed. You'll do mush better with WC'ing.

4. That's more of a DIY thing and Blueball, for instance has made them, but for the mosfet cooler in particular it will only work with your current mobo and will probably require alot of work. It's still better to just throw some sinks onto the mosfets and point a fan at them.

I would recommend getting a normal WC loop setup before venturing into Bong cooling. There would just be too many variables that you wouldnt know how to control yet with a bong setup if you didnt have any past experience with water. And you dont need to watercool your NB, Mosfets, or RAM. They will all do fine on air, and you can put quiet active cooling or big passive cooling on the NB and mosfets if you get worried; it will do just as good a job as water. Sure, water might give you better temps on those, but that also means you are dumping all the heat from your NB, RAM, and mosfets into the loop with your CPU and GPUs. So your water tempterature would be significantly greater, and the fans would have to push more air to get reasonable temps, which means more noise. Your best bet is to just cool the CPU and two GPUs. This will result in the best temps for these components, which are obviously the most important temp-wise when it comes to OCing.

As for room, pics of your case would help, but you could probably fit a radiator in that area with all those open 3.5" bays. However, you WILL have to cut your case some to accomodate the fans. You want at least a 2x120mm radiator, or a 3x120mm radiator if you can fit it. The bigger the rad, the lower the temps, obviously. The pump is relatively small, just get one of the DC pumps, either the MCP655 or MCP350. I would recommend the MCP655 due to its higher flow and 1/2" ID barbs, which would accomodate your tubing better (assuming youre running a 1/2" ID loop). They are also both very quiet, and run off your molex so you dont need an AC cord running through your case. All this would cost you around $250-300 for excellent parts, depending on what radiator you use. The blocks you would want an mcw6002-64 and the Maze4 SLI kit, but as for the rad, it really depends on space. Bigger ones cost more, but are worth the money.

You can get the parts much cheaper here on the classifieds, it just takes time.
I got a WhiteWater, MCP600, MCW50, 86' Chevette HC for about 170$ shipped to Israel. The shipping only is around 30-40$ so you can see it was quite cheap.

Achilles17 said:

As for room, pics of your case would help, but you could probably fit a radiator in that area with all those open 3.5" bays

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Craptacualr said:

3. Not sure what your XP-120 temps are now, but with modern blocks and a good setup for the price i listed above you'll prolly see Idle temps of 5C over ambient and load temps of 10C over ambient

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See sig. For the pics, pretend there's a PSU in the 2 drive bays under the DVD and fan controller.

I wasn't really thinking about doing a bong, just curious to know what it was.

NB H20 cooling is almost a must for me. These HSFs SUCK, and I have practically no room to mount another HSF on it cause of the GPUs sitting next to it.

Basically the bong works by evaporating water to cool itself off. For the same reason that say you just worked up a sweat playing some sport or other, and its about 75 degrees outside. With wind it feels a lot colder than with still air, the more air that goes by, the more water evaporates into it. As water evaps it takes heat from the remaining water to 'drive' the evap process, so the evaporating water steals heat from the remaining water thereby cooling it. This is why you can get sub-ambient temps with the right setup.

One more question I just thought of: how often does water cooling stuff get outdated? Sure you'll need to buy a new block for a new GPU or CPU socket, but is it like air where theres a new HSF every month?

water blocks take time to make, like they hafta spec EVERYTHNIG out perfect, so a new block will come out, but it wont come out every month, maybe 2 a year a new block will come out, if even that.

Currently waterblocks seem to be about at their best possible design, held by the Storm G5 currently. Last generation blocks (5002, Maze4, etc.) run at the most 5*C warmer, so you dont really have to worry about outdated blocks, at least for now.

For the cost, read the monthly roundup sticky, and remember that chipset/ram/mosfet blocks are pretty useless, as good heatsinks will be plenty for cooling those components.

For radiator selection, youll want a 2x120 rad (or 77 Bonneville heater core) for sli & your 3500+, the most popular rads are Black Ice Pro (use quiet, lower cfm fans), Black Ice Xtreme (higher cfm/louder fans, like Tornados), and Thermochill 120.2/3 (like Black Ice), but these rads are at least $75 (BIP II). A 1977 Bonneville heater core (with barbs modded by you & homemade shroud/bought premodded from weapon) will core just as well, if not better than radiators, but youll have to fit it in your case yourself (unless you bought it from weapon).

If youre willing to take the plunge, you wont be sorry if you put everything together correctly, and are ok with taking some time to mod your case to fit everything inside.

If you get a good waterblock you can always find a way to mount it to a new system if the situation calls for it.


A little imagination goes a long way!

chunkeymunkey25 said:

For the cost, read the monthly roundup sticky, and remember that chipset/ram/mosfet blocks are pretty useless, as good heatsinks will be plenty for cooling those components.

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Like I said, the stock NB HSF sucks and there is no room to mount another one, so water will probably be the best way to go. Can't hurt ('cept the wallet, of course).

LoneWolf121188 said:

Like I said, the stock NB HSF sucks and there is no room to mount another one, so water will probably be the best way to go. Can't hurt ('cept the wallet, of course).

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Or you could use a fan at the bottom of the case(if there's room). A little airflow across your nb hs would likely do the trick.

mysterfix said:

If you get a good waterblock you can always find a way to mount it to a new system if the situation calls for it.


A little imagination goes a long way!

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This is why I like the Swiftech MCW6002. Its pretty much universal, fits Socket 478, both P4 and Xeon, the newer Intel socket LG-whatever, K7 and K8. You just have to buy a new retention bracket if you change format. Most retention mechanisms are $10 and the Socket478 mechanism is $5. So if you upgrade or just change your cpu to a different type it won't break the bank in any way to use the MCW6002.

Oh and it works very well. Sometimes hard to find though.

/end mini review

That's a good point but any block can be made to fit on any board if you use a little enginuity. I should know, I have a white water s478 on my athlon64 system. http://www.ocforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=41624