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Need help water cooling my desktop PC!

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Ryan82586

New Member
Joined
Jul 15, 2011
I'm very experienced and well knowledged in PCs. Though, I have very little experience with liquid cooling them. I know that water and electricity do not mix very well, which is why I'm here looking for advice.

I've got a Dell Workstation Precision 470. Dual Xeon CPU, hyperthreaded @ 3.2 GHz (2 cores, 4 threads). 5 GB DDR2 RAM. Nvidia 8800 GT, Zalman Edition graphics card. 120 GB HDD. 0T0820 Motherboard.

This thing was great in the winter. It was like a mini space heater. Now, with it being summer tempuratures, it is heating up my room very quickly, and it is getting very very hot in the tower. With this intense heat we've gotten, my computer has shut down due to thermal event when it's at max load in a game. After checking boot logs, it was CPU_0 (my first CPU) that was out of temperature range. This has only happened a couple times, and I'm not too worried.

With all that being said, I think I want to water cool the CPUs. So what I'm asking is....whats the best way to do this? and how could I do it without breaking the bank? I've heard that water cooling kits are not the best way to go. I can build the water cooler myself, however I need to know what I should get, and what blocks will fit the dual Xeon CPUs (Socket: 604 mPGA). What do I need to make this work? A couple blocks that fit the Xeons, a radiator, a water pump, and some tubing? Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks
 
Take the Airflow shield off and take a picture of the Socket with the Heatsync off. You may be SOL on finding a block that will fit. Depends on the Dimensions however hot the actual socket type.
 
Yep, the Mobo design could be tricky. The cooler holes need to be standard like the common CPU blocks. If they are not standard, you can make brackets to hold the blocks down. It can be done.

The watercooling won't cool the room down, it will be just as hot as before. You'll need two CPU blocks, good pump, a pretty big radiator, fans, tubing, clamps, fittings, and a res. On the cheap, possibly $250, probably more. It won't fit in the case, you'd have to mount the rad external

Another thought is to replace your Case and CPU cooler fans with better fans. Cut holes in the side cover and add fans etc etc.
 
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