Is lapping a core i7 worth it?

[GMdoubleG]

So I have a friend who finally wants to get into water cooling and I was going to sell him my unused parts and have him buy an apogee GTZ for his i7 setup. Is this still the best CPU block for the i7? I know there are plenty of threads around here discussing this but I haven't been able to find any data comparing the GTZ, Heatkiller 3.0, etc.

 

[ascl]

Heatkiller 3.0 is the best block atm I think, however the GTZ has a nice mounting system, which was enough to sway my decision (as a noob at WCing, I figured an easier mounting system was worth the loss of a couple of degrees).

Detailed info here:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=224976

 

[GMdoubleG]

Am I reading those results correctly? Are they getting the i7 920 temps into the low 30*C while being overclocked to 3.7Ghz?

 

[GMdoubleG]

Nevermind, I just realized that it is the temperature difference between the CPU and the water. Now that I figured that out, can someone tell me how that translates? If there is a smaller difference between the temps then the Water Block is removing more of the heat from the CPU?

 

[hokiealumnus]

Yes, that's correct. If the water-to-CPU delta is 30C with a HK block and it's 33C with a Swiftech block, then the HK is performing 3C better than the Swiftech (those numbers are out of the air and have no bearing on actual performance).

 

[Daddyjaxx]

I take those reviews with a grain of salt. If those few degrees celcius is that important to you, you are running the chip too hard anyway. It's not the heat that kills CPU's neccessarily, it's the voltage. I'm sure plenty of them have been killed on even phase with a lot better temps than we would ever see with water.

 

[GMdoubleG]

It seems the heatkiller 3.0 is quite hard to set correctly and not worth the extra 1-3*C. I'm not going to be pushing my system very hard but I would like to have a stable OC 24/7.