Hello fellow Overclockers, its my first post on this forum so please save the bullets for later.
I started out with a Corsair H60 or Hydro series cooling "system" a year ago, and after bumping my i7 960 up to 4.4Ghz things started to get very noisy due to high 1700 rpm of the fan so i added an extra fan in a push pull setup and obtained a great improvement, but still very high core temperatures so i decided to do some mods to it.
Original setup with push pull fans.
The radiator feels just half full of water and is really thin so I thought it must be a good idea to ad a reservoir.
The pump is really small and barely pumping at all even with rpm of over 4000, no idea what the flow rate is, but so low that 6mm tubing seems almost overkill.
Since its 1/4 barbs on the Corsair I got some tube reducers so i can use my 1/2 parts. 6mm tubing holding them together. Primochill high flow it says, but looks pretty restrictive.
Everything put together and a tube added to the circuit down to the default Gigabyte UD7 water block on the motherboard. These boards is delivered with a "hybrid silent pipe" big useless cooling rib that blocks up two PCI slots and reduces the maximum temperature with 1degree... Seems like the water block is not much better either.
Since its just a midi tower and I don't fancy 10 hard drives and 5 CD players i knocked down the whole tray and got loads of free space to place my stuff.
Alphacool NexXxoS Pro II 2x120 radiator with dirt cheap Yate Loon fans and a Phobya Balancer 250 reservoir.
Well, its all bleeded and working, but the result is not very impressive. Both minimum and maximum temperatures is higher on north bridge and CPU even with that ticker and twice as big radiator. The problem here is obviously the tiny pump and the physical layout. Having a pump placed higher than the reservoir is a bad design from the beginning, adding over sized tubing and make it lift all the water from below is even worse, so its just dripping trough the hoses.
Original h60 with extra fan in push/pull setup:
4.4ghz stable at 1.424v
Modded h60 water system:
The test result was basically Instant overheat, so i did some tuning on the overclock and got it stable at a lower voltage.
4.4ghz at a lowered 1.376v, and even worse temperatures. I decided to stop Intel Burn test very quick since the core temperatures was close to 100 and still rising.
My first plan was to include the h60 radiator in the loop, but that would just been even more restrictive on the pump.
So the solution is obviously to get a separate pump and CPU block, which with fittings, shipping and all accessories is more than my student budget.
The conclusion after this mod must be that its much better to ad a good fan to the H series than modding it in to a custom water cooling system. Or you can use it as a GPU cooler
So is there anything i can do dirt cheap to improve this system? Will it for instance kill the pump if i connect it to a variable DC source and bump the voltage up some notches?
And what about the more powerful H80 and H100 , they might have the same housing but a stronger pump that's probably universal parts from a manufacturer?
Thank you in advance for any comments
I started out with a Corsair H60 or Hydro series cooling "system" a year ago, and after bumping my i7 960 up to 4.4Ghz things started to get very noisy due to high 1700 rpm of the fan so i added an extra fan in a push pull setup and obtained a great improvement, but still very high core temperatures so i decided to do some mods to it.
Original setup with push pull fans.
The radiator feels just half full of water and is really thin so I thought it must be a good idea to ad a reservoir.
The pump is really small and barely pumping at all even with rpm of over 4000, no idea what the flow rate is, but so low that 6mm tubing seems almost overkill.
Since its 1/4 barbs on the Corsair I got some tube reducers so i can use my 1/2 parts. 6mm tubing holding them together. Primochill high flow it says, but looks pretty restrictive.
Everything put together and a tube added to the circuit down to the default Gigabyte UD7 water block on the motherboard. These boards is delivered with a "hybrid silent pipe" big useless cooling rib that blocks up two PCI slots and reduces the maximum temperature with 1degree... Seems like the water block is not much better either.
Since its just a midi tower and I don't fancy 10 hard drives and 5 CD players i knocked down the whole tray and got loads of free space to place my stuff.
Alphacool NexXxoS Pro II 2x120 radiator with dirt cheap Yate Loon fans and a Phobya Balancer 250 reservoir.
Well, its all bleeded and working, but the result is not very impressive. Both minimum and maximum temperatures is higher on north bridge and CPU even with that ticker and twice as big radiator. The problem here is obviously the tiny pump and the physical layout. Having a pump placed higher than the reservoir is a bad design from the beginning, adding over sized tubing and make it lift all the water from below is even worse, so its just dripping trough the hoses.
Original h60 with extra fan in push/pull setup:
4.4ghz stable at 1.424v
Modded h60 water system:
The test result was basically Instant overheat, so i did some tuning on the overclock and got it stable at a lower voltage.
4.4ghz at a lowered 1.376v, and even worse temperatures. I decided to stop Intel Burn test very quick since the core temperatures was close to 100 and still rising.
My first plan was to include the h60 radiator in the loop, but that would just been even more restrictive on the pump.
So the solution is obviously to get a separate pump and CPU block, which with fittings, shipping and all accessories is more than my student budget.
The conclusion after this mod must be that its much better to ad a good fan to the H series than modding it in to a custom water cooling system. Or you can use it as a GPU cooler
So is there anything i can do dirt cheap to improve this system? Will it for instance kill the pump if i connect it to a variable DC source and bump the voltage up some notches?
And what about the more powerful H80 and H100 , they might have the same housing but a stronger pump that's probably universal parts from a manufacturer?
Thank you in advance for any comments
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