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Integrated Water-Cooled Case
man_ls writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of a new Koolance water-cooled case. It has a built in watercooling system, to save people into overclocking the trouble of building their own. Unfortunately, it only works with Athlon, Duron, and Pentium IIIs. The P4 socket isn't compatible with it. "
What if one of the pipes bursts? Or evel leaks a little? Is such a risk worth the extra CPU cycles?
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I still think the $250 price tag attached is to high...making it a niche market.
They say they target Overclockers and Power Users. I think they meant "We target that geek who needs every new god damn toy for his computer no matter what the cost". That's someone who thinks Mhz is the most important part of the equation. NOT a Power User.
I overclock, but I do it to get the most bang for my buck. The extra money I'd spend on this case would be better used on buying other improved system parts, not just pushing my Mhz that much higher. (think SCSI hard drive)
I'm not sure I understad the market that this is shooting for.
Back in the day, overclocking was all about getting the best performance out of a cheaper processor. For example, a $75 Celeron 366 overclocked to 550 would rival the performance of the $500 PII 550.
Grassroots watercooling did the same thing. It allowed people to reap more benifits out of a processor using cheapo parts they bought at their local auto parts stores. A used radiator, fish tank pump, tubing, and some epoxy to affix some home made heat remover directly to the core would cost just a few bucks. Watercoolers used to be an elite group of self doers, but now adays you can buy premade kits for just about anything.
Today, we've got $100 heat sinks, and $250 watercooled cases at a time where overclocking no longer yields significant percentages in processing power and where more than just the processor is a bottleneck.
Spending $35 on a Duron 750 and watercooling it to a gig or more doesn't seem that appealing when you realize 1 gig T-birds are only about $70.
Anyway, my conclusion is this: this product seems silly.
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I saw this at Comdex in Chicago. in APRIL.
Send in a post. No response. But enough bitching.
This is a really useful piece of hardware. It's a lot quieter than a regular case. In addition, because water's both cheap and extremely effective as a conuctor of heat, it can keep the temperatures of your CPU, graphics card, hard drives, anything you can slide a copper plate on near room temperature. It really increases systemic longevity.
Of course, you could just have your motherboard immerced in a vat of mineral oil and have a similar effect.. (Mineral oil is non-conductive. And before you say I'm full of it, this was the at the demo the Koolance people used at Comdex Chicago.)
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In a world where the average pc price is under $1000, $250 seems quite steep. I know some of you reading this made it sucessfully in the corporate IT world and make 60k a year but I am in school and work part time as a store merchandiser to pay tuition. To me this is way too much and doesn't really offer me anything I want or need. The whole idea of overclocking does not make much sense.
For all those math geeks reading this lets use a standard price/performance ratio. Lets compare prices for the state of the art athlon +1900 vs +1600. For a +1900 vs +1600, you spend an extra $200 more for a mere %8 performance gain. Now an overlocked +1900 would cost an another $250 for the price of the water-cooler to boost the megahertz speed. You would gain perhaps another %5-8. Remember that memory becomes the bottleneck at this speed and even ddram begins to slow things down quite a lot. Not to mention the pci bus speed and the bendwitch between the cpu and the agp card slows things down. So for $400 you would get a while %15 performance gain and have one hot(literally) system.
So the real question is what do you use the computer for and would overclocking with this tank system really benefit what your doing? Gamers started the whole overclocking movement. In the old days the speed of the processor was just as important as the video card if not more. If your a gamer today you could save money buying a state of the art Geforce3 and putting in a +1600 athlon and it will beat the crap out of a super overclocked system with an older geforece256. When your system becomes slow again buy a geforce4. You could save more money doing this in the long run. If your a hard core hacker then maybe you may want an overclocked machine. For me, doing programming homework on my pentiumIII700 takes only a few seconds to compile. I admit I have not written anything over 15k but that is how most small individual programming projects are. No one really write something that big by themselves. I have to admit it would take forever to compile something kde or a Freebsd "make world", but most people do this only occasionally. Its not worth $400 for me to compile something that big once every 6 months. Only the core kde members or freebsd developers would ever require something like this. I will happily wait an extra hour with my old PentiumIII 700 to compile kde. So basically must developers don't need these systems anyway. The last people I can think of who might want an overclocked system might be personal webserver admins or hobiest admins. I think a dual processor athlon +1200 would make a much better machine then an overclocked single +1900. They would be cheaper or close to the same price. The machine needs to stay on 24x7 and stability is important. You would not only get more performance with a dual +1200 but the system will be much more responsive if its under a heavy load. Hell even NT4 running IIS responds quickly with 2 processors. You all know that NT4 has bad thread handling. W2k and XP are alot better this.
Anyway I would advise agaisn't any overclocking because they are not worth it and I wish vendors would not sell systems that burn at over 65C or 160F. MY pentiumIII700 is cool to the touch and if I pay over a grand for the motherboard and cpu then I expect that it better be good quality and run cool. If it gets really hot then its way overclocked in my book and shouldn't be sold for production use or even personal. I also once had a 486 macine which ran at an unspeakable 66mhz at the time when it came out. I went through 3 cpu's on my system because it would freeze and get too hot. I will never buy a fast overclocked system again.
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