Swiftech 8500 Watercooling Kit Review

playafly187 writes "OCIA has posted their review of the Swiftech H20-8500 Watercooling Kit. The following is a direct quote from the review: 'This kit is aimed at those who want the low noise operation of watercooling, but are confined to a somewhat small case and/or those who don't want to fool with extensive modding of their case to accommodate a watercooling setup. The only requirement for your case is at least one 80mm rear exhaust fan opening and an empty 5 1/2" drive bay. I will take a look at each component provided in detail, then will walk you through our installation and testing.'"

Comments

I find this annoying

[phoxix]

I seriously think slashdot needs an "over-clocking and related" topic. IMHO stuff like this shouldn't be in hardware but rather in its own topic. I say this because I'm 100% sure there are many of us who don't care for water cooling or overclocking. However we do care for other hardware topics and whatnot, so blocking the hardware topic isn't an option for us.

just my two cents

Sunny Dubey

Re:Do we really NEED this?

[Anonymous Coward]

File this one under: Fixes for things that already work.

I have to agree, but I think overall this falls under the 'shit people like to do for a hobby' category. I never got into the whole overclocking thing, on the other hand I never got into the whole baseball card collecting thing either.

Noise noise noise

[Featureless]

I used to think worry about noise was something only Mac-having aesthetes did. I'd never had a "noise problem," and I could only see it being an issue for those using the gear in some kind of rarefied experimental or engineering setting (or making music, etc).

Then I got a new AMD PC. It's not outrageous by current standards; XP2100+, GF4 ti4400. I suppose a better (read: more expensive) vendor might have spent time tuning the case, fans, and airflow to get it quieter... had I known, I might have considered spending the money on more expensive brand. But I did what I always do; buy the almost-cheapest hardware for the almost-best specs. And, basically, this approach has always served me well, except for this time, and only because of the noise.

Oh wow, it is loud.

I've seen the firey-flash thermal death movies of what happens when you remove the heatsink from a current AMD that were circulating a while ago; actually, I got my motherboard just as they started really getting into temperature monitoring and safety features for AMD CPUs. I can read in the hardware monitor, not to mention feel in the air, how hot this computer gets. Actually, I can hear the power involved; this is also the first PC I've had which, when the CPU is fully loaded, I can actually hear the power draw slowing down the fans. This still astounds me.

My computer sounds like a running vacuum cleaner. Well, I exaggerate, but it is loud. Loud enough to be a serious nuisance. Loud enough that you turn up the volume of music. Loud enough that you don't want to watch movies or hang out in the room while it's on. And it blows me away. This is a PC for god's sake. I've never had to worry about noise on a PC before.

I've since invested in "quiet" fans and "smart" fans. These help a little, but not much. I realize that the services of the professionals Dell/Gateway/Apple/etc employs for designing cases to cope with this are worth some of the money they charge on the other end. Although I never ever expected noise would be the thing that drove me back to the big vendors.

So I find myself reading this article and actually seriously contemplating the purchase of this watercooler, despite the fact that I am not, and have no intention of becoming, an overclocker, and at ~$275, this gear is almost 1/3d what I paid for the entire rest of the computer - not to mention the risk of giving my gear a bath.

And I find harkening back to all of those science fiction books I read which incidentally noted water-cooled PCs in the world of the future. How silly that seemed in 1989. And yet now, at the rate power consumption and heat are growing, I start to wonder... might we see factory-installed water cooling coming from the major retailers in few years?

Just to cope with the noise? Or even because they have no choice, noise or not?

Crazy.