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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.'"
just my two cents
Sunny Dubey
and I'm stuck with these sub-par 5 1/4" drive bays. ;)
Alas, no watercooling for me.
*dons flame-retardant suit*
However, they forgot to mention that one little hole in your equipment will ruin your computer without warning.
Of course they did.
Quote the article:
The disadvantages of watercooling are obvious; H20 and electrical components don't mix! Should a watercooling setup spring a leak while your system is on, you had better plan on purchasing some new hardware
I haven't touched an Intel processor in ages, so I can't say how they are.
;)
;))
;))
Up here in the Great Amish Stronghold of Pennsylvania, it gets hot during the spring and summer. Around where I live, not everyone has an air conditioner. Actually, most people don't have 'em.
People ask me for advice on getting new computers. It's sad, but I have to tell them to stay the hell away from AMD unless they're going to buy an air conditioner to keep in the same room. I then tell them that if they're having someone build a box for them, don't skimp on fans. If they're buying a store-bought computer, buy the damned warranty, and extend! Extend! Extend!
Before I put my air conditioner in my window last spring, my Athlon 600 started having heat issues. As in, Linux started having weird errors, and Win 98 started BSoD'ing like mad. (*sigh* No, that wasn't normal for Win 98.)
I put the air conditioner in, boom, problems solved.
Now that I've upgraded to a nice AMD XP 1800, I intend to put my air conditioner in this year while there's still frost on the ground.
I'm not a cheap arse, aside from picking AMD over Intel for both cost and performance reasons. My fans cost quite a pretty penny. The processor still runs hot, and the box is still loud.
It doesn't matter if you have supposedly silent fans when you need a huge arse one for the processor, one on the chipset, one on the video card, and a case fan to help vent out hot air. The noise adds up. (Oops, did I forget the power
supply fan? They're always noisy.
And again, as for heat - not everyone has air conditioning. (I think people who don't at least have a few units stuck in windows are freakin' nuts, but hey.
Water cooling is the future. The current number of fans in boxes is getting ridiculous. The noise is climbing to outrageous levels, and they're slowly becoming inefficient when dealing with heat. Many people can't fit a full tower case
into their decorum, and most people wisely don't
wish to leave the sides off of their case for
better ventilation.
Most of us who deal with high-end computers have to deal with the severe heat issues that come with them. Processors are hardware. Video cards are hardware. Power supplies are hardware. Heat sinks and fans are hardware.
You know what? Water cooling systems are hardware. And they're shortly going to become important pieces of hardware, even for those who don't overclock.
Bring your computer to my room, it's fucking freezing here today :p
I'm 1/2 way to a quiet computer in my room. I solved the problem of noisy hard drives by relocating the drives to an older machine that does nothing but serve music/movies to the rest of the computers in the house. NIC cards, combined with wireless, and an old (spare) computer makes it a pretty cheap proposition.
Now I need to get rid of the HD that the machine boots off of to get it truly quiet. Solid-State drives seem too expensive to justify. I was thinking of trying to do a network boot, but wasn't sure how to get w2k up and running over a (wired) network connection. It might take a godawful long time to boot up initially, but seems like it would work fine once it was up and running. About the only two progs I would load would be Winamp, and Media Player.
Anyone out there had experience in diskless w2k workstations?
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.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
According to this image (*):
...this device is compatible with modern Intel and AMD CPUs. What I want to know is, will it work with my old slot 1 Pentium 3? My modern AMD CPU doesn't need to be overclocked (it's fast enough for me at 1753MHz), but my P3/600 running at 800MHz (or 1GHz even) would be sweet indeed... and unlike the new CPU, I don't mind taking the chance of blowing up the old one attempting to overclock it, since I've gotten a couple years of use out of it already, and it's `retired' now.
:)
http://www.ocia.net/reviews/8500/liquid9.jpg
* Does anyone else think it's ridiculous for a web designer to use a JPEG image to represent a block of text? Especially with such a tiny font size? The capital letter E in that image is 8x9 pixels, which is hard to see even for me, using a 21" monitor at 1440x1080. If I were using 1600x1200, I wouldn't even bother trying to read it, just click along to some other site... Also, if it weren't an image, I would have been able to copy & paste the text into this post. Of course, this rant complaining about it represents more keystrokes than it would take to type the text I wanted to paste.
Solid-State drives seem too expensive to justify.
I had a neat thought on this one a while back, but haven't been able to find the solution yet...Ram-Drives. Isn't there anyone that make a hard-drive sized box that you can plug standard sdram into? Without the ram, it seems like it would be fairly cheap to implement, and anymore, the ram isn't that expensive, either...just start adding 512 mb sticks whenever you can afford it...Add a small battery backup (how much voltage can it really take to keep sdram sticks alive, anyway?) and MAYBE a hard drive to back up everything to... Gotta admit that it would be pretty nice to work one of these hypothetical devices up to 20 gigs-or more-
Silent, fast, and fast. (Yes- I put 2 fast's in there on purpose---Cause it would be...)
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
Never really found any tips on the Interweb and previous "ask slashdot" noice tips to really work for me except for;
1. Panflows or Vantec Stealth fans are great. Both are really quiet, but you do sacrifice a bit of air flow. Not really a problem for me because I didn't get the fastest cpu (therefore lots of heat and requires lots of cooling)
2. Distance and barrier. A great solution if you can get it to work. You can buy extension cables for USB or your monitor, mouse and keyboard. I got one which had them all in one. I then stuck the whole thing in a nearby closet and closed the door leaving space for the cable. Only have to access the computer to change cds, but its well worth the inconvence.
Using this, I got the noise down to where I can hear my CRT monitor.
3. (Never had to do this but I think I would have) You can buy noise cases. Wooden cases surrounded by sound adsorbing materials. I like this idea because its used by sound engineers. But it is expensive.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Get a Seagate barracuta.
Or if you are willing to risk killing a hard drive;
1. Remove the hard drive from the case.
2. Set on top of form pad in side the bottom of case.
3. Ground the drive to the case somehow.
4. Attach power/IDE cables.
See how quiet it is now.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I've been thinking about this for a while (mostly for older CPU's, just as a way to possibly cut down noise), and I was wondering about hooking up external sources of the coolant, perhaps though a unused slots in the back of the computer. Hook up to an external pump/cooling system, and then connect multiple computers up to the same system (in parallel, so each gets cold incoming of course).
:)
I was curious about what other people think about this. A system like this one, with some modifications, seems to me like it would work fairly well. I'd just need different CPU cooling modules (Why not for everything Pentium and up?), so I can replace all my CPU cooling fans with liquid-cooling systems. Then I'd add coolant-filled pipes to the mess behind all my computers.
This is my
--An Oldie, but a Goodie!
If you know what you're doing, there isn't really anything to worry about. One little hole in your car's cooling system could cause thousands of dollars damage too. I have run a watercooled system nonstop, 24/7, without incident for almost 18 months now. The hoses are still in great shape, and the pump works fine. The reduction in noise is signifigant, although the case still requires some ventilation.
My original installation is here: http://www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
I've since moved to a lian-li case to get some more room and haven't had a chance to post the pictures. The installation is similar, even easier with all the extra space. The watercooling setup allows me to run a AMD XP2100 at 2Ghz, a mild overclock of a few hundred mhz, but I can do so at a idle temperature of 42C in a 30C room.
This gets posted everytime one of these articles comes up here. Don't spread FUD, no, it isn't for newbies, but no, it isn't inherantly dangerous either. If you don't know what you are doing, don't go near the kit. The biggest additions I made were fuel injection hose clamps, pinch-free, and a GFCI outlet so that if the pump shorts, my gear shuts down in a nanosecond.
I'm currently working on another setup for home to help deal with the noise problem on the box here. It is very expensive to do properly, though.
..don't panic
--just a dumb question (to anyone), but aren't there any add-on cooling systems that use an inert gas for the refrigerant/heat transfer medium rather than liquid water? I really don't know never did any overclocking stuff. Most I've done is attach small fans to the top of passive heat sinks. A gas would solve any leaking problems that could case electrical failure and hardware damage, combined with a thermostat "whoops getting too dang hot boss!" emergency shut down device.
Hmm, works fine for me using both Phoenix 0,5 and Mozilla 1,2,1 on Windows.
Mozilla 1.2.1 on my dual-Athlon Win2K box handled it just fine. Are you sure you're not still running an older version?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Can we get a resume on this Shawn "playafly187" Knight before we accept his comments about any hardware subsystem? It seems to me that anyone who doesn't know that you don't use water in a liquid cooling system shouldn't be writing about "watercoolers". I though that the consensus opinion among those "in the know" was that you use ethylene glycol (undiluted antifreeze) if you're using it in conjunction with a Peltier device, or low molecular weight mineral oil if you're not.
"playafly187" is correct
"Water cooling is the wave of the future"
The name of the site tells it all. "OverClock Intelligence Agency" N3wz f0r 31337 g4m3rz and other clueless teenagers whose opinions don't matter
utter rubbish
Actually, it's NOT slashdotted ... there's something about the site that causes it to eat up your system resources. I watched my wmSMPmon DockApp while Mozilla loaded the page and it flat-topped one of my processors the whole time the page was open. I popped open a terminal and ran top ... sure enough,mozilla-bin was consuming approximately 99.5% of that processor's time.
Getting curious, I opened it again and the page has some of the squirreliest Javascript I've ever seen and it seems to have the objective of loading and running a Shockwave object (in Mozilla!).
Evaluation of the webmaster's IQ is left as an exercise for the reader.
utter rubbish
The top 2 things you can do to quiet your AMD system:
1) Get an Antec TruePower series power supply. Two big fans running slow/quiet. They're also the best power supplies you can buy short of the atrociously expensive and noisy PC Power & Cooling power supplies (which I've also used).
2) Get a Thermalright SLK800 copper heatsink, YS Tech Rheostat 80mm fan, and Arctic Silver 3 thermal compound. I recommend buying from 2CoolTek. The YS Tech fans are adjustable, so you can try a slow/quiet setting and if that proves inadequate crank it up a bit. I've found 2500RPM to be a good balance of noise/performence on my 2400+ CPUs (which do run cooler than your 2100+ CPU, assuming it's the old Palamino core), and at 2000RPM you won't hear the fans at all. 60mm fans have to run at much higher RPMs than 80mm fans to move the same amount of air.
Point #2 is the best place to start. It's probably all you need.
While not a major retailer, Systemax is shipping their new Double X Systems with liquid cooling of not just the CPU, but also the harddrives and GPU. Im saving my pennies for one of these babies cuz theyre not cheap. I only wish they didnt come already case-modded, cuz IMO the whole point of that is to do it yourself.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Lemme see, sandpile.org, AMD Athlon 600:
Maximum Power: 600 MHz 0.18 m: 34 W
Something tells me there was something very very wrong with your setup. I do know a friend of mine running an athlon 1400 @ 72W max has some heat issues in the middle of summer, but that one? Give me a break.
Also you claim in the first line not to know anything about Intel processors, in the next paragraph you recommend all to buy Intel (aka not buy AMD).
Oh and in case you didn't know, Intel processors put out more heat total (85W vs 68W max for Intel 2.8 GHz vs AMD2800+), however the AMD have less surface area, so it'll need a better CPU fan. But for the case temperature, an Intel one is even worse...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wonder how long it'll take before we see a backclash, the power consumption of the latest and greatest CPUs/GPUs/whatever keep going up. How many hundred watts will people accept? Could it be that people will start buying less than the latest and greatest, not because of price but because of heat and noise? Or will they always feel this "need" for more computing power?
;)
It's not really as if this has been an issue before the GHz race, it's only in the last couple years that it has had any serious impact, with the Athlon 1400 being the big bad wolf. Personally I'm running an AMD2000+/GF4/2HDDs, and the noise level is about as high as is acceptable to me. I look at the P4 3GHz spec, and the GF5 specs, and I really don't think I'll want one, at the price I have to pay in terms of heat and noise. Or well, when UT2006 comes out...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings