Slashdot Mirror
Koolance Water Cooling Kit
VL writes "Overall, Koolance has a very impressive kit in the PC3-720 and is definitely worth considering if you're interested in an easy to use water-cooling setup. Performance is very good, and the case aesthetics are top notch in our opinion. Pricing is something we do have a problem with. Aluminum case aside, this is an expensive setup."
"Pricing is something we do have a problem with. Aluminum case aside, this is an expensive setup."
OK So how much for a bottle of water?
If I'm going to pay that much I don't even want my computer to look like a computer, let alone an ugly one.
There are two types of people in this world: those that categorize other people and those that don't.
You must be new here. Only old Korean people read reliable news sources.
Someone should quantify the effects of a quality Slashvertisement like this. How much do these companies rake in?
BRRR COLD!!!!!
BRRR cold as in cold beer, or as in ex girlfriend?
Site is already going slow so here is a mirror
o ling/liquid/koolance/pc3720sl/
/. should automaticly setup the links to use coral cache >_
http://www.viperlair.com.nyud.net:8090/reviews/co
Also here is the benchmarking images (For lazy people)
Idle Temperatures in C
Idle Temperatures in C
Load Temperatures in C
Have you metaroderated recently?
Cold beer, definately. Not imported, homemade if possible.
Expensive cooling kits that come with NO waterblocks? Flexibility my ass. They should include a "Select 1 waterblock of your choice" to come with the kit. But I'm guessing that's where they make their money. Carving up 1$ worth of aluminum and selling it for 40$
Until they start cutting their prices, I'm going to have to stick with homebuilt water-cooling. My current reservoir is made from a Tupperware container!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
For a theoretically open and free news site, Slashdot is -- and will continue to be -- a cash cow, a research firm said Sunday as it predicted the site will bring in more than $35 billion in advertisement revenue by 2008. Framingham, Mass.-based IDC said that overall revenue for ad-links, kool-kases, and self-promoted hardware sites running through Slashdot will reach $35.7 billion in the next four years.
Wait, I'm pretty sure one of the main reasons I installed Firefox and Adblock was to get rid of ads...yet they still seem to find a way to my browser...
But I still like that Lian-Li one with the koolance better...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Just think, one little leak and you could lose your whole beowolf cluster!
Seriously, I still prefer to keep water away from my processor wherever possible.
These days overclocking is no big deal for half the crowd ... CPUs immersed in cooled flourinert has made it passe to even try the basic level.
..
:)
Eventhough what I really want is a silent cooling system - I was quite spooked when my fans stopped working - perfect silence is disconcerting (Alfred Hitchcock could tell you). I want a silent, zero maintanence PC cooling solution (think about the G4 cube) - I'm sure I could compensate for the silence with some nice trance
"Overclocking is easy, silence is hard"
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
To 'Ads to nerds. Stuff that sells.'
I initially read the title as 'Koolaid Water Cooling Kit'. Wonder how that would work. Maybe Koolaid would work better than water for a water cooled system?
I have a cube, and it is not 100% silent. In fact, the harddive is damd noisy :-(
Can anyone recommend a SILEND G4cube compatible 80GB HD ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
more expensive than other choices, and doesn't work as well. It's not even a good advertisement. But I wouldn't know that unless I RTFA, so I guess mission accomplished huh?
I have a cube, and it is not 100% silent. In fact, the harddive is damd noisy :-(
Can anyone recommend a SILENT G4cube compatible 80GB HD ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Steve, I love you!
And some still believe Apple users are not necessarily gay.
it is NOISY ! I'm at work now, so I don't know my exact model, but it looks like the one on the Koolance main page (in black, with a case side window, glow-in-the-dark cooling liquid and 2 blacklights in the case). It looks nifty, but I really don't know why they put 3 of these big turbine ventilators on top of the machine when my CPU and GPU are water cooled ? These vents make a horrible noise, even when in low speed mode. In fact, I bought a shuttle 2 weeks ago, which is NOT water cooled but a lot more quiet !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Here's how the /. community can respond to these adverts disguised as articles:
1- Do not click the link
2- Post comments about COMPETITOR PRODUCTS, and alternative solutions. Spread focus.
3- Contribute replies to such posts made by others, i.e. keep discussing alternatives but try to avoid the advertiser.
No need to bash the original advertisers, just form a healthy discussion with a wide area of focus. Avoiding focus of public interest on the advertiser is the goal here.
4- Mod up articles such comments. Mod down comments which tend to announce "coolness" of the advertiser.
5- Profit - (i.e. enjoy the illusion of taking your news for nerds site back.)
The most intense sources of heat *require* some sort of heat-sink/fan help, as the ambient air flow alone is not enough.
But for the other components, the forced air cooling provided by the fans alone was sufficient.
What I am leery of is that if I tamper with the airflow which the original equipment manufacturer designed for, I may end up with all sorts of thermal related failures from parts which normally did not require heat sinking. Things like secondary processors and interface chips. Maybe even inductors or electrolytic caps.
Messing around with thermal design without having the proper equipment ( infrared thermal camera ) around to verify your tinkering did not leave a hot spot can be a very expensive hobby.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The temps, especially for the athlon 64, really surprised me. I recently built an athlon 64 system (granted it is a 3200, not a 3500, but that should not make a huge difference) that idles at about 28C and about 38 "under load" (I have not really tested under load yet, but the temp maxes out at about 38-39 after playing world of warcraft for an extended period). This is with a relatively cheap air cooler in a lian-li case. While the systems in ont whisper quiet it is not the loudest system I have ever had. I also have a fairly hot video card in the same case.
I bought my Koolance about 2 years ago and have had many problems. First the raditor spung 3 DIFFERENT leaks due to crappy welding. I sealed it up with some silicone I had laying around, lucky for me it has not giving me leaks since. Next, I found the part where you hook the tube onto the CPU cooler was crappily made, There was this tab on the bottom of it (something left over from manufacturing) which caused the tube to leak because it could not make a seal. I fixed that with a nail file. AND THEN it started growing algae in the system becasue Koolance didn't put enough bleach in the mix. 1 year later, when I was opening it up to clean the radiator (you have to do it to clean all the dust off or the things useless) one of the connections to the resivoir spung a leak. This was no fault of my own, the plastic was cracked and by me moving it it finnaly gave way. It splurted green water everywhere (it has UV green dye in it and it sprayed because I had the machine on) The bleach in the water semi-bleached a nice shirt I was wearing, that sucked. I used 3 sticks of hot-glue to close it up. That took 3 times before it stopped leaking.
Since I fixed those 4 problems, it has been fine for me =) If it was anyone but me, they probably would have given up, however.
I am still extremely happy with it though (probably because I want to think the 400 dollars on all the parts was worth it) It is running right now and totaly silent. (Mod me up, I realling need the points!)
Maybe it is true that some people over clock their CPU's more for the challenge than to save any money.
Check out the price of the cooler and compare it to the price differences between CPU's (of a comparable class. i.e. - Don't compare an intel to an AMD, nor a P4 to a Celeron) and their clock speed differences (what you would be gaining from using the cooler). You will probably notice that the cost of the cooler is more than your savings on purchasing an inferior CPU and going through the trouble of over clocking it.
Is it really worth it?
I agree.
When I was in college, there was a leak in the watercooling system for the mainframe - it sprayed all over the motherboard and it was down for a couple of weeks. (Imagine a Beowulf cluster of IBM 360s :-) We also lost service for a week or two when they tried to add the fourth megabyte of RAM to the mainframe, which had previously only had 3 Mbps. Seems like small potatoes now, but back in the mid 70s that was a lot - being able to define a 1 Megabyte virtual machine let us solve much bigger math and engineering problems that we'd been able to before then, and we didn't waste much of that RAM on GUIs (though most people used PL/C, the local PL/I variant, which was a bit more bloated than the Watfor and Watfiv versions of F0RTRAN and had much better print statements.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is it for KDE?
I have a silent rig for my home theater. It's an underclocked, undervolted Barton XP Mobile with no fans and no drives.
The CPU peaks at 75C, but it's stable. The driveless aspect is handled by using Venturcom BXP to network boot XP. There is an external dvd drive used for rentals/borrowed discs, but is so rarely used it's kept powered off.
It took a fair bit of tweaking to find the right balance of speed, volts, and temp for this chip, but it's doable.
My previous processor for this box was a P3 Tualatin, very easy to run fanless. I upgraded for video scaling and game reasons, but if you just want a box for DVD/mp3 playback, the P3 is fine.
If your cpu loads are even lighter, say for just an mp3 station/cd player, Cyrix or Epia are a good way to go...those chips are stable fanless in almost any environment.
For fanless operation, the Barton Mobile is the fastest chip right now you can reasonably get working, and the lower your horsepower reqs, the easier it gets.
Water cooling can be done on the cheep as well, under $50 for the whole setup.
The hardest part is the water block, making one isn't all that easy. The way I did it is by taking a smaller then normal heat sink and surrounding it with plexiglass. It has holes for an in and out tube in it. Figuring a way to keep it on the cpu securely wasn't easy, I ended up using thermal epoxy.
I got my radiator from a store that fixed air conditioners. I got the plexiglass from a surplus store. The pump from an aquarium store. Everything else from the hardware store.
I have some mini-itx systems that are silent but they achieve that by being without moving parts. The systems run just fine without fans and they use compact flash to load their OS. They they do various useful tasks they were designed for including running X sessions from a server.
Unless you're willing to go without fans and a hdd though you're going to have some noise.
No real maintanence to such systems. They are pretty rugged givin that they have no moving parts to wear out. Configured properly they can be shoved out of the way and forgotten.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
In Soviet Russia, the whore for slow news days is YOU!
All your consuming $ are belong to us. Somebody set up us the credit card reader!
My Favourite Meme
If you use this, you use it for overclocking. If you overclock, you should be able to put a few tubes together.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Easy.
Get a motherboard with a 933MHz Pentium III in it. A nice big heatsink is all you'll need to cool that 12watt CPU.
No other processor really comes close to that... The 1.0GHz AMD64 is about 22watts, which might be good enough with a motherboard supporting cool 'n quiet. This is the way to go if you want a 64-bit processor, or if you require DDR RAM.
VIA processors are under-performing pieces of junk that should be avoided at all costs. I speak from personal experience.
The power supply is the complex part. I'd buy a cheapo 500watt PS, and replace the fan with something practically silent. Since you'll probably only be drawing 100watts, it shouldn't need much cooling. You might try to use it without a fan, but I'd have thermometers on-hand, and watch case and PS temps very carefully.
If you don't mind spending a bit more money, there are plenty of fanless power supplies out there, and you're only going to need about 100watts, so it shouldn't be too expensive.
Overclocking and underclocking (for silence) are both easy. Silence with good performance is the only difficult part.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Most newer HDDs you can buy nowadays may be considered silent.
Try a seagate barracuda if you want to be sure (they're known for low noise level, hence the name). Any 3.5" IDE-HDD should be compatible with your cube.
Unfornationally harddisks tend to get louder over time, so prepare to swap in a new one maybe once a year or get a 3.5"->2.5" adapter and install a small notebook hdd which are even quieter.
I went to shop, bought Koolance kit number PC3-720, went home, installed it in my PC and you know what happened? Everything EXPLODED. Now I have no computer and must write this post from netcafe. Make sure you will never buy any Koolance product or your computer will explode like mine.
And BTW are there any Slashdot alternatives without xmas adverts posted as news?
It was nice to see easy access to front fans as mounting one in front of a harddisk seems a must these days. However why can't they fit air filters for blowing in fans to try an help keep all the rubish out of the case. This results in me still having to mod the case before I can use it. If they are trying to sell a premium case it should come with air filters, lian-li ones do. Atleast akasa now sell fan air filters! On the plus side it was nice to see lots of holes in the front of the case to allow the air to flow.
James
This Zalman Tower and this Breeze seem like a better combination at about the same price.
Hmmmm, I thought that's why we had the earth pin on the plug. Or don't you use that in the USA?
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
Hey, nice idea for a case. If it can safely contain that grill, the lower power MOBO is no problem at all. You could still use a hard drive though. Consider building your own using a USB case and a quiet drive, but hang it from beneath the desk using rubber mounts so that it doesn't transfer vibration to the desk. If you have a carpeted floor, you will never hear the drive mounted down there.
you can get *very quiet* though, but there's no such thing as a silent hard disk. flash ram, maybe, but that's far too dumb to get into.
and I'd add the following caveats.
Looooong build time. I have one of the black models with the top-mounted fans, and it took the longest to build of ANY computer I've built. Like most of the geeks here, I build my own systems, and occasionally systems for colleagues/friends. Once you've built a few dozen systems, you can throw them together in record time... not the Koolance. The koolance literally took me most of the day to assemble, due to some unforseen mounting problems (see below).
Not silent... in fact, it's downright obnoxious on the high-speed setting (though you don't notice it with your headphones on, playing a bit of HL2-Deathmatch). To be fair, however, the cooling performance is quite good... the GPU temps on my 6800GT hardly budge, even while 3D gaming on maximum settings.
And while we're talking about cooling the GPU... they only recently came up with a decent waterblock for the Nvidia 6800 line of graphics cards. Prior to that new waterblock I just linked, you could cool the GPU with their combo chipset/video waterblock, but not the memory. Also note that their prior "video/chipset" waterblock would NOT fit the 6800's mounting holes... I had to gently enlarge the mounting holes in the graphic card by hand with a drill bit. If you think enlarging holes in a big-bucks graphics card like that isn't disconcerting, you're a richer man than I.
So now they've made a custom waterblock for those graphics cards... I have NO idea if they've fixed the mounting holes/screws size mismatch yet.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
One of the biggest problems I've seen is how you get air in and out of the case. My P133 was always really noisy and I switched fans out quite a bit. Eventually I "Got a clue" and noticed that the exaust fan for the power supply had to go through a "grate" in the case. A lot of fans will end up making noise regardless because they end up smashing air against the case and making more noise. So after ripping out the case grill with a pliers and replacing it with a simple wire grill, I can't even tell the machine is on ( or wouldn't if it weren't for the damn hard drive ).
Non-conductive fluid is easy to find and relatively cheap. Just google Fluid XP.
I really hope Viper Lair sues you for attempting to DoS their server.
You're really a horrible person.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Try a seagate barracuda if you want to be sure (they're known for low noise level, hence the name).
Funny. The Seagate Barracudas used to be the hottest and loudest drives available. In fact, they were known for their heat and noise production. Of course, this was back when they pioneered 10kRPM (or 15kRPM, I can't remember which) SCSI drives. Then Seagate moved on, and since Barracuda drives were quite good, moved the name onto their IDE drive line. To which the only real innovation was their fluid bearings that made them *much* quieter.
They are quiet drives *now*, but they weren't in the past.
the guys at pimprig got a water block with there demo machine. if it will be included to everyday joe customer is unknown. I think its a pretty neat plug and play water cooling system. http://reviews.pimprig.com/cases/koolance_pc3-720_ case.php?page=2
To go silent, Voodoo created a chassis that is all heat sink. No fans / No noise.
see: http://www.voodoo.ca/sellPage.aspx?productID=1013
ceci n'est pas un sig
case aesthetics are top notch in our opinion
I can only assume that the submitter was talking about a different case. The case pictured in the article was made with cheap thin metal, with piss poor riveting, and sported a cheap looking insta-break plastic front bezel. Aesthetics is all about the fine details of a quality product. This case is just cheap gaudiness.
Flash forward a year ... My PC is overheating all the time. The *ENTIRE* system is filled with this white stuff with the consistancy of phglem (even though I used the growth inhibitors). The pumps are jammed with it and barely moving any water...
Long story short... WATER COOLING IS NOT MEANT FOR PCs. I think the quality of the koolance product is high, but face it, the idea is TERRIBLE.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
How hard can this be? Follow these instructions
Step 1: Buy a Dell
Step 2: Place Dell on desk
In my experience, although horrid to deal with as a company, Dell makes cheap and quiet PCs (look at the optiplex SX line)
my US$0.02
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
Write some nice letters to the companies providing hardware to viperlair for review, and tell them how you feel about their continued support of a review site that spams slashdot on a regular basis. Tell them that you're not going to purchase their products if the reviewers they send hardware to have to resort to such tactics to get traffic, and that you're going to get all of your friends (if any) to do the same. Do this every time a VL story shows up on slashdot. See how long VL lasts.
Sure we use grounded outlets in the US. However, I'm not sure how many people actually check to confirm that their ground is true. Besides even if an electrical appliance is grounded, I'd not want to be the one to test it. You?
I have an overclocked 2500+ running almost silent. I got a big Thermalright heatsink and a Thermaltake speed controlled fan for it... even at 1.8V it runs silent (at about 60C).
Even a little fan can do a lot more cooling than convection (no fan), and you probably can't hear it... so I think if you put a tiny (slow 80mm) fan in your box you'll be able run at standard speed.
My other car is first.
Nice recommendation, also endorsed by CubeOwner.com. Don't stop at 80GB, as Cube supports up to 120GB natively. Seagate Barracuda 7200.7-Plu from OWC
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
Ya, down here in Texas it's like 60F outside. When will the madness end?! :-P
water isn't THAT conductive...
An AC has helpfully calculated the dollar value of a slashvertistment in this comment. Bottom line, around US$650 per month profit, if you keep a steady stream of submissions coming in.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
koolance is ricey crap and is the bane of every real modder. it cheapens the art.