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."

Comments

Site will get slashdot - here is mirror

[Agret]

Site is already going slow so here is a mirror

http://www.viperlair.com.nyud.net:8090/reviews/coo ling/liquid/koolance/pc3720sl/

/. should automaticly setup the links to use coral cache >_
Also here is the benchmarking images (For lazy people)

Idle Temperatures in C

Idle Temperatures in C
Load Temperatures in C

I have a Koolance, and I'm NOT happy with it

[selderrr]

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 !

Re:I have a Koolance, and I'm NOT happy with it

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got one too, same as yours but before they sold them tweaked out. Its definately not loud - you can hear the top 3 fans but not by much. If I compare it to a standard home dell/hp, the fans make it louder. However, compared to super fast computer friends own, well their fans are deafening (and my CPU is 30 degrees cooler).

"spot" cooling makes me nervous.

[anubi]

There are many heat-generating items on a PC backplane and power supply.

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.

---Koolance Owner----

[mboverload]

I have the Koolance EXOS, which has pretty much the same parts but this one has them built into the 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!)

Re:---Koolance Owner----

[MikeFM]

I have a Koolance system and so far have had no problem with it. It looks nice (a cool blue color) and seems to work fine. The case is fairly roomy and is designed such that it's easy to work with. It was definately much easier to setup than a from-scratch system. No leaks, no breaks, no algae, no problems of any kind.

My one complaint with the system is that it doesn't come with any front ports for usb, firewire, and sound which are common features these days and are somewhat expected.

My one suggestion, other than adding these ports, would be to use led lit fans in the top. These three fans are much more visible than the fans in most cases and it'd be cool if they were lit. Not being able to change out the fans myself is something of a disappointment.

I'd not say the system is silent though. The three fans on top run most of the time and they make quite a bit of noise. Not as bad as some systems I have but much noiser than my mini-itx systems which are mostly fanless and which have much quieter fans when they do have fans.

I'm not really sold on water cooling yet. It seems to have benefits but the trouble setting up and maintaining the systems leads me to think it'd be difficult for those that aren't techies. I'll probably buy more Koolance cases though as I think they make pretty good setups for high-power gaming machines.

Re:---Koolance Owner----

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Koolance unit for about 1.5 years. It was a pain in the ass. The pump broke twice and needed to get replaced. They are good about replacing stuff in warranty but the second it goes out they will dismiss you and offer a small discount on a brand new system.

I ended up getting some foreign substance in my water (even though it was distilled) and it ended up gunking the entire hose up so I had to throw it away.

It did run very silent, but in the end it wasn't worth it. I ended up getting a Thermaltake Silent Boost which runs very quiet and there's no water hassle.

Bottom line is get a Koolance at your own ri$k.

Re:Overclocking is so '90s stuff .. silence is har

[evilviper]

I want a silent, zero maintanence PC cooling solution

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 is easy, silence is hard" :)

Overclocking and underclocking (for silence) are both easy. Silence with good performance is the only difficult part.

Seconded...

[The Tyro]

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.