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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."
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.
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?
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...
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.'
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.)
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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.
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