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Silent Water Cooling on the SLI

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the we're-in-silent-running dept.

Doggie Fizzle writes "Overclockers with a serious SLI gaming system don't have to deal with the drone of double the fans to get the extreme performance. A review of a customized Zalman Reserator 1+ water cooling system shows a well overclocked SLI system offering solid temperatures on the CPU, but an impressive drop of 20 degrees C on both video cards during full load operation... And the unique cooling tower of the Reserator 1+ does it all without a single fan to cool these hot components."

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Even better than water cooling by winkydink · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Flourinert would be a better pick, but the stuff is very expensive.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  2. Water Cooling? Great, but expensive by Thilo2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I had a Geforce4 once but that one just broke down exactly 2 years after buying it, there was so much dust in there the fan wouldn't rotate anymore and i didn't notice. And blowing through the ribs of the processor cooler i regularly managed to have dust clouds shoot out at least 5 meters.
    The fan for the processor broke twice, luckily the amd thunderbirds seem to be able to withstand extreme temperatures. I live downtown, so there really is alot of dust.
    That's when I decided to switch to water cooling. I just couldn't be arsed anymore to do all this cleaning stuff every 3 months and fearing the next component will die the death of heat because i fail to notice a fan is broken.

    I am having water cooling for over half a year now.
    I cool my cpu, and AMD64 3200, mainboard chip and GT6600 card on an Asus A8N-SLI board with water. This means, i effectively got rid of three noisy fans and replaced them with two big and quiet ones for the radiator. Combined with a good power supply, it is simply amazing how quiet the system is compared to the earlier setup, if I don't look at the LEDs I frequently fail to notice the system is running at all. No cleaning anymore of the fans and coolers, which is a huge relief for me (better than switching from ball mouse to optical mouse) and I have a handwarmer now in wintertimes (got to play some 3d heavy stuff though ;) by just touching the radiator.
    The downside is that it can turn out expensive and you can spend much money on it. If you buy the right things, it is very unlikely water leaks out, the biggest danger comes from a broken pump. Considering that I had many failing fans in my environment before and already broken hardware as a result I'm willing to take that risk, so yes, I would do it again if I had the choice.