Water cooling apparently evaporates
WE RECENTLY wandered around Sim Lim Square, the main electronic and PC components haunt in Singapore and South East Asia overall. We went in search of r some 3/8-inch to 1/4-inch water cooling tubing adapters for our Skulltrail testbed.
Across 200 shops and six floors of this monster centre, there was only TWO liquid cooling sets for sale. one from Thermaltake and another from Zalman,.
What a difference compared to a year ago, when you'd see all a smorgasbord of water cooling kits from Corsair, Thermaltake, Gigabyte, Coolermaster, Aquacomputer and oh so many other vendors. So, what happened?
According to the sales droids who make a living pushing this stuff, the reason is simple. First, good heat sink fan combos, combined with heat-piped chipsets, started getting real close on real cooling performance. Second, in this hot tropical place, spilled water and evaporation aren't the only problem: somehow, gunk forms even in all the distilled coolant-poisoned liquid inside the tubes - we've seen it ourselves a few times. You can guess what it does to the cooling performance. Thirdly, with all the thick tube, pump, reservoir and radiator mess, all connected together, any setup can get really awful looking inside.
Here, you can compare the looks of a liquid cooled system innards vs the Thermaltake fridge compressor - a freezer unit will look similarly neat, except for thicker insulation around its tubing. The photos speak for themselves.
Why all this now? Well, this Computex is expected to see far more "unique" coolers. Thermaltake's silent fridge should be ready, and so should OCZ freezer box. A few more Taiwan names will have such stuff around too. So, if shopping for one, hold on a week or two! ยต
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I would have lost my temper on the 1st pipe install all that work really might as well get liquid nitrogen instead. I'll stick with my copper pipe heatsinks and silent fans along with my sata cables and modular PSU's for better air flow and overall tidyness. But well done on the completion of that Borg machine in 1st pic going to look like that it gets any worse. Start to run if it shows a sentence upon boot-up "We are the Borg. Lower your shields. Your biological and technological distinctivness will be added to our own. Resistance if futile!" On that point you'll be wondering what we it do with a TV and A Toliet.
When I went liquid cooling on my rig (not for performance but for noise) I chose to use fluorinert rather than water. Similar performance, but no gunk, ever. The biggest problem is getting good hose that the stuff won't evaporate through. I plumbed mine with copper tubing to avoid coolant loss.
It looks like you are compairing a mid tower to a full tower there. I do like the neat and clean look of the freezer setup though. Been contemplating a phase change based system for several years now and although I have been water cooling for a few years, I still havent taken the plunge into a phase change based system.
I wonder what happened to the OCZ "Waycool" heatsink? It had a high-tech graphite base that was supposedly far more efficient at conducting heat than metals.
that picture is of THE most horrible looking / laid out watercooling application I have ever seen. and I have seen many.
I had a great set from Innovatec, worked wonders for my Athlon 1Ghz Thunderbird. Nowadays, though, even high-end video cards are properly silenced by the card makers. With the drop to ever-smaller transistor sizes, the heat generated has taken a nosedive. In the same time, following the general outcry that ensued with Nvidia's DustBuster, heatsink/fan combinations have greatly improved. All in all, in temperate countries like mine, watercooling is no longer a necessity if you want a silent yet powerful cooling experience. I have a quad-core Q6600 with 4 sticks of 1GB Kingston DDR2, 4 HDDs at 7200rpm, an 8800 GTS an an X-Fi Xtreme Gamer sound card. This all runs with default HSF cooling and I am not bothered for one minute by noise levels. So my Innovatec kit is sitting on the side at the moment, unfortunately. I did like it very much, it had stellar performance and was easily adapted to new CPU formats, motherboards and even GPU cards, but it is true that it is a bit of a nuisance to install and maintain - even though I haven't seen anything better yet.
If I wanted to... I could write an article making the Water cooling superior over the freezer set up. I could also take some funky looking pictures to make it happen. Oh that was done above. Please dont try and miss lead smart people who read these articles. Give the fact and don't try to sell me on something. Waste of an article.