Anyone running a water cooling system? Looking for reliable ones.

I bought myself a "Cooler master Saidon 120 M" a year ago, was pretty happy with it up until last week when the pump went out. The current heatsink/fan combination I have is this one, which is about ten years old but seems to do the trick alright since it's basically just a big hunk of copper.(Yes, I know it looks like a butterfly... it's my "Backup" heatsink I bought on sale a number of years ago... it was dirt cheap, i'm assuming because it looks like a butterfly) but i'm looking into getting another water cooler so I can overclock a little bit again.

So basically i'm wondering what cooling you're running, and how long it's been running to try to get an idea of brands and models that will last me at least a couple years, and hopefully through the next CPU I end up buying.

What's the load
Use glycol..tricool system

a reply to: Slanter

Can we get your CPU socket type so we can offer good suggestions? I'd personally recommend any of the Corsair H-series. If you plan on over clocking a LOT this might not be suited for you. The Corsair H series should handle even heavy overclocking but if you plan on pushing an extreme, you might want to go more expensive or custom.


If you are just looking for a cooler, no need for water, you should be able to use MOST coolers with NO problem unless your chip is burnt out or over heating. If the old one did the jump but burnt out, get a cheap Coolermaster one for 25+.



www.newegg.com...


Most on ^^^ are GREAT for the price unless you are OC'ing hard.

a reply to: Antipathy17

Yea, I'm just running an AMD 8350, nothing special but I like having a little extra oomph to get a few more FPSs in games.

I'm mostly looking for the closed-loop variety of water cooling, but if I can piece together an affordable water cooling kit that's a possibility.

Are you gaming at all on the PC? If so link some games and I'll see if I have any myself.

a reply to: Antipathy17

Yep the corsair ones are the best for the single block cooling solution, although unless you're going full water there's air cooled sinks out there that perform depending on tests just as good or just 1 or 2 degree warmer, sometimes cooler as well.

Either Noctua D15 or Phanteks PH-TC14PE are my choice providing your socket matches which I'm assuming it will based on your Saidon, I'm running the Phanteks on my i7 oc'd to 4.4ghz from stock 3.5 and it never goes above 50 degrees on heavy load plus I don't have the worry of potential water leakage on my system which is always a consideration as although rare I have read reports of unlucky people having them start to leak

i bould my own from scratch, only bought the blocks for cpu and gpu - everything else was hardware stores.

put it all togther in the bath, sealed it up and left it running for a few days - fitted into pc, one happy quiet overclocked machine (nice and dry) Also those litttle silica packets you get in boxes of stuff, collect them all, always, they come in great for any condensation issues by laying a load of them in the base of the case. I didnt have this problem, but i put some in there anyway

originally posted by: Biigs
i bould my own from scratch, only bought the blocks for cpu and gpu - everything else was hardware stores.

put it all togther in the bath, sealed it up and left it running for a few days - fitted into pc, one happy quiet overclocked machine (nice and dry) Also those litttle silica packets you get in boxes of stuff, collect them all, always, they come in great for any condensation issues by laying a load of them in the base of the case. I didnt have this problem, but i put some in there anyway

EDIT: if you can run an external and large reservoir - highly advisable, many kits dont use them at all but if your running a thick tube setup and a fast pump, sure it cools fast but also gets less efficient quickly if its only got a small radiator.

Ah crap, this post was meant to be an addition to the above post, sorry for the mess.

a reply to: Biigs

So you're just running with a really big reservoir without any radiators or fans?

a reply to: Slanter

Im not using that setup any more, while it was fun the i7 chips run so cool that a decent aftermarket heatpipe fan is enough to keep it cool and not noisy - also my GFX card has a very large full length heatpipe assisted radiator and two big fans - so just no need to OC.

Back to the old setup, i had a 1 litre reservoir and a dual 120mm fan push-pull attached on the back sucking air from in side the case with two front large fans on the front of the rig. The fans were on adjustable voltage turn switch than cut them from from 6 up to 12 volts meaning that when run on low (which was all i needed since i didnt OC the chip or gpu massively since quiet was also an equally important goal). The reservoir i based on a 5.1/4 bay designed but i made a double space version out of perspex and silicon (so i could see there were no bubbles) which help around a litre-i would have liked to use a larger one and had it outside the machine but since i had to move the PC to friends houses for LAN events i wanted it to all be in one movable container (ended up being really heavy!!!!) The remaining airflow was taken care of via the PSU sucking from in side the case and blowing out the rear the same as the attached radiator above it.

The reason i said to use a large res, was that even though mine was pretty big at holding cooled water from the res, it heated up due to being in the case and therefore the whole system after a few hours the cpu/gpu temps were a few degrees higher than initial switch on and system stressing.

I have some pics but they are old and the system its self long disassembled (the chip was an unclocked intel Q6600), its was quite the effort to get all the gear in there winch i had gone for large flow tubes - somthing after i build it i realised i could have probably got very similar results with the slightly narrower tubing. The water was distilled with cooling agents and UV die (i had a cold flouresent UV tube light in the base of the case so the tubes glowed up blue at night).

If i was to do the same again i would be tempted by these new all in one pre built kits, but like reports say, they can leak, some dont have reservoirs, but also they arnt trying to cool cpu and gpu so they dont need to. Its quite fun to DIY the whole system if you plan to PC both cpu and gpu and you'll get better resuts than the pre sealed kits depending on how good you are at technical stuff of course!. If i were to do it again i stick with the radiator attached to the back but id use a large external tank with extra tube length so i could fit the pc and res in a box for moving it around.

EDIT: Zalman did an aluminium tower tank, not sure if they still do them but that would be a perfect external tank to use.

I just bought the corsair H55 to go with my new i7-6700k. Im installing it right now

I dont overclock its just the i7-6700k didnt come with a heat sink.