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Good article Thomas ... thanks.

In my opinion, unless a water setup is virtually silent, it is useless when you take in to account all the extra pain that comes with installing it. Especially when you look at the Zalman CNPS series which is a similar price but runs very cool & silent on air. Also both of the reviewed coolers have limited applications due to their mounting requirements & case size requirements.

My two Thermaltake Aquarius II systems leaked ... blew up a graphics card ... not a cheap one ... then a decent ASUS mobo.

My gigabyte water system leaked and took out a network card and a wirless card.

My 600 Watt homemade refrigerated cold water system had excessive condensation which dripped onto the mobo and killed a power regulator.

I went back to heatpipe air coolers after that.

Was an interesting voyage ... no regrets.

Bit like playing with car engines ... after a while you just want to drive smething reliable ... driving in traffic isn't much fun with radical heads, a wild cam and a high stall.

Well, if your not a mechanic then getting a mechanic to fix your car saves a lot of headaches and can be very reliable. Same with PC watercooling systems, if I broke all that I'd say get a pro to set it up!

I have tried water cooling from several companies and have always used my own plumbing to make sure that they were secure. The most important part to me is if you are using water then why use the fans that make noise. I think water cooling is good for a fanless solution on higher spec processors.

With the latest CPUs and Heat sinks, air cooling has become very good. My Uncle is running an AMD 3800 processor with a fanless PSU, fanless graphics and fanless CPU. Just because the size of the heat sink is big enough to remove the heat away quick enough from the CPU. He has this on for hours at a time with no reboots or slows down.

Water cooling I think is a good project for someone but with the type of over clocking you can get out of the modern CPUs a good air cooler is all you need.

@donyer - pfft... Thermaltake w/c gear is generally acknowledged to be cack and Gigabyte w/c stuff isn't really any better. In fact, most "kits", including those from the more respected manufacturers like Swiftech and Alphacool are poor compared to properly selected individual components, much the same as it used to be with Hi-Fi separates years ago. The difference is, ultimately, you gets what you pays for.

I did my research, bought the "best of breed" w/c components from Thermochill, D-Tek, etc. and my QX6700 has never missed a beat at 3.5GHz in 12 months. BTW, sure, there's going to be peeps out there whose reaction is "omgwtfbbqlol!!111 *only* 3.5Ghz!" and to them I say "whatever". I'm not a "hardcore" overclocker; I'm not doing it for the kudos or whatever, I'm doing it to get the most bang for my buck having had something of a brain-fart in buying a QX instead of a plain old "Q" in the first place ;p

This rig is nowhere near silent, either, but it's a helluva lot quieter than it was on air and it's more stable into the bargain.

Liked the "hotrod" analogy, btw -- I know what you mean -- but that does sound a bit "old skool" when you look at what can be done with stuff in modern cars like Variable Valve Timing, Variable Intake Runners and Serial Port Programming. And no, I'm not a "ricer" ;p Let's just say my ride has a 40-valve V8 ;p

@donyer - pfft... Thermaltake w/c gear is generally acknowledged to be cack and Gigabyte w/c stuff isn't really any better. In fact, most "kits", including those from the more respected manufacturers like Swiftech and Alphacool are poor compared to properly selected individual components, much the same as it used to be with Hi-Fi separates years ago. The difference is, ultimately, you gets what you pays for.

I did my research, bought the "best of breed" w/c components from Thermochill, D-Tek, etc. and my QX6700 has never missed a beat at 3.5GHz in 12 months. BTW, sure, there's going to be peeps out there whose reaction is "omgwtfbbqlol!!111 *only* 3.5Ghz!" and to them I say "whatever". I'm not a "hardcore" overclocker; I'm not doing it for the kudos or whatever, I'm doing it to get the most bang for my buck having had something of a brain-fart in buying a QX instead of a plain old "Q" in the first place ;p

This rig is nowhere near silent, either, but it's a helluva lot quieter than it was on air and it's more stable into the bargain.

Liked the "hotrod" analogy, btw -- I know what you mean -- but that does sound a bit "old skool" when you look at what can be done with stuff in modern cars like Variable Valve Timing, Variable Intake Runners and Serial Port Programming. And no, I'm not a "ricer" ;p Let's just say my ride has a 40-valve V8 ;p

For some time I'd been wanting to get a watercooler set up. This article finally knocked some sense into me:

I'm not a talented overclocker, nor have spent money on silent parts - so why blow the money? I thus went for a relatively quiet cooler and fan, and it is not audible due to the noise the PSU makes!

The fans could be even quieter if various patents for blade tip winglets were put into use.

Papst appears to be the only maker shipping such fans currently.