Out of Pod Experience

Hello internet people.

I recently had to much to drink and decided i wanted to switch from a fan assisted rig to a water cooling rig. Surprisingly when i sobered up i still wanted to do it. I did some research and it seems like its alot of effort finding out what components you even need, let alone putting the damn thing together.

Just to note i do have experience building computers, iv built all my previous PC's iv used over the last decade and iv built a few for some friends also. But looking at putting a watercooled rig together seems like its fairly damn challenging.

Friend of mine did it recently and it said it took him nearly 24 hours to put it all together (granted he spent alot of money and got the best things out there)

Even after all the research iv done im still not entirely sure what im supposed to be buying to change over so was hoping some internet people could help me. Below is my rig details:

Case: Xclio A380
I know i will have to change the case, i am thinking of getting the NZXT Guardian: http://www.nzxt.com/new/products/crafted_series/guardian_921_rb if i can find somewhere that sells it in Ireland)

PSU: AKASA 1000W

CPU Cooler: V8 Cooling Tower Block (will obviously be removing this for the water cooling)

Ram: 16GB Corsair 1600MHZ

CPU: AMD FX-8150 3.6GHz

Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX

HD: Samsung Spinpoint 1TB x 2

GPU: Geforce ENGTX 560 (x2)

Now what iv figured out is you can buy a self contained unit for the CPU called an Antec H620 or H920) But i dont want to do just the CPU, i want it to cool the CPU, the graphics cards, the RAM and the mobo) and from what my friend said if i just used the 2 previous things to do that i could cook eggs on it. He also said that the H620 and H920 are just products that people buy so they can "say" they have water cooling and its not the proper stuff (not sure what he meant by that maybe was just its not as l33t as his own hardware).

Can you guys help me out, with maybe some hardware links and stuff. I dont know the individual components to buy and for some reason i cant seem to find a All in One kit to buy.

TL:DR Version: Want to change from fan assisted cooling to liquid cooling. Rig details above. :)

I have never seen the draw of watercooling. It seems like a lot of work to simply raise the price of your next upgrade [As you will get used to watercooling you won't want to go back to fan assisted set-ups and new hardware needs new watercooling blocks etc]

Plus, it's far more expensive if something goes wrong.

Do you want to overclock heavily ? (and if yes, why?)
Do you live in a very hot area and have no AC ? (my condolences)
If no to both, you don't really need watercooling at all.

If you do need to watercool, not really worth bothering with more than CPU+GPU anyway (because mobo/ram cooling is hardly worth it), if even that much, since GPU liquid cooling is likely to be a MAJOR pain in the posterior.
So, basically, CPU liquid cooling and that's about it.

And a cheap-ass pre-assembled and pre-sealed kit you just stick in instead of your current cooler should more than suffice.

Not surprising result from the Corsair unit. 120 rad, wimpy fan and underpowered pump.


A 360 rad, a decent pump such as the MCP355 or MCP35x and the correct fans for the radiator will perform much better than a Corsair kit.

As for CPU cooling, the 360 rad will cover that easily and could even take care of the heat from a GPU. The basic thing with water cooling GPUs is that ANY water cooling will be a HUGE improvement over any stock fan or aftermarket can you could buy. The real decision is to choose a full cover water block that will only work on whatever card you have at the moment, or to go with a universal block you can reuse. If you go with a full cover block, that will easily be over $100 but they do look very nice.


P.S. CPU waterblocks can be reused for quite some time. I can easily get the mounting hardware for the XPSC Raystorm that I have for multiple Intel applications.

Wow thanks guys for all the posts, i created similiar topics on other forums to do with water cooling and none of the others got any replies.

Some really nice advice here. Reading through it i think i may just go with the CPU cooling idea as at the moment that seems to be the only thing in my rig that i sometimes get a temp warning about (but i cant remember if that was a setting i put in in the BIOS or not). I have a V8 cooling tower on my CPU at the moment so am surprised.

As for being in a hot place, no im actually not, i live in Ireland (enough said really). But unfortunatly a few years ago i reinsulated my house and double glazed all the windows and since my bedroom is upstairs all the warm air gets trapped up stairs (great for winter, horrible for summer).

Due to this and the fact i have a big PC with 2 monitors, an xbox and a TV in my room, it tends to get quite warm in there thats kind of the reason i want to switch from fan assisted to water cooling.

But reading through the posts i had not thought about how the water blocks for the GPU's tend to be speicific for whatever GPU you currently have and since i priced them and they tend to be 100 euro a pop, i doubt i want to go down that road considering i usually upgrade at least once a year. Thats an extra 200 euro just to buy a new water block for the GPU.

Maybe i will go for just the CPU water cooling self contained unit. That way i wont even have to change my chassis either.

Use RealTemp or something similar to see what your approximate CPU core temperatures are.
It might not accurately tell you the exact temperatures below 40 degrees Celsius, and you might have up to a +/- 5 degrees uncertainty without thorough calibration in the 40 C - 90 C range, but as far as ballparking it goes (and that's really what matters, ballpark figure, not exact number), it's more than enough.

For most CPUs that came out in the past 2 to 3 years, the CPU won't croak much faster unless you manage to force it above around 100C for a long time (and for most CPUs, it will periodically downclock itself temporarily to avoid getting over that "somewhat safe" temperature, so it's really hard to ACCIDENTALLY fry it with a quick test).

If your CPU cores stay generally below 85 C with pretty heavy use (prime95 or similar "burn-in" tests) and under 70 C with normal use (playing EVE) on a particularly hot day, there's a good chance you'll end up needing to change your machine because it's morally obsolete sooner than you'll need to change it because the CPU fried.
The exact same setup should yield under 75C with burn-in conditions and under 60C while playing EVE on a normal temperature day.

Lower CPU temperatures result in lower power usage (especially for the newer SandyBridge CPUs), but the difference for just 10-20 degrees Celsius lower is negligible. The really big savings only come when you push temperatures well below zero degrees, which you'll need a completely different, more cumbersome and much more expensive type of cooling system for (refrigeration cascade cooling, for instance, or liquid nitrogen cooling and such).
You'd be better off just getting a room AC instead (both cheaper in the long run and more pleasant for you).

Ah. You probably just accidentally selected the most paranoid settings possible on the software. No worries there.
60 C in EVE on a warm day is nothing to really worry about.
Pass over 70 C on a regular basis on a cooler day and then you should start getting worried (or, you know, clean the dust off from your CPU heatsink, hehe).

P.S. A very easy way to quickly reduce your temperatures would be to disable the (usually default-enabled) "TurboBoost" feature from the BIOS. That's dynamic "on need" overclocking of select cores, but frankly, it kicks in far more often than needed, and it's seldom actually all that useful to begin with. You get a minimal drop in overall performance (a slightly larger drop in peak performance) for a pretty decent steady drop in temperature. You could easily be looking at up to 10C less most of the time, while not really noticing any serious performance change in most usual situations.

Don't you still have the old stock cooler ?

You need to jump into your hot tub time machine. Go back to the glory days of Pentium 4 and then use water cooling on your glorious Pentium 4.

using non-conductive coolants works as well, so if it leaks, it won't hurt.
my friend used some kind of mineral oil for cooling, worked pretty good.