i never got the point of water or liquid cooling a pc.
Mine plays all games i have maxed out great and only thing i have is a nice cpu fan.

waste of money imo

He lives in an apartment....

lol duh, but if your rig runs great without it why spend the money and headaches

lol hey im bored diving!

Intel performs better for games than AMD does, that's the only difference I sort of know.

Hmm, I have been thinking about redoing my box anyway.  My current setup is an Alienware, but my previous box was a handbuilt watercooled box.  I only bought the Alienware because at the time I received a sweet settlement check from an accident and said WTF, why not.

Since I want to redo my current box, I am looking for more suggestions.  I am going back to watercooled for overclocking and this time I may even go Peltier/Water mix.  I really want to watercool vid cards in SLI as well.  I was thinking of designing something like this:

Pump ----> Tri splitter ---> Vid 2 ---> Radiator ---> Reservoir ---> Pump
                  Tri splitter ---> Vid 1 ---> Radiator ---> Reservoir ---> Pump
                  Tri splitter ---> CPU ---> Radiator ---> reservoir ---> Pump

This would in theory not recycle hot water from one heat exchanger to the next.  A lot of watercooled boxes I have seen for purchase that includes vid cooling do this:

Pump ---> CPU ---> Vid ---> Radiator ---> Reservoir ---> Pump.

I would think that the initial being pulled from the CPU then goes to the Vid making it less effective in pulling heat away from the Vid processor.  Am I wrong?

I am thinking my method might be more efficient in pulling heat away from each component, but my concerns are too much heat in the system water because the radiator may not be that effective with 3 heat sources feeding it.  Additionally, the pump would be working overtime because of the splitter and forcing the liquid to go 3 ways? 

Anyone an engineering expert and point flaws in this idea? 

After I work the design, I will be going for the optimal components within a certain price range.

Two things to keep in mind that work against each other:
1. Yes, the *slightly* higher temp of the water coming fromt he CPU to the vid card will mean less cooling performance for the vid card block, but it's pretty marginal. The water in the loop is nearly all at the same temp, no matter where you are in the loop - +/-2 degrees C, I think. The whole mass of water raises in temp slowly as time goes on and the machine heats it up until eventually the radiator can keep it from heating up any more.

2. The the splitters restrict flow, reduced flow rates are bad for keeping the water flowing smoothly through the radiator and so being able to transfer out the heat into the air. Most folks seem to have agreed that the trade-off caused by using splitters - even with multiple radiators - is not worth the reduced flow rate; UNLESS you have one of those really big aquarium pumps.

I can say from personal experience that running my video and cpu water blocks in series is way better temp-wise than running them in parallel with a "Y" before and after the blocks (though I only had one radiator). Obviously the best performance comes from having two independent loops - but that seems like overkill to me.

If you don't already know, check out the watercooling forum over at http://www.ocforums.com - they have some of the most helpful and well-informed WC geeks on the net over on that forum.

Cheers,
Amino


ps.
to Op's point: I agree that WC is, in general, not worth the time and money.
I like to tinker and spend hours on the net doing research and specing parts and all of that, so for me it's more about the hobby-aspect of building it than it is about cost/performance benefits, but I doubt I'd ever do it again (I built my first WC rig last fall). The big advantage to me is the noise reduction, but you can get a lot of quiet air-cooled parts these days - even video cards. You have to either be into modding-as-hobby or extreme OC'ing for WC to be worth it. and for extreme OC'ing, you can probably spend as much on more expensive chips as you do on WC'ing and not have to deal with all the work involved!

jees amino u wrote a article

Did you notice those neat things at the end of the sentences? Those are called punctuation marks...They are used in things called sentences. But you don't have to worry about that. ;P

Quote from: Friar Cack on April 14, 2009, 03:12:42 AM

Quote from: locknload on April 14, 2009, 03:08:01 AM

jees amino u wrote a article

Did you notice those neat things at the end of the sentences? Those are called punctuation marks...They are used in things called sentences. But you don't have to worry about that. ;P

Don't forget that "jees" sounds like a colloquialism that would not be shared by anyone else; the vulgar substitution of "u" for "you"; and that because of the phonetic structure of the word "article", it should have been preceded by the indefinite article "an".

well done.  welcome to the gammEr police.  You, Saturn, and I are the aholes that like to point out mistakes made by others.