Solved What ever happened to water-cooling?

G'day,

Is it just me, or has water-cooling never really displaced fans as a primary means of CPU cooling? You still see water cooling kits obviously, but fans still seem to dominate, and I don't recall seeing a post here about water-cooling in recent months.

So, are they still quite expensive compared to fans, or has there just been significant advances to fan design that make them as competitive?

Opinions?
Golden

Golden,
Wow, where to begin. The way I see it water cooling had absolutely gone mad lately. But you still have two directions sealed and custom. The custom is likely very similar with options for every aspect of customization. But sealed has grown to also include a very cool (pun intended) option for a backplane GPU solution. So with top and rear fans you can run two sealed systems one each for GPU & CPU together. Is sealed systems lowering the temps from most all air based designs, Yes. But the best air and sealed are very close so I guess you could say air designs are constantly progressing. I just installed the new H100 240mm radiator single core design and I'm happy but is it a huge change from my H50.....honestly only a degree or three C. I would check out links and pic's and I love how in the right case it opens up air flow and cleans up the look.

Corsair Hydro Series CPU Coolers

Omni ALC

Thanks mate - ironically I just found this:

http://www.sevenforums.com/overcloc...se-cooler-my-current-rig-watercooled-air.html

I'll give that a good read - but I've thinking about experimenting a bit (again) so these will be useful.

I recently upgraded my RAM to Corsair Vengeance with the aluminium heat displacers, but they stand so tall, they wouldn't fit under my Noctua CPU cooler. So, I had to go back to the standard Intel stock cooler......which works fine, but looks naff. So....I either buy a nice fan, or.....wait for it......a sealed water-cooling system. I was looking at the Corsair H series too......

Ya with custom your world is your oyster as they say. You can loop the CPU with the mobo to the GPU and the ram if that's your desire. Looks like those types of extreme systems run multiple radiators or at least one large 3 core 360mm with six fans. They look awesome and cool extremely well. But the level of knowledge and experimentation is on a much higher level and is something where you're likely not going to get it perfect the first go, as it will take loads of tweaking to adjust the system .......but this is also fun and satisfying to a high degree.......go for it !

There has been a resurgence lately with liquid cooling due to the numerous liquid cooling systems from brands like Antec and Corsair.

As far as displacing fans, many of us don't require the complexities of liquid cooling to keep our rigs within acceptable temperature ranges.

For me personally, my temps don't even come close to a range where I need to even consider liquid cooling. I'd much rather just stick with a CPU fan as there is no chance of leaking, nor a need to store a radiator and such elsewhere in my case.

Corsair H60 cooling kit here I come..........

And its in. Very nice, very simple, very quiet and very cool

Great news and I would say "You're Golden....Golden" lol. Those Corsair/Cool-it rigs are hard to beat with out taking the next huge plunge into full custom water cooling. Now also keep this bad boy in mind for controlling the second largest source of heat your GPU.
Omni ALC

Mmm... those ALC's are nice, but no interposers for the GTX560