Fear of Liquid Cooling

[Beermaster]

Okay i have a real fear of liquid cooling, only because i have never done it, and none of my friend (even the geek ones) have ever done it either, and i am just to chicken to do it

But i do want to try it, should i just buy on of those pre build kits like Tt or somthing?

[grinder]

welp, because your first water cooling setup won't be perfect, a kit is prolly the best choice. It will let you gain some points without spending a lot of money.

I'm not a huge fan of Tt products tho. Perhaps something from Swiftech or the like?

[sswilson]

I had great cooling performance out of my TT bigwater 745, but avoid the TT cpu waterblock like the plague! (I'd tell you all about it, but I don't want to scare you away from water cooling.... :) ).

In reality.... the only thing a kit is going to get you is a slightly lower price, & all of the parts in one box.

There's enough water cooling enthusiasts here to walk you through exactly what you're going to need to order your parts individually. (I won't name any names.... but one of the regulars here just built himself a mighty fine WC setup from individual parts and I'm sure he'd be more than happy to give you some pointers.....).

[werty316]

Corsair's Nautilus 500 is a good choice for beginners.

[Patriote]

I was just like you about 2 years ago when i wanted to try watercooling...

I was a little scared to screw all my precious hardware i had put so much time and money on it. Also, there was the fitting question... Will i be able to make everything fit in the case so that i could move it around ?

Anyway, to make a short story, everything went all superfine! 100 times better than my latest build...Now my latest build is all done and working perfectly fine but it's just that i had to go through a sh!t load of problems and stuff...

I would recommend you to get this: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...cture=Swiftech This kit is extremely well awarded over many forums as a good beginners kit. It includes everything you need to get going into watercooling. As well as a manual... It does not include a GPU Waterblock thought. I purchased one separately. It only include a CPU waterblock. The manual\guide can be found on swiftech's website : SwiftTech Choose the product and find the link to the manual\guide.

Performance is where it should be with this kit. Since that time i bought and customized my watercooling set-up many many times. To end up with what you can read in my Sig and see in the gallery section ;)

I have a few pics of my first build with this kit










As you can see, i fitted the rad in the bottom of my Stacker. There was an already almost perfect hole for it... so it didn't required me to cut anything! Later on my next build it would require me to cut the bottom part of the case to fit a bigger rad. Thsi kit comes with a "radbox" which allows you to mount it externally hooked on a rear 120mm fan hole. Anyway, this kit is everything you could want as for a first build!

The best of the best would be to buy parts separately to end up with a custom watercooling set-up as many have in here. (Actually i think we're 4 or 5 ) If you want to go that way im sure everyone that knows something in here will help you make your choice. But with custom set-ups there is no manual... We'll help you out for that too!

PLEASE Don't get a Thermaltake pre-build watercooling kit such as the Bigwater unless you want poor performance, weak pump, cracking CPU blocks and so on with problems...

Last words are that Watercooling is hell of fun to build and makes you proud when it's all done and pimped out!

[Babrbarossa]

I was amazed at how smoothly it went- It took me a day to do it, and even did some major case chopping for my top mounted rad. If I had known that my power supply had a safety feature that didn't allow it to power up without the components all hooked up, I would have saved hours doing the leak testing, by simply hooking the pump up to another computer right off the bat.

While I have done alot of component swapping over the years, this is my first real build, my first overclock, first watercooling, and I only bought the system at christmas- so a lot of experience isn't necessary.

[Eldonko]

It's scary at first but its also easier than it looks. Just leak test outside the case and you will be fine.

[Beermaster]

Okay i am going to build a different machine to play with water cooling, i have pumps as my main hobby is marine tanks and i deal with pumps on a constant basis

check it out here
Dad's Aquarium

and my Reef site here
edmontonreefers.ca :: Portal

[Babrbarossa]

Wow- beautiful pics!

[Beermaster]

Thank you very much, it is quite a passion of mine