Yeah I am using Liquid. Overall it's given me maybe 5 degrees cooler over my Zalman 9700NT. It is NOT what folks make it out to be. Silent, ultra cool. Any idiot telling you that is towing the same line. I have to use 3 120mm fans, then another 2 to exhaust air out of the case. If I go low decibel fans, the air they move won't make the radiator cool the coolant right. If I go high air movement, it's like having fucking jet turbines in the room.

I CAN go no fans, and go silent true... but on stock settings, sitting at desktop I load Xp at 44c, and every 10 minutes or so I shoot up a few degrees. Forget playing a game like that either, I loaded up Dark Messiah and went to 70c after 4 minutes. And gee, I've spent oh... 300$ on this kandalf case with the built in water cooling... that sucked and I've had to upgrade the water components heavily, take on another 200 for the extra parts, another 100 for nonconductive coolant... or I could of fucking stayed in my Antec 900 with the Zalman and gotten 5 degrees worse temps. Everyone tells me I have a hot running chip, and once I switch I'll see idles in the low 30cs/high 20cs instead of 40c-43c, but I cbf or afford right now, to upgrade my chip.

And I wasn't bashing on your article, I was merely pointing out that in some situations comparisons like that are worthless. I wouldn't sell overclocking short though yak, it's gotten dirt easy now, you don't have to be a geek fiddling with settings any more to take a Core 2 or a Quad Intel chip and OC it 600mhz-1ghz on a 40$ aftermarket heatsink.

 

Water doesn't make a big difference when you are at idle. It makes it when you are on load. You can probably get a setup for around $200. Tline, triplerad.

I've hit the wall @3.0ghz with my Q6600. Any higher and it gets too hot for comfort on full load.

However, if I had water I would be able to run 3.6ghz all day.

 

I was pointing out how folks told me, and what I expected. And you just repeated the same thing I've been hearing for the last year about how the idle temp doesn't matter/change from air really at all.

@3.4 ghz, Zalman 9700 NT = idle low-mid 40c, loaded high 50s. Apogee WB on a DD 360 GT rad = idle low 40c, loaded low 50s. Not worth the few hundred I've spent into it learning the ups and down. And even if I bought your 200$ worth of stuff straight off it still is barely better then the 50$ Zalman Air cooler. Not to mention, if I was using distilled water, you'd have to worry about leaks. Not so with air. So I DID see the change in air to h2o, it just wasnt what everyone keeps claiming is so easy to do.

IMHO your average person isn't going to grab the best stuff right off the bat with WCing, theyre going to do like I did, grab what they think is best, find out it's fucked and then experiment. UNLESS they want to spend 400 bucks getting the top of the line everything, they're usually going to piecemeal it.

To be fair, my friend does have mid 30s idle, and mid 40's loaded out on his q6600 stock clocked. But he's also running oh.. like 6 120mmfans intake, 6 exhaust, then on the back of his case where the rad is he's got 6 120mm fans in a push/pull with shrouds on each side. Sounds like an airplane when he boots up, but hey, he got the awesome temps... at a mear 500$ worth of tinkering. 100$ Apogee GT/Thermochill 360 rad was like 150$, 2 360 mm shrouds at 40$ for both, around 20$ worth of tubing, 20$ worth of barbs, a DD bay res at 30$, DD pump at 120. So yeah... 500ish of stuff, to wind up with temps barely better then a 50$ air cooler.

To me, it's become more of a hobby to mess with it and try to make it better, then to even care anymore that I got mislead on just how much was possible with running liquid.

Oddly enough what I found works best is tubing from Lowes or Home Depot, mixed with copper elbows to help keep the amount of pipe down. Granted I only have 4 elbows in my system, where the tubes had to make too extreme of a turn for my comfort to get to the rad, but once I put them in I noticed a 3 degree drop across the board, heh.

 

Sounds like your friend has quite a bit of overkill.

I haven't had any experience with water cooling either, so maybe I'm being misled by the same rumours. Perhaps it is only the silent part which is being lied about. Although, a number of people have said that water cooling is more an enthusiast exercise than something worth doing in a cost/benefit sense.

 

oh aye it's overkill, but it's what it took to get the temps that are supposedly so easy to get whenever you go to a WC site.

a number of people have said that water cooling is more an enthusiast exercise than something worth doing in a cost/benefit sense.

Truer words have never been spoken.

 

A timely aritcle from Anandtech. They compare several water cooling solutions to a swag of air cooled heatsinks and fans. Water cooling didn't beat the top hsf's in any category. http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3097&p=1

 

What the quote doesn't mention, is adding in a NB, or Sb , will on average jump up your idle temps by 5-10 degrees C, and a GPu will jump it at least 10C. Loaded out, unless you have multiple rads, there's no way in HELL i'd want to try that.
I'll remark more on this later. Dinner

HAHAHA

BOTH of those systems blow ass horribly. Neither uses a decent damned radiator, and they're among the shittiest kits you could buy. You NEVER buy all in one WC kits, that's a known rule.

Quote from the comments

Anyway. Air's better for cost vrs performance, but in no way in hell would a quality rig be beaten by air cooling. Shit even mine is cobbled together and I still get better temps then a top of the line air cooler. My bitterness over it is that I dont get the huge results promised and overall, the money spent for 5-10 degree improvement isn't worth it, not that it isn't better. Could I clock 3.4 ghz on a 2.4 ghz chip and stay stable on air? Hell no. Can I on liquid? Yeah, and 3.6 as well, but I don't like the temps. Was it worth it to go liquid to be able to go from a stable 3.2ghz on air, to similar temps, but at 3.4? No.