Hello again! After about 2 months of reading reviews online, research and changing my mind, here is what I have to replace the components in my sig. Hard drive: (WD Raptor 150gig 10,000rpm) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16822136011 Memory: (Patriot Extreme 4x1GB) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220267 Mobo: (ASUS Maximus Formula SE) http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=CA4802848 Processor: (Quad core 2.4Ghz G0 Stepping) http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A1938460 OS: (Vista Ultimate 64bit) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116215 Graphics Card: (HIS 3870 512mb) x2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161212 Graphics Cooling: (Thermaltake DuOrb) x2 * http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835106112 PSU (Antec NeoPower 650watt) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371010 Water Cooling: (Gigabyte Galaxy II) * http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835128015 ----------------------- *I had a question on the DuOrb cooler, I know it will definetly fit the 3870, but I was looking more at this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835108077 I just want to know if this will work with the Gigabyte H20 system, and if it will cool the cards better than the DuOrb. Since the Gigabyte only has 1 radiator, I was worried that it would have trouble keeping the (over clocked) Q6600 cool. I was thinking about Ocing it to possibly 4Ghz for 3dmark06 and 3.2 Idle. So should I get the Swifttech waterblock or the DuOrb? Any other thoughts on the setup?
I believe Thermalright's HR-03GT cooler will fit the HD3870. That will undoubtedly cool better than any Thermaltake product ever made. Thermaltake never seem to be able to get cooling down to a fine art. Funny that, given the name! As for water cooling, NEVER go with a kit. Get quality parts yourself and you'll get a much better cooled system. No water cooling setup should struggle with any single processor. If it does, it's well.. rubbish really.
Man sam, you and your HR-03 Anyways, I decided on a kit because on newegg, there isnt a lot of available pumps, radiators, etc to customize your own, and because of the complications of having every single component be made of the same material, to prevent againced corroding.
There are plenty of specialist watercooling shops to buy your stuff from, and I would recommend such places over newegg every time. Watercooling is a specialist area for PCs, and if you want to do it right, you'll be prepared to look at specialists for it. Close comparisons of places like newegg in the UK are Scan and ebuyer, two large warehouse wholesalers. However, you'd get Watercooling parts from places like WatercoolingUK. Smaller shops, but ones that know what they're selling. Many such places also have forums to discuss the stuff they sell. With regard to corrosion, that shouldn't prove an issue with most proper water cooling components. However, it stands to reason that cheap watercooling kits get beaten by top end air cooling (which can sometimes still end up cheaper) yet even reasonably priced individual component sets will achieve temperatures no air cooling setup could ever hope to achieve. It mostly comes down to the blocks and the radiator. A pump is just that, as long as it has sufficient flow rate and head pressure. Some of the waterblocks included with kits I wouldn't trust to cool a Sempron 3000+, let alone a high end CPU. Things like the Swiftech Apogee on the other hand could probably easily take twice the heat of even the hottest overclocked quad core. Again with the radiators, basic BlackIce ones won't exactly get you far, but look for proper quality stuff and you can see pretty much room temps on your CPU, even at load.
So what would you recommend? I was thinking about the Apogee for the Q6600, but I wanted to see how the stock waterblock would do before I upgraded to that. I am leaning towards watercooling the 2 3870s, as it will be quieter, and the price for the block is about the same as the air cooler. Would you recommend any sites, and what products would you recommend? PS, I forgot to mention that I will be watercooling the northbridge on the Maximus SE, since it has that type of heatsink on it.
As it happens, the HD3870 is exceptionally quiet (rare for an ATI card I know), and is not audible above the noise level of the average PC. If all you're doing it for is for quietness, you may as well save your money unless your PC is on the quiet side of things. If this is going in the 900 case, you would need to set your case fans to low before the GPUs would make a noticeable noise. I can sympathise with watercooling a chipset, the cooling on a lot of motherboard chipsets (particularly Asus ones) is very sub-par, and replacing the heatsink is almost a must-do for extreme overclocking. As for a website, being from the UK I don't research many US sites apart from the big four, so I wouldn't really know where to start looking. Have a google!
As I said before, If you want water cooling, go to this website: http://www.dangerden.com/store/ I don't know why you need all this cooling, just let the fans do their job and just get a big Zalman fan for the CPU. Not to mention if you do take off the fan cover off the HD3870 then it will void the warranty. At this point its also pointless to buy Q6600 when the Q9450(which I am planing to buy after I sell the Q6600 that I have) is just around the corner. Also dump the WD Raptor. Its old and does not outperform traditional harddrives like it used to. Not to mention on average the operational life span of hard drives with little "windows" is not as long as solid top hard drives. Also the hard drive is going to end up in a drive bay in your PC and you will not be able to see it spin anyways. Patience is a virtue and good things will come to those that wait.
Indeed, the WD5000AAKS can achieve from-new read/write speeds of 72MB/s. That's not that far off a Raptor.
I was comparing the watercooling's noise to the noise of the DuOrb, not the stock cooler on the card. I imagine the DuOrb would be lowder because it has 2 fans on 1 heatsink, and since I will be running 2 3870s, I think you might be able to hear that. But once again, sam, as you said since I will be running it in the 900, I wont be able to tell the difference. Currently the 2 fans that make the most noise are the tidewater's fan on high, and a aerocool turbine fan that cools the graphics card as well in the side pannel of the case. I will post some more when I get home, but I have to go now. PS. What companies sell reliable water cooling parts? I was loooking at swift tech's h20 series.
Swiftech for blocks, D-tec for pumps, as for the reservoir, tubes and radiator, I'm not sure. I'll ask my friend, his PC's watercooled.
Ok, now I just wanted the WD Rpator because it is a 10,000rpm HDD. I see many reviews that claim that although many people have kick ass rigs, that they are still bottlenecked by their HDD. I would just be putting the Vista OS and my games on it, and apps and little things on my other two. I am willing to sacrifice space for speed, so a 500GB 7400rpm HDD doesnt do me that much good. BTW, do you know when the Q9450 will be released? Before Christmas? I think I saw somewhere (wikipedia??) that the price will be around 1,000 for that, way to much. And besides, the site I want the Q6600 from only sells G0 models, so I can overclock it to 4Ghz when I want (mostly for benching) since I'll be on water cooling. EDIT: I see that dangerden doesnt really have that many products to select from. I mean, they only sell 4 cpu blocks, and not the apogee.
Hmm, well, depends on your budget. The best thing to do for high speed hard drives is to buy four normal drives, plug them into a RAID card and run them in RAID10. That way you get the space of two of them at double the speed with drive redundancy. Update: OK, components for water cooling: Blocks: Swiftech Pumps: Dtec DB series Radiator: Thermochill series Reservoir: XSPC Tubes: Tygon
To run a raid 1+0/0+1 array you do need to have 4 drives. And running raid 0 increases your chances for data loss, but it does outperform WD raptors (craptors lol...not really) so it's a double bladed sword. In my opinion they need to make 15,000 rpm hard drives for desktops just like they do for servers, that would be nice. The Q9450 is going to be released in mid January for about $316 (~$360-390 after price gouching) so I would wait. You can overclock a QX9650 to 4Ghz on air and that is built upon 45nm technology just like the Q9450 is going to be. Anyways try not to fry your CPU when overclocking. That would be a sad turn of events,but funny to me.
No worries about data loss with RAID10. you have a drive redundancy on both the channels that are striped together. As long as both drives on a stripe don't fail, you'll be fine. The only way you can fry a CPU by overclocking is to give it an excessive voltage. Generally I don't exceed around 125mV beyond normal levels. It's best if you can keep it below 100mV extra.