I think this is taking it a bit far as if your environment is that dusty then that's what you have to address first. We're talking here about a PC in a home in a relatively wealthy country.
You can quibble if you want over details but if your only course of action to stop dust in your home PC case is to ensure it's a positive pressure environment you're doing it wrong.

@ enorbet. The house is 7 years old and is up to date with relevant building standards etc. It is even cyclone proof to a certain degree but we don't get cyclones here.

I've got to be honest I was going to get a Phobya 1260 radiator and 4 220mm fans and the biggest pump and res I could but the thing that made me take a step back and post this thread was the noise factor. The system is really quiet and compared to my old Pentium 4 (which is in my bedroom connected to my TV and at the same end of the house to my study) the P4 is like a Jet fighter and the i7 is like an electric car just sitting at the lights. I've never heard a water cooling system, apart from the videos on youtube but home videos are not really an accurate measure, so I haven't discounted it but if I can get just as effective air cooling for alot cheaper without the extra power consumption then that is probably the way I'll go.

@273, sorry mate but Australia can be dusty. It really doesn't matter how wealthy you are or how well your house is built this country can throw alot of dust around and it is very fine (miniscule) particles. New Zealand often gets Australian dust settle on it after a summer full of dust storms.

Greetz
Actually, I wasn't suggesting water cooling since it's main advantage is in moving higher quantities of heat per unit time and neither the CPU nor GPU produce substantial quantities. That "job" is left to voltage transformation and regulation. One of the difficulties in a smallish room is that unless some heat exchanger is installed or some means of exhausting anywhere from 400 Watts to ~1 Kilowatts worth of heat buildup that got dumped into your room, raising ambient, you're fighting an uphill battle. A simple solution might be building a cowel and using something like clothes dryer exhaust hose and vent to get it outside fast, but unless one is very creative that tends to be ugly. Unless water is very expensive there, my vote would be for a small swamp cooler just for that room. They tend to be cheap to buy one because they are so simple and not impossible for a fella with a few tools and some skills to build, if he has time on his hands instead of cash in his wallet.... although a side effect is that family members may find more excuses to visit your room. They work rather well in hot, dry climates.

Well..the power consumption isnt that much of an issue. It will be higher, but not by a huge amount.

As far as noise goes, 'mega water cooling' will be quieter for any given cooling level. But does that really matter so much?

When you are looking at delta of up to 30C+ for a stock intel heatsink + fan, that can be pushing the point if you're in a 45C room. 75C+ is hotter than I would want to run any modern CPU for any length of time....but are you going to be running @ 100% CPU use all the time?

Even if you were, a good aftermarket heatsink should be able to get you to deltas of around 10-15C (with a i7-4XXX 84 watt CPU) and by fairly quiet (45-50dB or under). Pick the 'right' heatsink and 'right' fan(s) and you should be able to get 10-15C deltas with 30-40dB.

That wont be in the same class as a 'Mega water cooling' setup, using say a Phobya XTREME/ 4x 200mm fans/big pump. With that, I'd excpect somethign mroe like 5-7C deltas @ 40dB or better, and maybe 5-10C deltas @ 30-40dB or under...and the noise in that case would be jiust as much from the pump than the fans....

Is it really worth spending all that money, $150 on a rad, $80-120 on fans, $100 or more on a pump just to drop temps a few dgrees? When even an 'expensive' aircooling setup is going to cost you less than the rad alone? Especially when the aftermarket aircooling is already way better than the stock cooler, and the CPUshould eb so far 'inside the envelope' it wotn matter about a few degrees..

Umm....I dont know where you got 400-1000 watts. Its totally possible though (but really, anything over 400-500 watts and you need your head checked or you are are doing some seriously nasty work). But its the same issue no matter if aircooled or watercooled. In fact, the water cooling is worse, you've got extra fans + a pump usign power, creating heat.

*edit- actually, do you haev any idea what sort of hardware you want to run this with k3lt01?

But I cant imagine you'd be after a 'gamers' or big GPGPU card.

A sane setup, like i7-4770, 8-16GB, a midrange video card, a SSD or 2, a HDD or 2, a sound card, you've still going to be under 250 watts....

Ugh. Evaporative coolers work, but they are ugly, nasty, and more risky. As its an 'open loop', you need to either have an automatic top up system, or check the water levels often.

Its also a neat way to increase the humidity in a room- which is not great for electrical components. Most of the time, the parts in computers are meant top run in 5-90% relative humidity, going over that isnt a good idea (and evap coolers can go past 90% easily, I've seen one room at 97% when it was 80-85% outside the room).

There is also often a 'gradient'- the relative humidity isnt meant to change more than 20% a hour (which is can do easily in a dry climate).

A better solution is a radiator outside the house. Better yet, using the earth itself as a radiator, with deep buried pipes and maybe a buried huge resivour like a 44 gallon drum.

Yes. In a bad way. Water cooled systems tout quietness as an advantage neglecting to mention this is because they generally move less total CFM of air through the case. This neglects any parts that don't have a water block. Those neglected parts then get and stay hot.... not good.

Agree. Unless you're building a machine just for the purpose of posting big benchmark numbers, even avid gamer systems tend to be "bursty" and modern hi-performance air coolers are very thermally efficient as well as quiet except when quiet really doesn't matter since the fans even at full swing are vastly quieter than other appliances in your room (especially if you're a gamer who turns up the sound so he can hear a cockroach with slippers on sneak up)

Umm.... are you aware there are people running 2, 3, even 4 cad/gaming quality graphics cards in one box? or that PSUs of 1.6kw are commonly available? and that even at an average of 80% efficiency (at the PSU, NOT elsewhere), ultimately this energy becomes mostly thermal? While many systems may still be in the 250 watt average vicinity this is still a large amount of BTUs that must go somewhere and NOT stay in your case, or really, your room either. Many modern systems however do have bursts lasting significant amounts of time at or over 1kw. 600 watts actual usage is utterly commonplace whether you find this insane or nasty doesn't change the vast numbers of people who either buy high performance systems for CAD, Audio/Video editing, or gaming.... or those who buy cheap, inefficient PSUs that are lucky to hit 60% efficiency.

What do you consider "sane" and "midrange"? HERE is a calculator useful for determining minimum PSU requirements. I think you will be hard pressed to hold it down to 250 watts unless you enjoy single-tasking, drab DEs, long page load times, and never do anything multimedia.


No uglier than any other cooling system and who in their right mind would use an evaporative cooler in anything more than a 50%-70% relative humidity environment? I've never even seen one that didn't have a bobber controlled valve system. Who would want to go up on the roof or even outside every half hour to top off? Additionally, I don't want to be in a 90+% humidity. let alone my PC. Basically if you live in an environment where evap coolers are practical, added humidity is a non-issue.


While deeply buried heat exchangers are an efficient option since, iirc, once a few feet underground the earth temperature is something like 11 C and water does have an excellent Specific Heat Capacity compared to air, this is by no means a cheap solution even with a moderately practical and reasonably cheap 44 gallon reservoir. It would likely be just as "practical" to use an air-to-water heat exchanger to dump excess household thermal energy into pre-heating ground water before your hot water heater.... Nice ideas.... rarely cheap and/or practical in most situations.

Sorry been at work so only just getting online now.

With regards to hardware I have 32 GB RAM and a TV card but the TV card is probably going to get put into a dedicated machine. I'm quite happy with the OEM HDMI so I have no intention of running a graphics card. Apart from 3 new HDDs and an 1 SSD.

This machine is my workhorse, it makes LiveDVDs, creates my repository, tranfers files to Sourceforge, does some video and audio work work, uni etc etc etc. It is by no means stretched as far as its theoretical capabilities (I deliberately over built the thing so it would not get stretched after doing similar work on my laptop and it was stretched).

I have pretty much decided water cooling is to much expense, not to mention an extra possible failure point (or 3), for very limited gains above a decent air cooling setup. I'm looking at Scythe and BeQuiet at the moment and think that will be enough for my purposes. I will, for the sake of having a decent margin to work with, get something with the highest heat dissipation I can for the money.

I've seen several evap coolers here, and I live in a humid climate. People built them because they are cheap, and they work. Sure, they dont work so well as they do in a dry climate, and thats why I've seen at least one hybird system (evap + rad).

Beauty is the in eye of the beholder.

But in general they are ugly at least in my experince, and for my tastes. A rad can be nice and clean, all the evap coolers I've ever seen have been not only ugly and lumpen but also home built.

Because I live in a humid climate and agree with you, I dont even look at evap coolers, so maybe I'm *heh heh* 'out of the loop'. Mayeb someone is making 'off the shelf' evap coolers fo computers now.

Could you post a pic of a good looking computer evap cooler please?

Water isnt cooling by itself, you still need air to cool the water. Yes, water can absorb a lot of heat and not raise itself in tmep that much, so it does tend to hold down extreme ranges of temp, but in the end it stil needs to be cooled.

IF the rad is in the case, it tends to have similar CFMs passing though to air cooling....one of the advantages of water cooling is that instead of being forced to use 1 or at the most 2 fans, or limitd size, you cn have more and bigger fans.

The biggest issue related to this is if people build 'passive' watercooling systems, or systems with the rad outside the main body of the case.

But, the major heat outputers, the CPU, maybe video card(s) are OK because they are cooled by water, and the other parts like HDDs, SSDs, and chipsets normally dont need that much airflow to keep cool.

Yes, there are people running 2, or 3, or 4 video cards. Diminishing returns....2 video cards isnt twice as fast, 3 video cards is worse yet, etc..

If you have _any_ evidce that multipule video cards are in any way common, I'd like to see it. Out of all th gamers I know just 1 is runnign 2 cards in SLI/crossfire, and the rest (15+) all haev single cards. The guy I know who does 3DSmax and maya for a living one has a single card in his desktop system as well.

Most of the time, people tend to run 1 CPU, 1 video card. There are a few people out there with 2. 3 or 3+ is very, very rare.

As for 1600 watt PSUs beign 'commnly avaible'...maybe. Commonly used? Not at all.

600 watts real power consumption is by no means commonplace. Checkthe TDPs (thermal design power) of some parts, for a 'sane' system you'll find that its far less than you are making out from (I guess) reading a few webistes by crazies, fanbois and those who get given parts for 'testing' on the proviso they give them a good review.

A sane 'gamers' system these days is something like this-

i7-4770
Max TDP 84 W

http://ark.intel.com/products/75122

nVidia GTX760
Graphics Card Power (W) 170 W
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desk...specifications

Given another 50 watts for motherobard, RAM, HDD + SSD (and that is generous) and you're still only at 304 watts max power consumption..and that is a 'gamers' system. (see below next quote for more on that)

Even if that was pushed up to a i7-i7-4960X (88 watts) + GTX 780 (250 watts) you are stil only looking at 384 watts max.

You've got to be kidding.

A i7-4770K, 4 x 4GB DDR3 1866, Intel SSD 520 240 GB, GTX 680. System Power Consumtpion @ 100% CPU load- 164 watts. Thast real load, not a load of guess from a PSU calculator.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...-4770k_11.html

You could add in decent midrange video card and still be well under 250 watts....and even a 'mid rage'video card is overkill really. I've got a GT630 rev2 in this, its a 25 watts TDP card (25!!!) and its runs KDE 4.X with all bells and whisptles turned on, while playing HD video, and with digicam and firefox running at the same time without any lagging at all...and that is with a rather old and meh dual core CPU, which is nothing much compared to a current i7.

If you want to se my opion on those PSU calcs se this thread, there is not need for mye to go through it all again. It all starts on page 3, but here is page 1-

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...pu-4175500459/

The newegg PSU calc is worse than most.

Try this one, it actually gives you more info and options-

But long story shot- PSU calcs are a guess, based on guesses, with a saftey factor built in.

Our thermal posts are getting long and starting to be repetitive as well as "kicking a dead horse" now that OP has made a decision for Air, so I'll try to walk a fine line and be selective and short.

I never mentioned an evap cooler for a PC. My thoughts there are regarding dealing with nasty 45 C ambient and then adding to it by blowing more heated air into a room. Anything that can improve that will go a long way toward comfort both for OP and his PC.

<snip> (a lot of stuff about thermals everyone should already know)

Aside from enthusiast magazines which sell SLI/Crossfire to some market now for what? 5 years? (I reason they don't build what doesn't sell) also I subscribe to Overclocking forums where people list their hardware. While there, 3 and 4 are indeed uncommon, 2 is not. However on Gaming specific sites, especially if you go to the database for any outfit like 3DMarks, you will see hundreds of systems you (and to only a slightly lesser degree, I) consider insane. This includes multiple graphics cards and systems pulling upwards of 800 watts.... actual, not theoretical.


For the record, I am no "magazine mechanic". I am both educated and experienced in the field(s) as a hobbyist and professionally. It seems to me you are underestimating the number of people who build "insane" systems for whatever reason, but no matter since this in no way helps OP. This all began from my remarking that added to the 45 C ambient he already suffers, he is heating that yet further by his PC. While there is substantial difference between the BTU output of a 250 watt system and a 600 watt system (though not necessarily linear), the point is neither is trivial which leads to the conclusion, as above, that cooling the room, even 10-15 C might possibly be accomplished without massive expense and gain improved PC stability and longevity in the process, not to mention a more pleasant user environment. It is, after all, a system within a system.

The original SLI 3DFX PCI cards were late 1990s, but discounting them, SLI came back with PCIe, 2004/2005.

100s. A vast number in this world where theres at is least 1 computer for every 4 people in the western world..and probably hitting something more like 1 to 1. 0.01 of systems used,and myabe 1-5% of hardcore 'gaming' systems, maybe 2.5-10% of CAD/heavy graphics systems. Not really siginificant.

To use k3lt01s term for LN2, those crazy overclocked/multipule SLI systems (which are the only way you will ever get 450+ watts real power consumption) are mostly a wank. I've seen crazy systems get ptu up _everywhere_, after all, they are big ticket 'look at me' systems.

Sure, they do sell some of those systems- but its like lamborghini/ferraris. There isnt much point to 'conspicuous consumption' if nobody sees it.

They aer also like formula 1- nVidia and AMD compete to have the biggest, fastest cards around just so they have the bragging rights to say they have the biggest, fastest cards around. In the hope, often justified, that people will ignore doing reseach on the price point theyare actually going to buy, and go instead for the biggest, fastest around...

You most ceratianly did, in fact you suggested it as a good idea-

Maybe you meant using an evap cooler to cool the room, not the computer.....which is stil cazy IMO....but really, what do I care, the number of technically wrong things you've said is amazing....I'm stil laughing at this one-

Its even funnier with k3lt01 saying he isnt going to use a video card at all, just (I assume) onboard intel...in that case he'd be hard pressed to even hit 250 watts real power consumtpion, and that would take some serious overclocking to do.....

Though depending on exactly what CPU k3lt01 is going to get, I possibly get a video card if it was me. Possibly. Maybe not for an i5, but who would even think of a $150 rad for an i5?

I'm enjoying reading these replies and if you feel like continuing I'm willing to read more.

A couple of things to note, I'm not adding another A/C to the house (yes evaporative is still A/C even though it uses water and not r132a or any of the other refrigerant gases (I have an ARC licence which you need in Australia under environmental law to work on A/C). Evaporative cooling in dry areas just pumps humidity into the air, it seems counter intuitive to me to have an "gassed" A/C in the main part of the house keeping the house cool and dry and then having an evaporative A/C in the study that will create humidity that will flow into the rest of the house because the main A/C draws moisture from the inside of the house to remove it.

I have said what my hardware is early on.

Somehow I missed, even after scanning back, that you have A/C for the whole house, perhaps because you noted that your study faces West and gets full sun during the hottest time of the day, only a serious issue if that room is thermally isolated from the rest of the house. This is why I mistakenly suggested an evap cooler for the study... thinking it was a hot spot that seemed prohibitively expensive to cool. I fully agree now that this is clearly not the case that evap is a bad choice for you.


Nah. I apparently also missed the bridge that must be somewhere in the vicinity, since trolls must come from somewhere, and one (not you) keeps nipping at my heeels.

Cascade and I have had our difficulties but I think calling him a troll is over the top.

If someone is a 'troll' for pointing out gross inaccuracies, I'm more than happy to wear that tag.

All I've seen is Aerocool Strike-X Air Post 1. Have I missed some post?

Looking back, I still dont seem to see what CPU you are running on planning on getting. The only reference I can see is post 32, where you say 'the i7 is like an electric car just sitting at the lights'.

It doesnt make a huge amount of differnce, I was just wondering.

Scythe was my choice because I could get hard info on the fans without having to make guesses...and fan tech hasnt chnaged much so even old reviews are still worth looking at.

From memory the reviews I based my choice on where these 2 in patricular-

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article832-page1.html
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1361-page1.html

Noctua is probably the best choice if you dont want to spend much time looking ro compare model numbers that vary by 2 or 3 letters. They are expensive, and not the absolute best, but typically very good.

As far as heatsinks go, there isnt a huge amount of differnce bewteen simialr models. Number of heatpipes/size of heatpipe and wieght can give you most of the info you'd need to make a reasonable guess.

It can get a bit more difficult if you are going for lowest noise posible, in those cases widely spaced fin are 'better' than dense packed fins. But you dont sem to eb going for lowest noise, more a good compromise between noise and cooling.

If you were going to buy just on brand, maybe prolimatech..they always seem to do well on the tests I've seen. The prolimatech armageddon seems decent, and the genesis is _very_ 'funky'and would be nice if you wanted to keep the RAM cool as well.

But really, IMO its much of a muchness as far as normal heatpipe tower coolers go.

I wasn't going to say anything else but the whole "troll" things is pathetically stupid, it give me the irits . It is in multiple threads and pollutes good conversations with agro. Some people can't seem to take others disagreeing with them.

Not planning on getting any hardware, I built this machine a couple of month back. The reference to the i7 was this machine, the P4 is my old desktop. I had a thread a while back on it and there is a link to my MoBo in my signature. I realise people don't remember, and I actually thought I had posted it was a 4770K (I remember typing it but its not in the thread ), so I should have been more on the ball about what I have actually posted.

keep it cool what ever you need to do is OK with me. I always worried about how sealed a sealed system is. Anyway it doesn't not matter to me.
What is a liquid. there is 50 year old refrigerators still working with true sealed system. what I see for today's liquid cool is far from sealed.
would I use it sure is it a true one piece welded loop system naw glue and hoses to me. Oh well I am sure some are better than others.