Introduction to Water Cooling

What is Water Cooling (Liquid Cooling)
Water cooling also known as Liquid Cooling is a method of heat removal from components. As opposed to air cooling, water is used as the heat transmitter. Water cooling is commonly used for cooling internal combustion engines in automobiles and large electrical generators. Other uses include cooling the barrels of machine guns, cooling of lubricant oil in pumps; for cooling purposes in heat exchangers; cooling products from tanks or columns, and recently, cooling of various major components inside high-end personal computers. The main mechanism for water cooling is convective heat transfer.
[Source from Wikipedia]










Why Water Cooling
Better Cooling Efficiency
Water has a thermal conductivity of 0.6062 W/ (m*K) whereas the thermal conductivity of air is only 0.0262. This means heat can be drawn away from components more efficiently with water. Water also has a much higher specific heat capacity than air (1.0 J/ (kg*K) versus 0.24), which allows the water cooling system to absorb a lot more energy before heating up. Using liquid to cool components allows the heat to be carried to a remote location, usually a radiator where the heat can be dissipated more effectively than with a heat sink. Because the radiator is mounted remotely, it can be larger than a chip-mounted heat sink, and therefore will be able to cool more effectively.
More Silent Setup
Because all major components in the computer will be cooled by the same system, there will be fewer fans, and therefore less noise.


Components for Water Cooling
Water Blocks
A water block is the watercooling equivalent of a heatsink. It can be used on many different computer components including the central processing unit (CPU), GPU, PPU, and Northbridge chipset on the motherboard. A water block is better at dissipating heat than an aircooled heatsink due to water's higher specific heat capacity and thermal conductivity. The water is usually pumped through to a radiator which allows a fan pushing air through it to take the heat created from the device and expel it into the air. A radiator is more efficient than a standard CPU or GPU heatsink/air cooler at removing heat because it has a much larger surface area. Installation of a water block is also similar to that of a heatsink, with a thermal pad or thermal grease placed between it and the device being cooled to aid in heat conduction. Picture on the left shows a Watercool HEATKILLER® CPU Rev3.0 CPU block.



Radiators
Radiators are heat exchangers used to transfer thermal energy from one medium to another for the purpose of cooling and heating. In PC water cooling, it responsible for transfering heat from water to air. Larger cooling area provide better performance.



Reservoirs
The reservoir is used to hold the water that is pumped through the system to a location that will be easy for the pump to pull the water from. The other purpose of the reservoir is to help remove the bubbles form the system when it is initially filled. This process is called bleeding.





Pumps
The water pumps move fluids inside the cooling system. It move the liquid from heated blocks to the radiator and reservoir before entering the waterblocks again. Pump performance vary on specification such as Head Pressure and Flow rates.

Useful sites about water cooling

XtremeSystems Forum
RRTech Forum
Overclock.net Forum

Sources of Water Cooling Components in Malaysia

Clawhammer (Alvin) from Lowyat.net forum
Vladtheimpaler (Joe) from Lowyat.net forum

PC-A05N add-ons: Lian Li BS-03

Just came back from my KL trip for my holiday. Did some changes on my PC-A05N built, take out the HDD cage for better airflow for PSU, leaving only primary HDD as the only HDD unit in the casing. Installed the Lian Li BS-03 side patented fan to improve the air flow of the case, especially the VGA compartment.


Swapped out 500gb HDD now will sit in here as my external HDD, 80gb HDD will keep in my shelf as backup HDD.

Lian Li PC-A05N Water Cooled Mini i7

Phew... finally complete migrating all my hardware from the Old Good CM Stacker STC-01 to this little mini tower case from Lian Li. Specification mostly the same as the previous built but now with smaller radiator, means no more 4.2ghz run. But the Syscooling 120mm radiator I am using surprisingly yield quite impressive results. I able to handle 4.2ghz for prime run but crashed at LinX run. For 4.0ghz, it was on par or even better than Swiftech MCR-320QP from my PC-A6010 setup acting as intake instead of exhaust.

Enough talking, time to show off this little powerful rig.


The hardware components inside. Intel Core i7 920 @ 4GHZ, 6gb Kingston DDR3 1333 @ 1523, ASUS 4890 (3D rendering), MSI GTX260 (Physx mode), Corsair TX750.

Water Cooled components, DD CPX-Pro, Bitspower Bay reservoir, D-Tek Fuzion v2, Syscooling 120mm Copper radiator.

More to come about the ATI + Nvidia Physx run...

ASUS P6T and KVR1333 @ 210 BCLK @ DDR3 1678

After some working days, finally get some free time, time to tweak my PC system.

System Components:
Intel Core i7 920 C0/C1 stepping
ASUS P6T 0502 BIOS
6gb Kingston DDR3 1333 Value Ram
ASUS 4890
Western Digital 80GB HDD. (WD80JD)
OS = Windows 7 RTM version.

Cooling system:
D-Tek Fuzion v2, Swiftech MCR320QP, Danger Den CPX-Pro, Bitspower drive bay reservoir.

The main objective of this run is to try out higher BCLK + RAM frequency at around 4ghz clock for CPU frequency. Here is the screenshot after LinX run and Memtest run to make sure everything is stable.

Although its nothing special for this tweak since I think most people who into overclocking shall reach it. This is my first time success of pushing my system past 200 BCLK stably and to my suprise my value ram which rated at 1333 able to reach DDR3 1678. So I am quite satisfied with the outcome, and I will tweak my system again in future when I got the free time.

DDR3 1333 Kingston Value Ram

Bought 3 stick of 2gb DDR3 1333 Kingston Value RAM last week just in time before the price hike in the memory market hit Malaysia. Bought it with the price before price hike, so glad that I was able to made it just in time for the cheaper ram.

The ram modules I got no longer were the hynix chips, which previous batch of KVR module were using, instead they are replaced by qimonda chips. The hynix according to some forumer over at lowyat forum, is quite OC'able, at least it does ddr3 1600++ CL8/CL7.


So, after getting the KVR 1333 2gb stick with qimonda chip, I tryout how fast these qimonda batch KVR can do. Surprisingly, it does DDR3 1520 CL9 stable, not bad although its not as good as the hynix chip.

With Vista x64 Ultimate, the size of memory does impact performance of a PC. I opted to upgrade to 6gb kit as it benefits more using Vista x64 compare to 3gb Kit. This time I save cost by getting the value ram over performance ram as stated in my previous article, the difference is not much, and I managed to push it to DDR3 1520 just like my previous 3gb Team Xtreem Kit could do. I have not pushed the chip to the max as I do not want to mess up with current settings I got which is 190 BCLK * 21 @ 3990MHZ with DDR3 1520. But I believe these Qimonda batch KVR able to push to higher speed as DDR3 1520 definitely not maxing out them yet.