The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

When I said "I know", I meant that I knew it would be expensive. FYI

I agree with Steve. Water cooling is not just for aesthetics(Glowing tubes, and silence), it's for an enthusiast, who likes getting the most out of his motherboard, and CPU, without frying it at the same time Though I don't believe I'll watercool my future GPU. Unless it shows higher temps than I'm currently seeing on mine. GPU's are far too expensive, and for the little gain an OC would give me, I just can't see doing it.

I plan to push my next CPU to 4.5Ghz. God willing LOL!

 

I too only go to that extreme if I'm going to push a system, so for the most part I don't water cool PC's unless I need too. Same-Same

I can definately see why Russ does and I would in his situation as well.

I also like the idea of a chiller like Peltier Effect devices or other types for that matter but again the need has to be there.

 

Mr-Movies,

Small correction. It was the SB750 chip that gave me problems, not the NB/VRM. My current motherboard temp runs between 40-43C. The problem that existed with cooling the NB was because there is no longer any concentrated airflow over the NB or VRMs, because there's no longer a fan to provide any airflow when you replace the air cooler with liquid cooling. The most important thing, is that even though the fan I modded into it, it only runs a couple of degrees cooler than without it. The big difference is that it doesn't get any warmer when encoding with DVDRB/CCE. Today's the first time it ever hit 43C, but it was a hot and humid 103F out today. It survived last summer that saw a good number of days at 110+F and above The fan mod lowers the MB temp about a degree or two, but it doesn't go up when fully loaded down, with all 6 cores at 100%. Considering that the house is 77 years old and has no insulation at all, the cooling is outstanding, in spite of not being able to get below 85F in my room on a hot day! That's with a 9600 BTU AC in a 12'x12' room, I might add. Unfortunately the room has SW exposure, so the sun is on it from mid morning until sunset! I need a seriously big tree! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Mr-Movies,

The problem with a Peltier cooler is the danger of water molecules collecting and causing corrosion on the motherboard. The water it makes is distilled water, which is non-conductive and non corrosive. It's the impurities that the distilled water collects from anything it touches that causes the corrosion. That and they are horribly inefficient. I have a friend sophocles, who used to belong to this forum 5 years ago or so, that has an air conditioned case that uses a Peltier device as the cooler. I think the case draws more power than the computer! LOL!! Sam would know the name of the case I think.

One serious warning to anyone thinking they will go down to Radio Shack and pick up a Peltier device and sandwich it between the CPU and the CPU Cooler, and that's it. WRONG! There are so many ways you can get yourself into a world of trouble. Check this guide. http://www.dansdata.com/pelt.htm It's old but still one of the best guides for Peltier devices for CPU Cooling, and the guy who wrote it made it easy to understand. The bottom line is that if you are willing to do everything necessary and by the book, you can have a very good cooling system for the CPU. Be warned, it's a lot of hard work, and you have to do all of it perfectly!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

A complete WC solution would take care of your SB750 southbridge so it is still the way to go. If I’m going to water cool a system I’m going to do it right and not just WC the CPU even though it is much cheaper to do that.

I would use Peltier system as a water chiller and not as a direct chip solution, as I'm aware of the issues of doing it the way you suggested and the way they marketed it for PC's when it first hit the market. Before anyone I knew of or even mentioned the possible problems I was already onboard with the issues and would not have made that mistake. I always try to think of what could go wrong and what the benefits are whenever I solicited a new approach, that's the engineer in me.

Stevo

 

The Peltier sounds interesting, but it also sounds risky. I would put my computer in a sealed mineral oil tank, before I'd allow a peltier near my $h!t LOL! I may just try that one day too

 

The chiller would be outside of your PC just like a refrigerator so there would be no risk to your PC. You would have extra heat in your room though due to the backside of the plate(s). If the chiller or the pump goes out then your PC would overheat but that is true with fans and WC anyway. It would be a very quiet system the only noise coming from the impeller & PS’s fan of course. Dust build up would also be reduced with less airflow too. It would be a pain to do all of this so it would only be used in extreme cases of course.

 

Mmm, chilling a radiator would definitely have its uses. I may try that one day. OF course the power requirement is an eye opener

 

Yup that would be another issue although I don't think you would need to run a dedicated 220v service.

 

Stevo,

A complete WC solution would not have helped me with my SB750, as the chip was defective. I had the misfortune to get two in a row that were bad. Turned out to be a bad batch of SB750 chips!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Eek! That's all I have to say about that! What if my problem is a bad SB!

 

Sorry about that Russ I didn't follow you I guess on that talk about luck. What are the odds of getting two SB's bad? Wow!

Kevin have you run chkdsk on your drives maybe one of your USN's has gotten corrupt that too can cause flakey problems.

 

Oooops DP sorry....

 

I usually use a utility to check the health of my drives. Speedfan or Everest. But I'll give the chkdsk utility a go

 

Was it the SB750s or the SB700s that were the unreliable ones? I know AMD had a dodgy southbridge version that had a lot of failures.

 

I wonder if that accounts for the issues I had with 3 different ASRock boards I had with SB750's on them. Probably not becuase it was always USB issues so I'm guessing it was their poor drivers but you never know?

 

Sam,

I know the SB700 chips had problems initially. but the story I got on those SB750s is that they were rejects that somehow got mixed in with good chips, and shipped to Gigabyte. I was just lucky enough to get two of them in a row.

Russ

 

Or rather unlucky enough

Chkdsk complete. Clean. Further, I'm 99% sure that a lockup occurred during the chkdsk utility. It hung during step 4 file verification. The drive became very quiet, and the LED was full on for ~10+ seconds. As is typical with the lockup. I wonder if I'm somehow getting a port timeout on one ore more drives?

 

That sounds like USN verification and it won't error even if it runs into an error(s). I had one freeze up for a couple of hours, never showed any errors and did this twice. The errors remained but if I opened a certain folder explorer would freeze up on me everytime. Even if you run a MFG disk diag on it it will test fine but the NTFS journal is corrupt. To fix the problem you have to copy the data off the drive to another drive or make a backup image, some use HDCopy, and then reformat the drive and start over.

 

Let's assume for a moment that that's the case. How does that happen? And this particular bug has never happened to me before. And why wouldn't a reinstall of windows 7 be effective?