Water cooling

[Julian Richards]

I got a cheap deal on a water cooling system on Ebay. It has a block
for an Athlon XP and a graphics card block. I hope that it will fit my
Powercolor 9800SE. Does anyone have any experience of such things?

A more general point. Is it time for the PC industry to bite the
bullet and water cool as standard on new ready built PCs? It must be
more efficient than fans everywhere, especially with these new cooling
fluids.
--

Julian Richards
computer "at" richardsuk.f9.co.uk

www.richardsuk.f9.co.uk
Website of "Robot Wars" middleweight "Broadsword IV"

 

[First of One]

I got a cheap deal on a water cooling system on Ebay. It has a block
for an Athlon XP and a graphics card block. I hope that it will fit my
Powercolor 9800SE. Does anyone have any experience of such things?

It most probably will fit. The Radeons 9xxx cards (except for the 9800XT)
has the same heat sink bolt pattern as all the earlier video cards (Geforce3
and back). It's a fairly standard pattern.

In the end it's still just a 9800SE, though, about as fun as modding a
4-cylinder Camry, or a V6 Mustang... Don't start with something
fundamentally slow and hope to wring speed out of it.

A more general point. Is it time for the PC industry to bite the
bullet and water cool as standard on new ready built PCs? It must be
more efficient than fans everywhere, especially with these new cooling
fluids.

Is it really more efficient? Have you taken a look inside recent Dell PCs? A
few ducts and you can cool even high-end systems with two large, quiet fans.
Apple has actually shipped water-cooled systems; the systems cost as much as
a kidney in Third World markets.

 

[Julian Richards]

It most probably will fit. The Radeons 9xxx cards (except for the 9800XT)
has the same heat sink bolt pattern as all the earlier video cards (Geforce3
and back). It's a fairly standard pattern.

In the end it's still just a 9800SE, though, about as fun as modding a
4-cylinder Camry, or a V6 Mustang... Don't start with something
fundamentally slow and hope to wring speed out of it.

I've got 8 pipelines running.
--

Julian Richards
computer "at" richardsuk.f9.co.uk

www.richardsuk.f9.co.uk
Website of "Robot Wars" middleweight "Broadsword IV"

 

[J. Clarke]

I got a cheap deal on a water cooling system on Ebay. It has a block
for an Athlon XP and a graphics card block. I hope that it will fit my
Powercolor 9800SE. Does anyone have any experience of such things?

A more general point. Is it time for the PC industry to bite the
bullet and water cool as standard on new ready built PCs? It must be
more efficient than fans everywhere, especially with these new cooling
fluids.

Liquid cooling is not fire and forget and some of its failure modes are
destructive even on machines that can autothrottle sufficiently to protect
themselves from a dead fan.

As for "fans everywhere", open up a PowerEdge or a Netfinity sometime and
you'll be surprised at how few fans there are. They're big fans, but there
are only a few and carefully designed ducting.

On the other hand, few machines have as many (hot-swappable) fans as an
Intel-brand PII Xeon server.

 

[doctor.ratt]

Liquid cooling is not fire and forget and some of its failure modes are
destructive even on machines that can autothrottle sufficiently to protect
themselves from a dead fan.

As for "fans everywhere", open up a PowerEdge or a Netfinity sometime and
you'll be surprised at how few fans there are. They're big fans, but there
are only a few and carefully designed ducting.

seconded.
my latest case is a thermaltake tsunami dream. it has a
full-case-width fan at front & rear and a standard-sized blowhole on
the side.
even in the warm, close weather we've had of late my temps have never
gone above 40celsius under full load - a64venice, 6600, 2xpata hdds.

dr ratt

 

[First of One]

If it's got the full 128-bit memory interface, then I stand corrected.

 

[Thomas]

If it's got the full 128-bit memory interface, then I stand
corrected.

I believe it's 256-bit even ;-) A full 9800 Pro!

 

[Thomas]

I got a cheap deal on a water cooling system on Ebay. It has a block
for an Athlon XP and a graphics card block. I hope that it will fit my
Powercolor 9800SE. Does anyone have any experience of such things?

I bought a Swiftech MCW50 to complete my watercooling setup. This little
thing really helpen my overclocking... Some notes on my watercooling can be
read at
http://tvdh.getmyip.com/navigation/Pentium4.htm

 

[Doug]

You think a PC server uses a lot of fans? Try looking at a video server
sometime. Encoding/decoding/streaming broadcast quality- NTSC/PAL/HDTV along
with 16-bit, 44Mhz stereo audio streams to/from high-speed, fiber channel
disk arrays creates huge amounts of heat and data that few fileservers will
ever see. Broadcast quality video servers cost in the $50K to $100K price
range and typically have six 120mm AC fans drawing air through the whole RU.