making the switch to liquid

procupine14

greetings all i have returned to this forum after my absence to deal with college and other things. I didn't really have any time to post nor to mess with my computer with my job and all so its good to be finally in college and working limited hours.

But enough about that ......i am switching to liquid cooling and want to get some feedback on the products that i have bought for this new system.

Basically is there anything i need to return and get something better.

here we are:

Danger Den DD-CPX1 12V 3-Pin Powered Pump - (DD-CPX1)
Danger Den Black Ice Micro 80mm Radiator (Black) w/ Customizable Fittings
Koolance CPU-300-V10, 3/8" (10mm) CPU Water Block
Swiftech MCRES-MICRO Small Form Factor / High-Flow Reservoir

did i do well?

Lelisevis

You did do well buddy but is there really a need, What was your goal when you set out? I ran my 5200+ 24/7 at 3ghz on air with a Zalman CNPS7500-AM2 which was near enough silent and had room for a little more. If it's for the graphics card you could invest in a 8800GTS/GTX instead for much bigger improvements than any GPU OC would give you.

Just a thought to consider.

procupine14

well, as of right now the Enzotech Ultra X cooler that I currently have i am running at full speed all the time with minimal temperature improvements. Therefore i want to switch the CPU cooling to liquid to combat the lack of proper air circulation in my case. As for the graphics, I'm staying with a conventional fan and no modding with it will take place. I plan on in the future (when budget allows) to upgrad it anyway. therefore, just a slight OC to it for now will get me by. Also i think that by eliminating all the ambient heat that my Enzotech is creating now will solve some NB temp problems.

thats the story with that

ChaosMinionX

Whats your budget on watercooling?

procupine14

well the current system (above that i just bought) is about $160 and the reason for buying that style of rad etc is for the limited amount of space i have left in my case

procupine14

update.....i have finished installing my liquid system and i will have pics up on the "show your rig off" forum as soon as i find the usb cable to my camera

In any case....the system is as shown above and I'm sitting at the mid 40's C @ 2.989 Ghz

yeah i couldn't get a stable three. Windows would not boot

other than that everything is in my system and running for two days now and no leaks whatsoever

Lelisevis

Cool......literally. Looking forward to seeing it.

Is that 40C full load?

procupine14

well it never gets above 50C at full load and stays mid 40s while working...I'm getting some more tubing right now because i need to change a few things around but other than that its working flawlessly

josh2thad

Nice OC there
Couldn't get a stable 3Ghz? Ive seen many of these 5200+'s @3.0-3.3Ghz i do realize that every chip has its wall and they are all different but what was unstable about it? What voltage you have it at?

Lelisevis

Procupine I hope your reading this. Ive just looked at your 3dmark06 pic and I see your using the Asus tool to read your temps. Dont ask me why but that tool reads your cpu temp as mb and vice versa. I have exactly the same problem with my Asus board.

I thought when you posted above that your idle temp was a bit high. My 5200+ at 3ghz used to idle between 28c and 32c and that was with a zalman 9700 air cooler. Try using coretemp to measure the cpu cores. If this is the case you might get more stable overclocks by lowering the NorthBridge with a small fan.

procupine14

oh really??! i never knew that lol ouch
thanks for the info

Lelisevis

Core Temp

Here you go dude, will give you your individual core temp.

procupine14

sweet....yeah it does show backwards.....that means that all this time my north bridge has been suffering :'(
that sucks

Lelisevis

LOL glad I could help matey. When you first posted those idle temps I was thinking shit how am I going to break it to him that those temps are insane. Then by co-incidence I was starting to OC my my processor and I noticed that everytime core 1 temperature raised on Coretemp the NB temp on the Asus tool matched it.
Believe it or not the same fault is replicated on Nvidia's own Ntune monitoring program.
Anyway now you know that it's probably a high chipset temp holding you back. If it has a finned copper heatsink on it you should be able to screw a small fan directly to it which may help a little. However now your running with water you may want to look into including the chipset in your loop.

procupine14

yeah i probably will.....i'm running that factory junk heat tube to sink thing (i'm assuming that you know what i'm talking about) that ASUS swears up and down works like a charm....i just removed it, for now, and scraped off the clay that they call thermal paste and put on some nice AS-5 until i can get a NB water block

H3X4D3C1M4L

I was about to say...50's on a 5200 watercooled, OC'ed or no, would be sad. Damn them pesky northbridges.

Slap a water block on it and assuming it wasn't really the chip, say hello to an easy 3GHz

Lowfat

Not to say you made a horrible choice or anything, but you could of likely done better for the money. Unfortunately that Koolance block is a very poor performer for the $$.

procupine14

yeah i actually went for a thermaltake air cooler for the NB for now it seems to be holding up since the location of my northbridge sits directly below my GFX card its very hardto get anything slim enough to get under there. that is the reason i got the thermaltake NB cooler that rotates and uses heatpipes. once i slap a different fan on there I'll be good to go

as for the quality of my waterblock im not too worried as of yet. The thing doesn't leak and I idle at 29C so I'm happy with it for now. it may get replaced soon but not quite yet

procupine14

to be honest...unless you are using hot water I don't even know how you would pull that off

and even then the heat would dissipate eventually

H3X4D3C1M4L

Yeah... using hot water makes little sense, I think we can all universally agree on that

procupine14

lol yeah