Watercooling

[Rookie]

I've been upgrading my PC to a HTPC over the last couple of months, and the major issue I want to sort at the moment is noise. I'm running it in a horrible beige Tiny case with fack-off big case fans, a noisy PSU and quite a lot of stuff packed in. So I want to sort out the aesthetics and cooling in one, so naturally I've been looking at watercooling.

Is it worth it? I'm not exactly running a supercomputer at the moment, only an Athlon 3000, so it would seem a bit overkill right now. However, I've noticed 9600 Phenom Quad Cores are rather cheap now, and a matching motherboard is reasonable aswell. If I pile that in is it going to need watercooling?

I've been looking at a Thermaltake case with integrated watercooling:

Thermaltake

And a NZXT Hush case - NZXT - with a Kalman Resorator v2 running. Zalman

If watercooling is worth it, which type is worth it? The Thermaltake comes in £70 less than getting a Zalman but if it's not any good the £70 would be well spent, I know the Zalman's are pretty much the best money can buy. It would have to be really good for me to put up with it though, as another box hanging around is something I really don't need, despite it's prettiness.

Or I could just buy my NZXT case, some silent fans, a nice fanless CPU cooler like a Mars which I'm not sure about because that seems to be the quietest you can buy, and it's still 16dBs, and a quiet PSU. Which brings me to the last issue.

Are fanless PSUs any good? I've been told they love to overheat, so when it comes to PSUs should I be looking at fanless, or ultra-quiet fan ones?

Any and all advice much appreciated.

[lllN30lll]

I think watercooling was originally designed for cooling purposes, not noise reduction.

if your not doing serious amounts of overclocking then i'd just stick to getting some very quiet fans instead.
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Turbo R1
CRF450R

[Rookie]

[lllN30lll]

[Rookie]

See that's where the Kalman would be great, since it's just a massive heat dissapating radiator there's no need for fans - I think there might be one little one.

[lllN30lll]

you mean the Zalman?

like i said, depends on which you buy, the better ones will be more expensive.

https://www.ebuyer.com/search/?intCatID=130&intSubcatUID=1349
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Turbo R1
CRF450R

[Tarmacsurfer]

Thermaltake boxes with the water system built in tend to have something of a bad rep, small bore pipes so not a great flow rate and alos a tendency to leak at the drop of a hat, they're primarily used by people who have no idea wtf they're doing and want to boast about their watercooled "rig". The Zalman setup is nigh on silent so for an HTPC, assuming you have the space, then it's not a bad solution. To be perfectly honest, I'd try a build with the hush case on air cooling and see what you think, water cooling can indeed make a system alot quieter (depending on pump and a few other variables) but it would probably be overkill for what you've got in mind.
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[Rookie]

[DEN MONKEY]

Ive got the thermaltake 765 I think it is with the dual radiators.
Runs on 3/8s and seems to do pretty well.
With the fans speed turned down its quiet as.
I do still run fans though for my video card.

If I had to do it over I probably would put together a custom kit and run 1/2 inch tubing.
This was my first go at it and for that I'm happy with the set up for the price.
It doesn't run a great deal cooler at idle but remains steady once under load.


You can see the dual rad on top of the pc and the piping at the back coming from the single rad mounted to the case.
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meh