How To Watercool Your PC

Enemy Number One

As you can see from my system specifications, I have a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4E with a Prescott core. This type of processor has been dubbed "pres-hot" as they are one of the hottest running CPU’s on the market. In fact they run so hot that Intel quickly redesigned and released a new version ("Cedar Mill") that runs much cooler.

Who needs a heater when you have a Prescott?

Typical idle temperatures for a processor are around 30-40°C, and up to 50-55°C when under load. My Prescott with the Intel heat sink and fan runs at about 54°C when IDLE and rises to 69°C under load! When the processor reaches 90°C its time to start worrying as we are now approaching meltdown. The processor will automatically shutdown at this temperature to prevent damage.

For any electrical component, temperature is enemy number one. There is an unwritten rule that a 10°C increase in temperature will half the lifespan of a processor. For example, a processor should last 10 years running constantly at 45°C. When running at 55°C constantly, the life span will be expected to only be 5 years.

Cooling

Soon after I installed this processor I purchased a Zalman flower cooler and several more fans to help with the temperatures, bringing them down to 50°C idle and 65°C load. This cooler is made of pure copper and has a much larger surface area than the Intel heat sink. It also features a much larger diameter fan. The problem with more and larger fans is that they create a lot of noise.

The larger the surface area on the heat sink, the more heat can be transferred to the air. Larger fans can move more air through the heat sink and is measured in cubic feet/minute (cfm).

Another (hot) year later, the extra fans and new heat sink were still not really dealing with the issue, just moving hot air around. I decided that it was still running far too hot (not to mention that the heat produced heats the room up). I could get even more fans (which create more noise), a different heat sink (which may not help much), constantly run the air conditioning on full power or I could try something a bit more extreme…

Water Cooling

After much careful consideration I decided to water cool my system. This decision was made after carefully considering many other options, such as a bigger heat sink and fan, ducting to direct cold air onto the processor, extractor fans and getting a blower fan for the Cooler master Stacker case. This would also greatly increase the noise levels of the computer (which is already loud). I was after a solution that would offer the greatest cooling for the least noise, and water-cooling is the most efficient method of heat dispersal and is nearly silent in operation.

I have never used water cooling before, so I decided to buy all the parts in kit form, rather than purchasing all the parts separate (and finding that I missed something). The kit I chose was the Swiftech H2O Apex Ultra +, which has won many awards and has a good reputation within the overclocking community as being a high performing, top quality kit. It was ordered late Friday afternoon from Overclockers.co.uk and it arrived early the following Monday.

This kit contains all the parts required to cool the processor, chipset and the graphics card, as well as all the hardware to install the kit into most computers platforms.

The Swiftech kit is supplied with the following items: