I just cut back on my watercooling...

[kleptophobiac]

I used to have three water blocks in my setup. There was a maze3 on the CPU, a DD maze4 on the GPU, and a dtek 'fsb' on the NB. All of this was a tubing routing nightmare, as well as the latter two blocks being rather poorly designed. The FSB block's barbs are too close together, and it uses to damned smooth barb (LEAK!!) and it didn't come with a sealant between the barbs and the top plate. Thumbs down. The maze4 gpu was at least sealed, but the barbs stuck out so much that anybody without a wide case (aka, lianli) couldn't get the hoses to come out at a flat enough angle to prevent gpu damage. Thumbs down.

Anyway, I also figured they weren't helping me that much anyway, so I ditched them. Now I'm back to a simple maze3 and a chevette heater core in my loop, pumped by my trusty mag3.

Anybody else cut back on their water cooling setups recently?

 

[cgrant26]

Yeah, I really would have liked it if my Maze4 GPU cooler had the barbs sticking out towards the back of the vid card instead of sideways. I was a bit disappointed to see that sideways was the only way to mount it. I too have a tube routing mess in my case. (at least it's nice and wide though)

 

[stumpy]

What kind of performance decrease have you seen (temps, overclocks) by not cooling the NB and graphics card? Most people don't recommend putting a NB block on, and I'm not, but I've never actually seen any temp comparisons or related benchmarks.

 

[kleptophobiac]

My temp difference between CPU + GPU and CPU + GPU + NB was negligible (maybe 1°C max, but that could be fudge error), and my FSB didn't budge. The NB block was worthless. The difference between CPU and CPU + GPU was about 4°C. My video card overclocks about the same, memory went up a little (more airflow, I guess... I now have a vga silencer rev 3) but core went down a little. In the end the performance didn't change either way.

I'm happier with my one block setup; less water volume, less mess, more reliable, lower CPU temp.