Sandy's Blog

Using water to cool computers is nothing new. I always thought ‘I will get round to it’, but to be perfectly honest it has always been too expensive and the options available have been too shonky.

Two dark moons must have collided during the middle of last week (round about the time when I caught office plague - aka the cold), and I bought a Zalman Reserator 1 Plus from Ebay.

The reasons you may want to cool your computer with water (as opposed to air) are as follows:

• More Efficient - Water conducts heat well, and using pumps you can move the heat somewhere else (i.e away from the critical parts of your computer)
• Noise Reduction - Air cooling means lots of noisy fans. Water cooling requires almost inaudible pumps
• Geek Points - Goes without saying really, although not something to boast about around normal people

It arrived on Friday in a huge box. At this point I was regretting the purchase conceding that I was just on a geek train, and I bought it because the illness had confined me to the house to think up crazy stuff like this, kinda like comfort eating for geeks.

Anyway, I open it all up. The main part of the system is a huge black tower sits near your computer and dissipates heat. It has an EU plug (two prong), and I needed to get distilled water and thermal paste. Right at this moment i’m teetering on sending the whole thing back, but I grit my teeth, replace the plug, and take a trip to Halfords for the water.

The Install

1. Figure out what the hell is going on

   I try to work out how the schematic in the manual will apply to my PC. The case I have is quite small and there is not much room left in it. Basically I had to think up a way in which I could test the water system for leaks without damaging my computer, but without having to disconnect and reconnect everything after the test to do the final install. I figured as long as I get everything in the right order, the only place it would have to traverse my computer would be the entry point (though the PCI slots - horizontal expansion cards at the rear).
   I decide to take my time here and familiarise myself with all the parts, and then do a final check for CPU (Main Computer Processor) and GPU (Graphics Card Processor) compatibility. These are the main generators of heat in my computer, and the kit basically gives you aluminum and copper ‘waterblocks’ to put on these chips. These blocks conduct heat well, and water system runs through these blocks taking the heat away from them (and therefore taking the heat away from the Processors).

   
2. Plumbing

   One huge bit of anti-kink hose, one clueless and ill geek. I work out how much tube I will need to go between the CPU and GPU but avoiding the power supply (roughly 30cm). So I cut and fit. I now start to realise what I have paid the best part of £200 for. The blocks, tubing and fittings are very high quality, like stuff you would get in industry as opposed to consumer grade equipment. I became much more confident about the ability of the kit here, there is a water flow indicator (thats right - indicator, not alarm) that fits onto the pipe, and fittings (with quick release) that connect to the Reserator (big black tower). This part went fine.

   
3. Graphics Card

   My graphics card has a very puny heatsink and fan on it which I will have to remove. Cue 10 minutes of attacking with pliers, before I manage to lever it off with a screwdriver. The kit came with ram heatsinks for my graphics card - I didn’t ask for them but thought there would be no harm sticking them on the graphics card anyway. I stick the mounting kit (with washers and everything) on the card, but leave the GPU waterblock off because I haven’t tested it yet.

   
4. Main Processor

   At this point I realise I have made a slight schoolboy error. To mount the CPU waterblock using the supplied fittings I would need to remove the motherboard (the huge rectangular thing at the back that everything else plugs into) from the case fittings - i.e a complete strip-down. Bah. So anyway I take all the PCI cards out, unscrew all the motherboard screws (thank god for the electric screwdriver), and pull the motherboard out.
   Now playing with motherboards always makes me nervous. I’m sure that I managed to knacker my old computer by faffing with the motherboard and applying too much force, to what is generally a precision piece of equipment. The old bike mechanic saying of ‘if it doesn’t go, force it’ really does not apply here. Anyway, I manage to put the base fittings on ok, and put everything back into the computer. Sorted.

   
5. Water System Test

   So everything is connected. I double check all the fittings by giving them a slight tug. All ok. I fill up the system with just over 2l of distilled watter, and 500ml of supplied coolant (I’m guessing its similar to anti-freeze - it stops your system freezing but also boiling?). Sweet, a nice aqua tinge appears in the flow indicator. Nothing leaking yet .. I turn on the pump. Still all good, nothing leaking. The manual says leave it on for an hour and check for leaks, so I go out for a few hours. When I come back nothing has spilled out so I assume that is a pass.

   
6. Fitting

   Firstly I apply 3g of thermal paste onto the graphics card GPU core (this has quite a large area so I use it all). I then slide on the waterblock and secure it using the fittings. The graphics card then fits nicely into the AGP socket. Attaching the waterblock to the main processor was a bit trickier to do. Firstly I was using the wrong length of screws initially, and the force I was using to try and fix the waterblock down could have easily damaged the CPU core. At one point the waterblock (~1 Kg of copper) was skating around on top of the core - not good! I eventually manage to lock it down, then realise that the hoses for the water are tangled and I need to take it off to get the correct routing - goddamit! I take it off and fix it down again - correctly this time.

   
   
7. Complete System Testing

   With everything connected properly and plugged in, I switch the beast on. To be perfectly honest I wasn’t expecting it to work, I had literally unplugged everything, moved everything around, put a lot of force on fragile components etc etc. But it worked first time … sigh of relief. My computer, sitting on my kitchen table with the inside exposed, made one hell of a racket. This was because I still had 2 fans & loads of hard drives in the computer, plus the table acted like an amplifier. But at least it worked, thank god.

   
8. PSU, Hard Drives, Fan(s)

   My PSU (Power Supply) had 2 large and noisy fans in it, and they didn’t seem to be extracting much heat. So out comes the power drill, out goes the warranty, and I nuke the fans. One of the fans was right against sheet aluminum anyway so I doubt it was much use. My computer had a few unused hard drives and a floppy drive in it, which I take out and store (will sell them later). I stick everything back together, tidy stuff up and install one variable speed case fan in the 3.5″ drive bays, projecting towards the RAM slots (memory) and Northbridge, secured using cable ties of course!

Impressions/Overall Opinion

It is very good. And reasonably quiet - passes the sleep test (I can fall asleep easily with my computer on, which is good considering I live out in the boonies!). My CPU temperature, which used to hover around 60-65 degrees idle, had dropped to around 30 degrees idle. This is obviously a good thing. Although this was not the primary reason why I bought the kit, I have had a go at overclocking my system a little (running it a bit faster than it was initially made to run), with some success.

sdt@tard ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2100+
cpu MHz : 1760.263
bogomips : 3525.88

Thats from ~1666 Mhz, so around a 100Mhz improvement - stable. Nice. On a loaded system (doing something intensive where both the GPU & CPU are used) while overclocked, the temperature can get up towards 45 degrees. The graph below was is me playing quake 3 from a previously idle system, and 1 horizontal unit is 2 seconds (i.e whole graph is about 25 minutes).

So is water cooling your computer worth the money? This is a difficult question to answer, it is expensive and it doesn’t make your computer any faster. The only real improvement that most people would care about is reduced noise. I am reckoning that it is an overkill solution to cooling, and will support any upgrades I make in the next 3-4 years (if I buy suitable waterblocks etc).

It just depends on how important aesthetics are to you. If you are one of these people who are still using CRT monitors, forget it. But if you moved to a LCD monitor and really appreciate the difference it made on your eyes, its that sort of change just not so apparent. The installation of this system definitely isn’t for wimps either, although I had no trouble - I do stuff like this all the time. Can you really afford to catastrophically break your computer?