Water cooling towers for PC's , are they worth it?

I was thinking of getting a water cooling device for my PC. Are they really worth the money? It seems the "better" ones are rather expensive,over $200.00 US, so the cost savings for the amount of energy saved would take a great deal of time to get paid back. Is there any validity in the fact a PC tower works better the cooler it is, and are the costs worth the effort?
There are other cooling devices for the motherboards, HD, processors and graphics cards, are they any help?
Thank you in advance for your responses.

 

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Na. I recently built myself a new system. P4 2.8 gHz (shucks, I just missed the 64 bit AMD), 120 gb hard drive, 2 gigs RAM, 800 mHz front side bus, ATI 128 mb Radeon 9600. I researched cooling systems and got a CPU mounted fan with huge heat sink as well as some case fans. Ends up I don't really need the case fans (my Intel PERL main board has a number of temperature sensors in various locations). The fan is quiet, which is something I greatly appreciate. This board is supposed to give me some overclocking options and if I did that maybe I'd have to ramp up the speed of the CPU cooler fan (nice option as I ramped it down to minimize noise while watching where the temperature was acceptable) or use a more agressive cooling system, but, for less than 30 bucks I'm fairly state of the art and I retain the KISS principle, Keep It Simple Smarty. Use the money you save from not buying an expensive cooler system towards the fastest processor you can get. You might want to wait a year for the dual core designs.

A good graphics card will come with a fan and heat sink.

Looks like this system may last me a year or two and then? back to the drawing board.

 

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Unless you plan on overclocking your system heavily I wouldn't waste your money on my machine! I overclock like the devil (running about 700 Mhz over speed) but still use a fan with a large heatsink and added a few case fans, nothing more.

 

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I'm extremely leery about letting water into my system. Even with excellently crafted parts, eventually they will fail and you will have a disaster on your hands. And unless you're overclocking to the point where you really need it, water-cooling is just asking for trouble.

 

My friend built his own. It worked well until it broke. If you suspect that your system runs too hot, then you might want to try it. Usually a good CPU fan and a little thermal grease works fine.

Your system may not be so cool when the water line breaks

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oh, here are some cases that not only look cool but work well. You can surf around the site for really inexpensive suner-cooling mechanisms. http://www.xoxide.com/allcases.html

 

The problem is they won't guarantee them for leakage. I'm a little leery if they wont give a guarantee with these products.

 

Exactly. Stick to traditional cooling methods. if your CPU runs so hot that you need special cooling then there is a problem.

 

Sitting here in my office with 10machines and 30 fans all up. My senses are bombarded with the sound of these fans. The only reason I would go water cooling is to reduce the noise pollution. But water cooling requirers to much maintenance, making sure the levels are good, putting in anti bacterial poisons. For now ill put up with the sound but look forward to the day that a cheap passive heat transfer system becomes available that does not make any sound at all. I remember reading about a system some time back but cant remember the details. Time for a google search.

 

The best reason for watercooling is to overclock without the noise of standard air cooling. Some of the more extreme air cooling can make it hard to be in the same room as the computer.

If overclocking isn't your intent, then some careful shopping can yield some very quiet air cooling. You may even want to consider underclocking your CPU if you really want quiet.

All cooling questions answered here.

 

Thank you for the link Repo.

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