Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Introduction

If you’ve ever wanted a quiet, affordable cooling solution for your PC, watercooling is for you. Even a case designed for quiet fans can be too noisy and run too hot on today’s power-hungry hardware. Personally, I was finding with three case fans, a CPU cooler, two power supply fans, and the build in fan on my graphics card, that the system got too hot. And, it was noisy as hell!

My desktop is made up of the following components:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M sharing L2 Cache LGA 775
• 4 GB PC2 5300 RAM
• Intel Desktop Motherboard D975XBX
• Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
• ASUS EAX1900 CrossFire 512M PCI Express x16
• Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Case

Before installing the water cooling solution, my graphics card idled at 60° C:

Afterwards, it hovers around 40° C a little warmer than room temp:

The Solution

For only $89.99 you can buy the KINGWIN Aquastar AS-3000 cooling system. I also added a little Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound to my order, although the Kingwin system comes with its own thermal paste you can use. You’ll also need distilled water.

What you get from this is a device which sits in two 5 1/2″ bays and pumps water to a CPU block and a GPU block. It comes with adapters to fit virtually all (read the product description for a list) processors and video cards, hoses, screws, antifreeze, and more. Everything you might need is included.

Unboxing

Let’s take a look at what Kingwin gives you for $90:

Installation

Here is what my system looks like before any work is done:

The Antec Sonata 2 case has a weird air-duct which needs to be removed:

Outside of the case, you’ll need to assemble the GPU and CPU pads and connect them with the hosing to the pump unit for an out-of-case test. You don’t want leaks inside your case, so we run it outside first. Connect the hoses, unscrew the cap, add the antifreeze, top up with distilled water, plug into the case power, and run for a while. Technically distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity, but I don’t want to find out.

Our first problem is that the screw mounts don’t fit our drive bays–we need to remove the top mounts, which is no biggie:

Success! Time to connect the heat-blocks:

Installing the GPU block

The ATI 1950 is funny, because it includes its own huge fan and cooling block. You need to completely remove it, and attach your the heating block, using the Geforce 6800 clip they provide. Don’t forget the thermal grease!

Installing the CPU block

Interestingly, the thermal paste on the CPU was pretty bad, so I improved it. This step is is hard as taking off the previous CPU block and adding the watercooled one:

The Final Product

Note that the water cooling system doesn’t work sideways, so you have to test it right-side up. But that aside, here’s what it looks like installed and running!

9 Responses to 'Water Cooling Tutorial & Install Guide How-To'

1. cjcm said:

   on November 20th, 2006 at 3:38 am

   OMG…I wish I have a PC configured like yours. What do you use it for mainly? Surfing and blogging doesnt need that much power..

   One question, with that cooling device, you still need all those noisy fans? I guess you cant take them off right? So it still noisy as hell?

2. Elliott Back said:

   on November 20th, 2006 at 3:40 am

   I left one case fan on the back, but I think I’m going to rip it out relatively soon–it’s not doing much good. There’s also a fan on the front, but I can control the speed, so I just leave it off now. There’s really not much need for fans inside the case anymore.

3. Watercooler | Bakkel dot com said:

   on November 20th, 2006 at 2:06 pm

   […] Ook benieuwd hoe je waterkoeling in je PC bouw? Elliott Back geeft een aardig beeld. […]

4. l said:

   on November 20th, 2006 at 4:01 pm

   for a person with such a powerful pc, i sure don’t see you on steam very much!

5. Cibbuano said:

   on November 20th, 2006 at 6:49 pm

   damn, that’s a lot of money… I built a similar system for about $10-15, I guess.

   Just need rubber tubing, a block of aluminum and a TEC.

6. Elliott Back said:

   on November 20th, 2006 at 7:46 pm

   $89 is not that much! I would need a lot of mechanical parts to be able to put together something similar–for example to work in copper tubing I’d need copper-tube melting equipment, shaping equipment, threading equipment, etc….

7. Tom said:

   on December 16th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

   Hey mate, 60 degree celcius for a IDLE pc is really bad. What is your ambiant temperature? 50? Cause that’s 1 impossible, 2 quite hot. I would suspect you’re using many usb hardware as those amplify the processors’ temperature in order to manage them. If you remove all your usb hardware, you should easily be able to go at 20-25 especially with water cooling.

8. Dash said:

   on June 27th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

   what did you use to record your temps? im about to install liquid cooling in my PC and id like to see what improvment i make.

9. Elliott Back said:

   on June 30th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

   I recorded them with a random software to record CPU temp sensors off the BIOS. You can google for something?

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