Water Cooling Tutorial & Install Guide How-To
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!
This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 1:51 am and is tagged with antec sonata 2, arctic silver 5 thermal compound, pci express x16, pc watercooling, arctic silver 5, seagate barracuda, desktop motherboard, sonata ii, kingwin aquastar, water plug, case test, quiet fans, supply fans, room temp, case fans, 512m, cpu cooler, antifreeze, air duct, water cooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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11/20/2006 at 2:06 pm
[...] Ook benieuwd hoe je waterkoeling in je PC bouw? Elliott Back geeft een aardig beeld. [...]