water cooling, ease of maintenance?

telemachus

Hi, i've been asked by a friend to put together something of a monster specced system for his son (the lucky little bastard ), now i've worked out roughly what components to stick in and soforth but for something that's going to amount to over two grands worth of kit, and brimming with overclocking potential it seems something of a waste to pop a fifty euro fan on the cpu.

If it was my own machine (if only) i'd be more than happy to tinker with water cooling kits and so on, but the thing is once i'd put it together and thoroughly tested it i'd need to be confident it'd run without problems by itself (the kids only 12 and wouldn't be going anywhere near the inside of the machine). What sort of maintenance would a water cooling kit need roughly, and would it be feasible to have a water cooled machine owned by someone realtively clueless to the inside of their machine? Cheers for any advice, i'm just somewhat fearful of being confronted with a steaming semi melted mess down the road .

Kintarō Hattori

You could go with a Coolermaster Aquagate Mini. It'll water cool the system and doesn't require any maintenace. It's good to go from the box. Coolermaster say it won't need any topping up for 2 years.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/aquagater120/

Endurance Man

If you go for a simple kit you should be okay for a good while. Eventually it will need to be topped up but most can go for months and years .

gline

Endurance Man wrote:

If you go for a simple kit you should be okay for a good while. Eventually it will need to be topped up but most can go for months and years .

this is true, most kits dont need to be topped up for months. Just ask the kids dad to check the water level every so often, or even better get a case with side window so u can visibly see the level and it is easy to check, and have mbm installed so if the temps go too high u know it needs a top up

Cuddlesworth

If it doesnt leak within the first 24 hours it never will. TRy a swiftek h2o xtreme kit if you want to go wild

telemachus

Thanks for all the advice, the refill periods and stability once it's initially setup are encouraging. I don't suppose anyone has any reccomendations as to a case/kit combination, it's just I recall looking at getting a water cooling kit for my own system and after looking at the measurements it seemed a pretty awkward squeeze, are there any particularily well proportioned cases about, or even some made with reservoir/rads in mind?

Cuddlesworth

I plan to pick up one of these after christmass.

http://mountainmods.com/product_info.php?cPath=21_61&products_id=255

Review of one of their cases here
http://www.systemcooling.com/mountain_mods_u2-ufo-01.html

Sparky

yeah dub, has one of them heavily modified.

Cuddlesworth

Is there any need to mod one of them?

DemonOfTheFall

I have no idea why anyone would want that case... It's the biggest monstrosity i've ever seen. The Stacker is easily big enough to fit a 3 rad WC setup and half a dozen HDDs, I've no idea why you'd want more!

Cuddlesworth

I have a stacker, and its not big enought to accomidate a triple rad comfortably. Those cases have a huge amount of space needed with wc setups because they are a bitch to take apart in a normal case.

stevenmu

I guess I'm the most conservative person on these boards. Imho if he's never going to look inside it, it's hardly worth the hassle of watercooling, presumably he won't even think of overclocking ? I'd just stick a nice zalman in it with a bit of AS5, maybe some nice quite coolers for the GPUs too. Nice and simple.

Tbh I've never had a WC setup myself, but one thing I always wondered about them is how easily you can just pick one up and move it.

Cuddlesworth

Mines been taken to a few lans. No problems so far. The kits that use barbs are dependable, the quick connect can sometimes leak if moved out of position.

gline

stevenmu wrote:

I guess I'm the most conservative person on these boards. Imho if he's never going to look inside it, it's hardly worth the hassle of watercooling, presumably he won't even think of overclocking ? I'd just stick a nice zalman in it with a bit of AS5, maybe some nice quite coolers for the GPUs too. Nice and simple.

Tbh I've never had a WC setup myself, but one thing I always wondered about them is how easily you can just pick one up and move it.

you have a point, if its for a person that will never even look inside the case or overclock then there isnt much point in a WC setup.... a thermalright or zalman hsf would do well (even if he did end up overclocking at some stage), then you could save the money you could have spent on a WC setup and get a better gfx