Overclocking Water Cooling

[Mr.E Mag Man]

Well I was browsing stuff for my new overclocking computer project (for those of you who don't know, you make your cpu run faster than usual.. like my old 300mhz got cranked to 450 :D ).. but the added stress on the CPU creates a lot of heat, as well as on the memory and video card, depending, etc, etc,.

But anyway! Most overclocking people use CPU fans which sound like weak vacuum cleaners, and heat sinks to dissipate the heat. (I've seen someone's setup that sucks 240 CFM through the case.. my modified car only does about 90 CFM)
The real crazy guys go for water cooling systems, which -you guessed it- pump water in and out of a plate connected to the cpu.. I saw one particular product today... looky looky.
http://coolbreez.com/merchant/graphics/00000001/mcw372.jpg

[DaXtremeist]

even crazier people use FREEON to cool there system : )

[Eagle]

Thats not unusual. Most of the electronics on my boat are AEFW (aux electronic fresh water) cooled

[Muzikman]

Hmm...those sure do look like MacroLine elbows to me...

[mykroft]

Muzikman: They probably are, anything that will hold air at 500psi will easily be watertight.

[joeyjoe367]

i dunno... I consider myself to be pretty knowlegdable about computers, but i don't trust this sort of thing...

just imagine if you bumped your computer (yeah, gettin' frustrated w/Counter-Strike or something :)) and it sprung a leak...

your $1000 + computer would have just gone down the drain.

...I'll stick to my air cooled CPU's... besides the differance between 350 MHz and 450 MHz isn't that great. and what use is a 450 MHz computer if the CPU is burned out and doesn't work? ;) That's just me tho

[shartley]

I was wondering if anyone would point out that 300 to 450 is NOT that big of a jump. LOL Thank you joeyjoe367.

In fact want to make a real difference with a 300MHz Computer? Double the RAM. RAM is dirt-cheap and will actually show more improvement than trying to over-clock by only 150MHz, and it causes none (or very few.. minus a slight heating) of the cooling and system issues that over-clocking tends to cause. Over-clocking anything under 600MHz, in MY opinion, is a total waste of time, energy, and borders on joke material. ;)

And besides… why bother going from 300 to 450 anyway? You can pick up double that for virtually NOTHING now days. It is like talking about taking a Chevette and adding on all the extra performance parts you can (and risk blowing the engine), to make it half as fast as a stock Nova.

I just get a kick out of these over-clocking threads...

“Man, I got my system cooking! I took my 300 and got it to run at 450!” .

To that I say..

“I surfed over to Dell and got my Son a Homework Computer (which is FAR from being top of the line) with a 1.1GHz Processor for ONLY $859.” LOL (Note: I did not actually DO this, but the price IS accurate.)

See my point? Look at how hard some of you guys jump on people who trick out a Spyder or BE? And the example I gave for computers is with NO special options or upgrades. It is also not a custom built computer, but one straight off the shelf. So, can we be a little more honest with ourselves when it comes to our computer “upgrades” and over-clocking? ;)

[Mr.E Mag Man]

I dunno what happened to my last reply, but yeah..
What interested me wasn't the fact that it was a water-cooled system, but that it was using macro line connectors.

I have a pentium 2, 300 mhz cpu, which is overclocked at 465mhz right now.. stock heatsink and fan and everything.
So, SHartley, yeah you can get speed really cheap nowadays, but hey, I got my extra speed for free :D

As SHartley said, it's no big deal, but the ratio jump from 300mhz to 465mhz does seem impressive.. If I could get the same results from a 2ghz pentium 4, I would have a 3.1 ghz computer :D But, sadly, I cannot (afford it, or overclock to 3.1).

For $308.00, I am gonna get a 1.4 ghz Athlon Kyhla Thunderbird, the best Heatsink/Fan combo, a purty red motherboard which happens to be the most stable KT133A mb there is, and a new power supply with a bunch of doodads.
This upgrade will let me overclock the 1.4 to 1.6ghz, with great stability. Speed is very cheap nowadays.

[shartley]

Mr.E Mag Man,
Thank you for not taking offense at my post. I am glad you realized it was not meant as a flame. :)

Your new project seems a bit more worthwhile. And I am glad your last one was free. That makes a big difference.

Let us know how it turns out. :D

[Ityl]

Ram and bus speed seem to make the biggest difference. I have a 933 128 ram at work (p3) and a 1 ghz 256 ram and home (p4) The P4 is a lot faster, you can't even compare. But there isn't much difference between the 500 I had before and the 933.

It's sad all I use the computer for is music, email and the internet...hehe.

[joeyjoe367]

Shartly, i agree with you on the RAM thing. RAM can really make a differance and nowadays it doesn't cost squat.

You can get 128 mb of ram for $10 or so, plus shipping @ www.pricewatch.com

It'll do a lot more for you than toasting your CPU.

ITLY: that's basically all I do also, but all at the same time :)

I do a bit of gaming also, but since there's no High bandwitdth available here, i'm limited to pretty low standard games.. :(

[adam68c]

Silly computer nerds go play outdoors or something.Its a nice day u really should be outside.lol:D

[belligerant1]

i'm packin a 1gig athlon, 320 megs ram, and a voodoo3. the only point i see in overclocking is to get better preformance in an inadequate piece of equiptment. like i get better framerates from my voodoo3 in cs than any geforce2's that i've ever seen. i overclcocked it from 143mhz to 195mhz stable w/ dual fans and a heatsink sandwich so as far as ocing goes i know what i'm doin, but see no need to oc my processor when it preforms fine. my vid card is diff though. i hope you see my point.

[Twiek]

I posted this origninally on the Tinker's Guild Tech Forum:

A while ago, someone mentioned the Koolance water cooling case. Well I finally had enough time to play around with the voltage settings on my Abit and tweak the CPU's maximum performance. Well....Onto the review:

http://home.cox.rr.com/pbshack/puter.gifhttp://home.cox.rr.com/pbshack/case.gif

The case has a "detachable" bottom that contains the resovoir (which has fins on top and bottom), pump, and electronics. There are 2 nipples that stick through the bottom of the case (one input, one output). The lines cool the CPU and Power supply, plus they have options for the chipset, video card, and hard drive. I got the chipset and video card, but I haven't installed them yet because I need to get some adhesive thermal compound for the video card (no mounting holes). The actual water jacket for the CPU is rather slim.

http://home.cox.rr.com/pbshack/water.gif

The base is copper, but even still, I can tell the system would benefit from a better water jacket. I'm sure it would also be more effective with some REAL thermal compound.

I have a Duron 750 currently (It's a LONG story, but it should have been an AXIA stepping 1300MHz 266MHz Bus T-Bird), on an Abit KT7A-RAID with the RMOD (ups the voltage by .2v). The CPU's not the fastest thing out there, but at $30 a piece, there isn't really anything that can even compare. Since everything AMD makes under 1200MHz has a multiplier lock, I'm running my 750 with a 7.5 multiplier and 124MHz bus speed, with a VCore of 1.72-1.73. That clocks to 931MHz. According to VIA Hardware Monitor, it stays under 40*C in windows (with all my crap running at the same time), and stays under 45*C when I'm running Unreal Tournament. I think the monitor over-estimates my set-up because the sensor is on the bottom of the CPU and the core is on the top, so it needs to "fudge" the numbers to make them look realistic. The case itself has a LED temp display of the jacket temp, and that always stays between 34*C and 36*C.

http://home.cox.rr.com/pbshack/temp.gif

When the jacket temp gets above 34*C, the three small fans in the back turn on at 45% power, and then progressively go faster as the processor heats up. One of the really nice things about this case is that it makes almost no noise. Most of the time when i'm sleeping and windows is idling, the fans aren't even on.... and the noise is nearly imperceptible.

I've actually gotten this setup to run stable at 1GHz, but I'm not too sure I wanna push it until I can get a really acurate reading on the core temp, and mabey get some thermal compound. Well, here are the benchmarks I had for it @ 931MHz:

http://home.cox.rr.com/pbshack/bench1.gif
http://home.cox.rr.com/pbshack/bench2.gif

As you can see, it outperforms the Duron 800 (which is supposedly 50MHz faster than mine), and almost comes into P3 1GHz range. I still have some memory/system bus optomizations to do, so I'm sure I can push a little more performance out of this budget rocket.

The cool thing (pun intended!) about this case is that it can be had for less than $200. That may seem like a lot for just a case, but if you think about it, it replaces a case AND a heatsink/fan combo. A good Inwin case (yes, Inwins are some of the more expensive cases) will run you $100, and a decent heatsink/fan combo will cost around $40.....

The quality of the case dosen't quite rank up with Inwin, but it certainly is well built, and I think the Koolance looks better.


Shartley: Overclocking has its advantages. I look at it this way: My case cost me....mabey $50 more than what I would have spent if had gone the conventional route. Mabey a Duron 900MHz costs less than $50 more than my 750.... However, if I own at least two processors while I have this set up, I will have paid for the price difference with my overclocking. If I can get my computer to run at 1GHz, then I will have more than paid for the difference. Sure you can buy a processor that's $50 more, but why not get a case that's $50 more that earns you $40 performance on every processor you put in there? And maybe it's not needed, but you can get performance otherwise unobtainable with a setup like this (running a 1400MHz Athlon at 1600MHz+). Or don't run the processor faster, but reduce the latency on the RAM, and still maintain stability (by keeping the CPU near room temp).

When you see posts like "I got my 333 to post at 600!", it's more about pushing the limits than making it "budget consious". Although, most of the time, a processor can be pushed slightly beyond its spec with the standard cooling equipment (usually 10%). Mabey it'll reduce the life expectancy of the processor from 15 years to 10, but who's gonna keep a processor around that long?

Mabey you've seen posts from 13 year old ego maniacs, but just because people spend money to overclock their computers dosen't mean its not worth it.

Just my $0.02

[Twiek]

Shartley, I'm not taking offense to your posts....and I certainly don't mean to be offensive or flame you; I'm just explaining the Overclocker's POV.

One more thing....300 to 450 IS a big jump. When you talk about processing speed, it's about percentages, not actual MHz gained. Say you had a processor intensive rendering program: It takes 6 hours to render this one scene on a 300MHz. But overclock it to 450, and it now only takes 4 hours. This obviously neglects x86 architecture, as the gain wouldn't be exactly that, but you can see the point. On the other hand if you had a 1450MHz that took 6 min, and you overclocked it 150MHz to 1600MHz, it would take 5 min, 55 sec. Not much of a gain.....

[shartley]

Twiek:
No offense was taken. You are correct. And you are correct on the overall posts concerning Over-clocking. And another reason no offense can be taken is you are talking about different things than most of the people posting.

With that said, I will stick to my statement about not even bothering with anything under 600MHz (other than doubling your ram). And you bring up dollar figures of $50 for this and $30 for that… let’s be honest, that is nothing. And when those amounts really MATTER, I would say, sure, play all you like. But if you want to do it right, get a better system. And even more so, when it is an old 300 or there-abouts. I am sure you understand I am not flaming you on this. I am just pointing out that there is a big difference between a 300 and a 600, and it goes much deeper than just the processor speeds (but you know this…. Others are reading our posts.).

You seem intelligent enough to see that there is a huge difference between the systems you describe over-clocking, and those normally posted about here on AO. The Bus speeds alone make a big difference. So your thoughts about 13 year olds were right on…. But some were not quite that young (same idea though).

I was commenting on the much older systems, not talking about the newer ones. I was also not talking about over-clocking as it pertains to everyone, just what I kept hearing here. So, again you are correct.

Personally, since I rely so much on my systems, I cannot afford to play those games for the relatively small change it makes. Let me explain a bit further if I may.

Sure, if you can get a process that takes 6 hours to complete a task, to do it in 5 hours, you saved a lot of time. But I will throw in that most home users don’t need that kind of processing time. What do they do that takes 6 hours of processing time, run a scan disk or defrag? LOL Most people are looking for a boost in speed with their games or Photoshop, or whatever. And that same boost from 6 hours to 5 hours will not even show with normal operating procedures. But if they took their RAM and doubled it…. It WOULD show. See my point? Not even mentioning the fact that most people could actually tweak their systems on an operating level, and not a hardware one and see a big difference (again, I am sure you know exactly what I am talking about).

And I DO do things that require 6 hours+ for processing. Take some of the Higher End CGI Animation, some of it takes 12 hours or more to render 30 seconds of decent quality footage (and this is using several processors). Now, what would the average home user be doing making this kind of stuff? Most play with FLASH now days, and the processing speeds needed to run THAT are not the same as what you need to work with Lightwave and 3D Studio Max, etc. and do so at professional levels.

One deals with rendering flip book style animation with a few cool twists, and the other deals with actually creating all elements IN the animation, in a 3D environment and does so each time for EVERY frame used. This being the case, do you think I would over-clock my systems, or simply buy the faster processors? And buy ones directly from the Major Manufacturers who will support them if they have problems. Thank God I don’t do much of that anymore though. LOL But I do use the same software, just for a different output.

As you can see, we are looking at the situation from totally different angles. And I think you are dead on with your observations as they pertain to home users with decent systems to begin with. But I will state again to put you at ease… I was not talking about the same types of systems you were working with. I was talking bout the ones far below them.

Thanks for your comments. This has been a great thread full of wonderful conversation and good information.

[Twiek]

Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't get my case to overclock it, it was mor of a side effect I got it because I will be sleeping next to it (in my dorm room), and I don't want 15 different fans to be making noise.... :p

When I'm downloading off morpheus or any such protocol, the fans don't even turn on, and usually, I can run winamp also without the fans coming on, so I can fall asleep to music instead of the whine of 360CFM fans. :)

However, all being told, if I do get my 750 to run at 1GHz, I will be very pleased, and I'll prolly post something along the lines of "1GHz for $30" :cool:

[Twiek]

Sorry guys....I'm gonna have to take the pics down. If anybody would be willing to host them, then I'll send 'em to ya.