Intro to Water Cooling

An example of a liquid cooled computer.

Finally, right? I know – if you’re into overclocking (and I know you are!) and into performance (and I sure hope you are…) then water cooling is for you! It is a well known fact that the cooler your computer is, the faster and more efficient it can run (hence extreme overclockers using liquid nitrogen, for example, to cool computers; like the people at AMD who overclocked their… well, just watch).

Liquid cooling is far more efficient than air cooling, albeit more expensive (but expensive for all the right reasons). There are a lot of components to water cooling, but this is just an intro, so I’ll keep it simple. Also, there are various tube sizes (and coolers, even UV reactive and glow in the dark for all of you crazy cats out there), so you must be consistent with the tube sizes – I recommend 1/2″ tubing because of the high amount of flow.

Water block: Copper is an amazing metal to use for the water block because it can absorb and radiate heat extremely well. Surface area is important, because more surface area means more points for heat exchange exist. Often within water blocks, you will see pillar-like structures, or in the case of EVGA’s “Hydro Copper 16,” little “E’s” to increase the surface area (how hardcore awesome is that?).

Pumps: Basically the stronger the pump, the more flow you are going to get, which is good – the more flow, the more heat exchange (which is the whole point!)

Coolant: Water can absorb a lot of heat, without changing its temperature very much so water is an amazing coolant. Of course, there are additives-such as anti-corrosives, chemicals that improve the cooling performance.

Reservoirs: Another aspect of cooling, a reservoir helps in filling your cooling system as well as protecting from nasty, nasty air bubbles (everyone, let’s boo air bubbles! C’mon! “Boooooo!!!”)

Radiators: Oh sweet radiators! The radiator is where the coolant dumps its heat and cools down in order to suck out more heat from your processor, graphics card(s), etc.

Water Block: GPU – look up your gpu, because gpu water blocks are very,very specific – and CPU also varies from socket type to socket type, so just keep what I had to say in mind, and you’ll do just fine.

Reservoir

Radiator

Pump

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