Water cooling

After a considerable amount of work spent and several weeks of waiting, the water cooling for my PC is finally finished. All parts, except for the pump, are produced by Aqua Computer.

The preparation and modification of the case was finished in December last year.

But unfortunately, while mounting the 120cm radiator, I used screws which were too long, so I penetrated its hull. I mounted the system nonetheless, after all I still had the 240cm radiator.

After filling in the water the system ran perfectly, at least for one day. The second day the pump stopped functioning, probably because of the huge amount of air in the system. Aquacomputer were very friendly and repaired the pump. I also ordered a new 120cm radiator, a cooler for my 8800 GTX and some other accessories which I missed with the first order, e.g. a ball valve. I remounted everything, filled the tubes with water only to notice that the production of bubbles remain.
After some consideration, I decided to mount the equalising reservoir at the highest point of the case so that all bubbles collect there (second half of the following gallery). It was totally worth it because not only did the bubbles disappear. The pump was running much smoother because it used the water as a lubricant and any bit of air has a negative effect on its operation. Also, the temperatures of the CPU and GPU dropped, after all air is rather a heat isolator than a conductor.

The cooling works quite efficient as I've got around 47°C +/- 2°C on each of the four cores under full load (folding@home SMP). I could start overclocking a bit...