Before you can watercool your PC, there are a few things that one must first learn about watercooling.
What is watercooling and what are the benefits it has to offer?
Watercooling is much better for heat dissipation than air. If you want to keep your computer cooler than air cooling can without going extreme and using things such as phase-change cooling, peltiers, dry ice, or LN2. Because water can absorb or dissipate heat better than air cooling, you can achieve much better temperatures while in normal use and overclocking. You can also setup watercooling to have a near silent PC.
What are the parts involved with a watercooling setup?
Pump - To state the obvious, a pump pumps the water through the watercooling loop in order to maintain a fresh supply of water to the block. If there was no pump in a watercooling setup, the water would just sit in the block and your processor would overheat and burn up. The pumps you will most commonly find use in watercooling setups, such as Hydor, Eheim, and Danner Mag, are most commonly pumps which were designed for aquarium use, but are very easily adapted for use in a watercooling setup.
Radiator - A radiator is what helps to cool down the water. The water passes through many small tubes with fins attached to help cool down the water. The radiator is coupled together with at least one fan, more in higher performance setups, in order to cool the water.
Blocks - The blocks, or water blocks, are what are attached to the heat producing areas of the PC. There are water blocks made for processors, video cards, chipsets, and harddrives. There are even watercooled power supplies which one can purchase. You could watercool your entire computer if you so desired. The options are seemingly endless leaving you with no shortcoming of possibilities if you want to watercool your computer. Inside the block there is usually a series of fins or pins through which the water flows in order to dissipate heat. In this article we will be focusing only on cooling the processor.
Reservoir - The reservoir is a holding tank for extra water and also acts as an air trap. Having air running through your watercooling setup along with the water is not a good thing. Watercooling setups can also be made in which there is no reservoir used, but instead there is a short section of tubing coming off the tubing at one point in order to fill the system with water and bleed out the air.
Tubing - You need something to get the water between everything.
Size - In setting up a watercooling setup, there are many tubing sizes which can be used. There are a variety of parts for each size. Some of the most commonly use sizes are tubing with an inside diameter of 1/2" or 3/8". Other common sizes are 1/4" and various metric sizes. We will be using a 1/2" setup for this article.
What about leaks?
Many people are scared about setting up a watercooling setup because they're afraid of it leaking. If you set up and test a watercooling setup properly, you will have a leak free setup. One thing to help ensure no leaks is to leak test the entire setup before installing it in your computer. I will go more in depth about leak testing later in this article.
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