your first problem is that you are using fans smaller than 120mm
True. 120mm fans are nothing now. New case has 140s all around.
That case was built before 120mm fans were common- everyone used 80s and 92s.
hahaha.. remember 8 yrs ago, 120mm fans were expensive and hard to come by. but 23, damn thats like a wind tunnel.
btw mike, is your entire case water cooled? like hard drives as well? i mean, if its just the cpu,gpu and chipset(s) youd still need good airflow to the hard drives.
Yeah, I could hear it downstairs in my 2 story condo in school... with my bedroom door shut. LOUD.
The only thing I really have water cooled right now in the main tower is the CPU. The amount of gains that I get from water cooling the video cards just aren't worth it anymore- you have to get crazy custom water blocks that cost a zillion bucks. For that money, I'd rather buy another card to go SLI and get significantly more performance than the water would give me. The hard drives don't benefit from it except for lifetime, and air cooled they're just fine. Current model hard drives barely even get warm anyway. The chipsets are fine without water too.
I didn't start out water cooling for noise- I did it for performance. I had reached the limit for air cooling. Now I kind of halfway do it for noise and still do it mostly for performance. It's a mix- I pick and choose depending on the performance benefit for each setup. In my computer room, a little wind noise is perfectly fine, plus it costs way too damn much to water cool all the components. In my living room, the HTPC is pretty much completely watercooled, but it's much simpler in setup, and noise matters more... plus the case is too small to give really good cooling with heat sinks and fans. Yeah- imagine that- water cooling to save space in a SMALLER case. I'll get pics of that later too.
One other consideration is water heat soak. If I don't stand to gain much performance from water cooling other high heat components in the system, there's no reason to heat soak my water any more. If I isolate just the CPU with the water system, I have that much more heat capacity to soak up more and overclock higher. Ideally, you'd have a separate water loop for every heat source- but that's REALLY complex in something the size of a computer case. Why heat up the water with your video card just to pass higher than room temperature water over your CPU right?
My future setup (when I have more $$$) will be this- phase change cooling (refrigeration) on the CPU for sub-zero cooling, then water cooling on all the rest of the components with the video card(s) isolated in a separate loop from the power supply, drives and chipsets.
