Anyone water-cool?

[__________]

Yo, I'm building a new production case & PC soon, considering water cooling.
The PC I've been using for about 8 years now is very noisy - I've recently upgraded from the stock cooler but I added more case fans so it's very audible.

Is it worth me water-cooling or should I just invest in really quiet CPU and case fans? Either would be a noticeable improvement but my main worry with water-cooling is how rugged the different components are. The machine will be in constant use and transported a fair bit.

[fragments]

People occasionally get on about fan noise messing with their monitoring--I'm not here to say that they aren't correct in some degree, but I feel like there are tons of people (probably a lot of professionals as well) working with "noisy computers" and still do just fine. How much is it really interfering? Not that it isn't a pain, but I'm sure we could all find a way to monitor our tunes with the computer turned off.

I know heat is an issue, so I chose a full size tower even though I'm not using 75% of the space in it. It has a large, slower moving (quieter) fan and the system doesn't seem to get very hot IMO. I don't have issues with the CPU over heating and slowing down (or at least not to a degree where I'm noticing a difference).

I'd probably go the cost effective route if I was going to bother.

Just curious, why would you be transporting a full sized desktop PC quit a bit? From school to home?

[Marcus]

Aircooling tends to be quieter unless you are talking about a full custom loops. You need to pick other quiet parts too like the power supply and hard drives.

[mthrfnk]

I have a quiet CPU fan and 2 quiet chassis fans plus I have sound proofing on my case, it's pretty damn quiet - even when running the CPU to the max. In fact the noisiest thing about it is my Blu Ray drive when I'm watching a movie. Water cooling sounds like a good idea in principle but it's no quieter, you still have to have a shit ton of fans that cool your radiator, not to mention the noise of your pump. I had a friend who went down this route, it's not worth it imo unless you have a top of the line CPU & GPU that you're running red hot 24/7.

[Genevieve]

Get a soundproofed case, mayne. The noise I still have blends into the background. It's overal quieter than the birds I hear singing outside.

[Brothulhu]

I have one of the corsair prebuilt CPU loops and it is dead quiet but preforms just as well as a air cooler half it's price (about 60 quid 4 years ago). I'd just invest in one of the Corsair cases (or Lian Li if you are minted) and some really nice quiet fans (Corsair have some good ones again) and it will be quiet no matter how you cool it

[gαммα]

yea man dont bother with a custom loop just get a h100 or something

you can even buy fittings for gpus that let you use h100s on them as well

[__________]

safe everyone

Aircooling tends to be quieter unless you are talking about a full custom loops. You need to pick other quiet parts too like the power supply and hard drives.

I'm either gonna use a Corsair CXM430 PSU which is very quiet (compared to my old PSUs at least) or a PicoPSU which is fanless and tiny but doesn't leave much room for expansion.
No hard drives - gonna use a 64GB mSATA SSD for my boot and programs, 2x 64GB USB3 sticks for internal storage, connect to a NAS for external storage, then will add an internal 128GB SSD later on I think.

it's no quieter, you still have to have a shit ton of fans that cool your radiator, not to mention the noise of your pump

Very good points! All I've really considered is the overclocking potential so far. I need to find some actual dB comparisons between water and air cooling.

Get a soundproofed case, mayne. The noise I still have blends into the background. It's overal quieter than the birds I hear singing outside.

I'm building my own case and am definitely gonna soundproof it as much as I can.

I have one of the corsair prebuilt CPU loops and it is dead quiet but preforms just as well as a air cooler half it's price (about 60 quid 4 years ago). I'd just invest in one of the Corsair cases (or Lian Li if you are minted) and some really nice quiet fans (Corsair have some good ones again) and it will be quiet no matter how you cool it

That's pretty much what I wanted to hear. I'm willing to pay out for extreme improvement but it sounds like you need to drop £200 on water-cooling for it to be worthwhile.
I'll be using a Lian Li motherboard tray to mount most of the components to, they're not easy to find but they're not expensive at all!

How much is it really interfering?..........
Just curious, why would you be transporting a full sized desktop PC quit a bit? From school to home?

If you heard my PC now you'd realise
This machine is gonna be my everyday work and production PC but also a prototype (the case, anyway) for a rugged music production system thingymajig. It's gonna have a screen and a load of analogue and digital audio shit built-in. This one will only be transported once every month or so but the final one will be in constant transit so it needs to be tough. This is kinda what's making me wary of water-cooling - I wouldn't trust it in hold or even hand luggage on a plane.

yea man dont bother with a custom loop just get a h100 or something

you can even buy fittings for gpus that let you use h100s on them as well

I'm thinking 1x 200mm fan, inwards with well-placed ventilation holes. Possibly 2x fans but I really want near-silence. Still not 100% sure if I want positive or negative air pressure. Shit is long.

[Genevieve]

I've actually been paying more attention to my noise since making this thread and I only hear noise when there's no music playing. Even at low levels.

[mthrfnk]

it's no quieter, you still have to have a shit ton of fans that cool your radiator, not to mention the noise of your pump

Very good points! All I've really considered is the overclocking potential so far. I need to find some actual dB comparisons between water and air cooling.

This obviously depends on your setup... but if you have 4-8 fans on a radiator setup vs 2-4 internal fans on an aircooled PC, what do you think'll be louder