Hardware & Technical Bought a new water cooler for my CPU

[Surfinjo]

Decided with all the stress I'm putting my CPU through, Bounty Hunting on Elite, running too many programs at the same time and generally heating up the greenhouse, it was time I upgraded my £15. cooling stack.

Found this:

Cooler Master Seidon 120V Version 2.0 Liquid CPU Cooler £39.98 inc vat

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cooling/watercooling/120mm/rl-s12v-24pk-r2.html

It's a nice, simple water cooler, with a pump header and a radiator.

Connecting it up was simple enough, but the initial results were disappointing. Then I remembered I'd set up the BIOS for the old stack.

Pressed the CMOS reset and after running through the startup, all is working fine.

I really wanted a nice simple CPU Temp monitor. There are loads out there, but most have so much information, useful yes, but not what I needed right now.

Speedfan doesn't work. It reports my temps are 15C. Sad, it was a great program once.

Others too much, then I found Real Temp.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/real_temp.html

The smaller image is the one you generally see. It shows the temp for each core. Underneath is listed Distance to TJ Max. That is the amount of temperature increase which will take the CPU over its rated maximum.

 

[Porina]

What temps were you getting with the old cooler? And what bios changes did you have to make?

I never realised AIO watercooling was so low cost now. This puts it close to the ball park of the Hyper 212 and in a quick search, it does seem to perform a bit better, costing a bit more. Is there any noticeable pump noise?

 

[Surfinjo]

What temps were you getting with the old cooler? And what bios changes did you have to make?

I never realised AIO watercooling was so low cost now. This puts it close to the ball park of the Hyper 212 and in a quick search, it does seem to perform a bit better, costing a bit more. Is there any noticeable pump noise?

Temps with the old cooler were between 25C and 70C. I used a general systems information tool to check them and wasn't consistent, so those are the ones I remember.

Temps with the water cooler are between 30C and 60C. As I said, I now use a constant monitor. My biggest worry frankly is if the pump fails. It probably won't, but I did have a water cooler before which did fail. I'm still smarting a bit over that. It was an NZXT. cost almost £100. It liked to connect to its base over the net which was a bit like running a machine with a ton of spyware. Fortunately I got a refund.

My BIOS has a number of presets designed for different cooling. The old preset was for the stack. But more, I had played about with the fan settings for the stack. There are also some settings to set different priorities, thresholds and stepping levels which I'd adjusted to reduce some of sudden, brief fan changes, such as when a temp spike occurs. I'll go back in something and re-do those.

The pump noise is surprisingly, about the same as the existing fans, which is really pleasing. That was somehting to think about naturally.

I should add that I opted from water cooling because I wanted the fast cooling response that it gives. This cooler certainly seems to do the job. As you say, not a bad price either.

 

[Porina]

The way I look at it, I tend to get a Hyper 212 air cooler as a compromise between cooling performance and cost, with a typical price under £30. So £40 isn't that much more. I'm quite tempted to get one to play with especially if I can hack it onto a video card...

For my main system I went with the Corsair HX110i GT which is £100 ball park, and has been fine so far. I'm not too worried about the pump failing as long as the CPU isn't massively overclocked. The CPUs will throttle back in overheat condition.