Posted on 29th Jun 2012 at 09:09 by Antony Leather with 55 comments
In the last couple of years, water-cooling has made some serious leaps in usability and value. Sadly we’re not referring to custom water-cooling kits here, although the number of off-the-shelf components that are available now if you’re building your own system is staggering. No, we’re talking about all-in-one liquid coolers such as
Antec’s Kühler H2O 920 and
Corsair’s H80.
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Posted on 5th Nov 2011 at 12:26 by Antony Leather with 59 comments
In the 15-odd years I've been building my own PCs, all my main systems have invariably been housed in large towers. Whether this was because they needed to accommodate multiple hard disks when I was experimenting with RAID, or to fit water-cooling hardware inside, my cases have got perpetually larger.
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Posted on 13th Jul 2011 at 07:41 by Antony Leather with 142 comments
For me, water-cooling began out of necessity. I water-cooled my first PC nearly ten years ago, when, living in a house with a flat roof, my bedroom got incredibly hot in the summer months. I was already hooked on overclocking at the time and strove to save money by buying cheap, but very overclockable hardware. Unfortunately, the combination of the house's architecture and high system temperatures meant that my PC was intolerably noisy and unstable.
Infuriated, I made the move to water-cooling - not a particularly easy one as there were few guides and even fewer off-the-shelf components back then, which resulted in regular trips to the local DIY store to search for parts. I initially water-cooled my CPU, and my overheating and noise issues were solved instantly - my PC went from a hot, noisy box to a cool and quiet machine of wonder. I had more overclocking headroom than before too.
Every one of my main rigs since then has also seen me spend entire weekends building and leak-testing. In fact, the last three PCs I've built have had a water-cooled CPU and GPU, as well as the various hotspots on the motherboard too. However, a lot of today's hardware simply doesn't need water-cooling as urgently as its equivalent back in the day. People still want water-cooling, but it seems to be a desire that's separate from the need to actually cool the hardware.
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Posted on 30th Jul 2010 at 10:22 by Paul Goodhead with 83 comments
This blog post stems from a conversation Clive and I had the other day about the water cooling grommets we’re seeing on
most cases these days. If you’re not sure what I’m on about a water cooling grommet is a rubber-lined, circular cut-out in the back of a case that appears to be designed to have water cooling tubing passed through it.
The crux of the conversation was essentially the question of whether anyone actually uses these grommets, and if they could actually be considered a feature when it comes to calculating a case's feature score in a review. My argument is that they shouldn't be counted and I’ll explain why.
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