Home-made CPU-,GPU-,Chipset water blocks tested

Cooling/Water Cooling by piotke @ 2004-01-28

Watercooling your entire system, something only for the rich ? Wrong! Buying cheaper blocks means crappy performance ? Wrong again! I received some home made water-blocks, for VGA, CPU and Chipset, to see how they stack up against retail water-cooling solutions. Now these blocks are going into mass production: low priced, good performing water-cooling for everyone? Let?s find out

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Chipset block

Chipset block

Looks

Also made fully out of copper, this block has two "arms" and each of them has a slot. This is needed for the installation mechanism.
But here I have some negative remarks. The overall finishing is once again perfect, but the slots have some burrs. Not a big disaster, but I have to mention it of course.

Installation

I like this mechanism. Place the chipset block on the chipset, put the clips through the slots and hook them to the original mounting system.
This method is very easy in use and looks professional. The Waterchill Chipset block, for example is a complete different story. In the manual they recommend to install their block using zip-ties...

Temperatures

The Asus P4P800 has only a heatsink as chipset cooling. And while using your system at a FSB of over 275, these things gets extremely hot. So, almost anything has to be better than that...

Unfortunately the chipset has no built-in temperature sensor, so I couldn't really monitor the temperatures.


Before:

Madshrimps (c)

After:

Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)

Minor detail:

Madshrimps (c)


But I can monitor the temperature from my VGA card! On to the next page for a closer look at the VGA block ->
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