jmke

Water-cooling started in the home based computer market roughly in 1996-98, give or take a couple years. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of useful information available on the web from the very early years of watercooling. 1996-98 is what I could estimate as a realistic starting point by studying old articles from some of the larger websites that have been around since the beginning of watercooling, plus I've been doing it since 1999, so I know a little about the history of it from hands-on experience.

Back in the 90's, most of the watercooling parts were homemade with basic hand tools featuring very simple, easy to build designs with very few parts. Watercooling was for me and many others directly tied to overclocking, in so much as the more you wanted to overclock your CPU, the more heat the CPU core would create. Aircooling wasn't sufficient to keep up with the extra heat load without causing instability and system crashes, if it would boot up at all. Some people, myself included, also do it for the simple fact that it can be a much quieter cooling solution when you sit next to your computer while working all day - fans can really start to get on one's nerves.

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