Worth it?

gamerman4

gamerman4

Active Member
I do a lot of overclocking and wish to move up to a better cooling solution. At first, I wanted to go with the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu but after some thought I wished to go with watercooling and get a prebuilt watercooling kit. With stock HSF and 3 120mm case fans, 40mm OTES (ABIT) fans and various component fans, my CPU can reach up to 58C overclocked (250FSB and will later go higher) on %100 load. On a cold day (case temp 28C-30C), it reaches around 54C. On a hotter day (Case temp 31C+) It gets hot and with those fans, most of the hot air blows into my very small room and heats it up a good amount. Is it likely that a new aftermarket HSF can cool it better or should I get the prebuilt kit. If I decide to go with prebuilt watercooling kits, is it easy to change waterblocks if I upgrade to a different CPU socket type (Next years AMD socket M2s?) I would think paying more for the watercooling now and upgrading the waterblock would be better than having to upgrade to a new HSF as I upgrade to a new CPU. What do you think I should get? (Rig in sig)

For anyone saying I will have to upgrade RAM before I OC anymore, I have it covered, I'm getting OCZ RAM.
 
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idk man,,, You're not rally running that powerful of a rig, but then again since you're gonna be pushing that rig to its max it may be worth it. Look to see what others suggest.
 
well a cheap watercooling system will only make things worst. so wats ur budget. and i wuld have to reccomend a watercooled system for overclocking. there is really no logical reason for having it, unless u just feel like having it.
 
Believe me, once I get it OCd to as far as it goes (Highest tested was 270FSB with no instability) it will get very hot and it will be powerful, I'm praying for 3Ghz. I will also be needing to cool my GPU as it can get artifacts if case temps gets high. I will be upgrading this sytem in the future too.
 
Its not just about temps, you will need to get better ram since there will be alot of stress on it, and im not sure if your mobo has AGP/PCI locks, i would try to get some before you do this. And water cooling is mostly just for testing, since it requires alot of maintance.
 
its not just about temps, you will need to get better ram since there will be alot of stress on it
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I have already said:
For anyone saying I will have to upgrade RAM before I OC anymore, I have it covered, I'm getting OCZ RAM.
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specifically OCZ EL Platinum Editon Rev. 2 DDR3200

And after a little more research I have decided that I should prbably go with the air cooling since watercooling is too much trouble to maintain as geoff5093 pointed out.
im not sure if your mobo has AGP/PCI locks
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My current running speed is 250FSB so it probably has PCI locks.

Lastly Im probably getting the TR XP-90 or 120 but are there any other HSFs that give better performance for under $50?
 
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gamerman4 said:
My current running speed is 250FSB so it probably has PCI locks.
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Well i got mine up to 253FSB stable and neither do I :) But i cant go any higher since my AGP card cant handle it any higher then that.
 
It is a PCIE board I don't know how to see if it has PCI locks but it does let me manually set the clock of the PCI-E x16 slot so it probably has locks for the PCI slots too.

UPDATE: It does have PCI locks.
 
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just as geoff said, its just not about temps, it's about literrally how high all of your parts can absolutely go
 
Right now, the only major things limiting me is my temps and my RAM. I am upgrading my RAM. I have confirmed that temp is the reason my GPU gets artifacts because I keep it at the same clock speeds and on cold days, my games never have artifacts and on warmer days, I get some artifacts. I have not received stability problems on my current overclock and I have tested 270FSB and it was stable for a while but when the temps got high, there were some errors. Its not that I think a new cooler will solve all my problems, it is just that I would like better cooling than I am getting from the stock HSF. I have already ruled out watercooling.

My question now is that is the XP-90 worth buying it and a fan for it or does the CNPS7700 perform better?
 
The xp 120 works great, no problems, one of the best.
Are you sure you couldn't get better airflow thru your case to keep temps down. I o/c and live in Las Vegas so know about high temps. I got much better cooling playing with the case fans and air inlets.
 
If I could actually make the external exhaust fan on the PSU to actually spin (it only spins when hot) it might be cooler. I guess I could replace the current 120mm fans with faster ones.... Any suggestion on a good, quietish, high CFM, 120mm fan? I am still getting the SI-120 ($10 cheaper than XP-120) because I have one of those metal high-velocity house fans and I pointed it straight into my case on high. It almost blew by case over but even then, the CPU only went down 5C-6C which shows that I do need better airflow in my case. I will replace my side intake fan with a nice high CFM one and hopefully get some better cooling. I am thinking of getting 2 panaflos, one for the SI-120 and the other for my case.
 
Good move with the house fan, Panaflows are one of the best fans.
You might want to check into the psu fan situation, doesn't sound right.
 
It said in the manual that the exhaust fan blows when the temp gets too high. the intake fans always blows. I'll look into trying to keep it on.
 
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