Silent water cooling

[plofstof12]

Hi

I use my PC for gaming and I also have a home audio studio running Cubase and stuff like that. The latter means that I need a VERY quiet PC so that microphones don't pick up any background noise during recordings.

I have managed relatively well so far with Zalman products. I also have the Accelero Twin Turbo on my ATI HD4870. This cooler does excellent work but I have some trouble with voltage regulators heatsinks not sticking etc.

Also, no fan is completely silent and the PC still emits a low amount of noise, albeit very low.

I'm thinking about trying water cooling. Something like Zalman's Reserator sounds good to me, mainly because it is Fanless!
(I hope the pump doesn't make too much noise though?)

So I was wondering:
1. Can you guys recommend any products for silent water cooling. Preferably fanless and with silent pumps.
2. Is it possible to mix & match different products (e.g. use an aqua or coolermaster VGA block on Zalman on the rest)
- like, will the nozzles fit and so on?...

 

[killadoob]

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-232-1.htm

I have this and it is totally silent, i did add a high power pump which is also silent though as the one is not really powerful and on a very hot day does not help much, in cooler weather though it works really well.

 

[Obelix]

I have the Resertor 2
You wont hear the pumps unless shove your head into the resevoir

It Kept my old Prescott ( normal temp was 72 Deg C ) running at around 50Deg C. My Core2Duo runs at room temp.

 

[Arthur]

I got into liquid cooling for precisely the same reason - I need quiet in the recording/video studio.

I eventually settled on a remote (ie room next door) Koolance Exos-2 and a liquid-cooled PSU (Silentmaxx). Koolance water blocks on the CPU, northbridge, video card, RAM, mosfets and 4 x HDDs.

It's not advisable to mix 'n match components in a liquid cooling system - blocks are designed for certain liquid pressures and flow rates and generally work suboptimally or even badly when these are outside the design spec. Make sure you balance everything properly. Though the physics is relatively simple, the implementation is in many respects quite counter-intuitive. Things like radiator design (louvre-fin or tube, collector design), tube size (section and length), pump pressure, head and flow-rate, waterblock design (impingement, internal resistance & pressure drop), number of waterblocks in circuit, serial or parallel water circuits, etc all play a role - an unbalanced system can be very disappointing.