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I know I'm new here, but I thought I'd throw in what little bit of
wisdom I have accumulated on this.<br>
<br>
I never had a problem with heat in my PC until I started playing World
of Warcraft. Other games I could run fine at full graphics with no
problem. When I started playing WoW I would get the dreaded #132 error
anywhere from 5 mins to 4 hours into playing. #132 is related to
memory errors and is generated by the application. I would only crash
to desktop which made me think there was something defective in this
game. I read through all the tech support forums and did everything
the vendor recommended. I then came across a post on the forums about
my motherboard (Asus A7N8X Deluxe rev 2). Someone mentioned memory
errors in this model because the northbridge chip wasn't properly
cooled. The factory cooler is a passive heatsink attached with a
thermal pad.<br>
<br>
I spent $25 at Newegg for a northbridge heatsink/fan and another 80mm
intake fan for the front of the case. After installing I had no more
problems with WoW. It turns out that WoW was pushing my hardware to
the limit and thus generating more heat than any other application.
The extra heat was enough to cause a voltage leak somewhere between my
northbridge and memory. The thing that probably helped the most was
replacing the factory thermal pad with the Artic Silver I got from
Newegg.<br>
<br>
Moral of the story: take into consideration all of the aspects of the
system, and not just the cpu temp. My northbridge chip was only warm
to the touch after I received a CTD (which means the heat wasn't
transfering to the heatsink). Spend the extra $20-40 on the
aftermarket coolers, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches.<br>
<br>
--Jim<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Dustin wrote:
<blockquote
cite="midPine.LNX.4.44.0512012159280.22481-100000@alice.wonderland.caltech.edu"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, John Riehl wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I dont seem to find anyone selling built (pc) systems with water
cooling,
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Mostly for the same reason that auto companies don't sell cars with really
hot blowers--then you have to back them with your warranty. Better to
either supply a pretty tame one and let the aftermarket people tweak it or
don't put one on at all.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Still, it would be cool to build this system, but the people have backed
off.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
It's mostly a l33t ricer gamer fanboy thing. Your customers don't sound
much like l33t ricer gamer fanboys. :-)
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">The actual requirement for the system is that it is a dual-opteron
system, with 8g memory, and a decent (not cutting edge) graphics board.
Disk requirements are essentially just for the os, because user disk
is nfs mounted. I did find an article by someone who water cooled such a
system.
The people who are looking at getting these systems are extremely noise
adverse. (In 20+ years of sysadminning, I have never had a bunch of
users as noise adverse as these. Seriously, they get upset at speaking
in a normal volume in their cubed office room). I should offer
management an "alternative solution", i.e. headphones.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
I think if you work hard enough at it you can get quieter than water
cooling without it. I've never done it, but I can see how I'd start:
fanless psu, big holes in the case for big (so I can run them nice and
slow) quiet fans from endpcnoise.com, on variable controls so I can
throttle them back to wherever I need to. Rubber washers/gaskets between
the fans and the case to reduce vibration. Really oversized ricer heat
sinks on the cpu, northbridge, and graphics card so that the air from the
big slow case fans will be enough to cool them. And at least one exhaust
fan blowing straight up out of the case in the direction convection
already wants to go.
I'm sure it can be done, because I recall seeing a magazine article where
they built a fanless Pentium 4 (!) system just to prove they could.
Part of the problem is that they want a high-end opteron system. The
easiest way to get a quiet desktop is probably to buy one of the couple of
Pentium-M based desktop boards and start by reducing how much heat you
have to remove from the case in the first place.
Dustin
</pre>
</blockquote>
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