july 2007 MAXIMUMPC
TOSSING WATER ON THE PROBLEM
A VERITABLE TWISTER OF COOLING
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
In our before shot, the entire GeForce 8800 GTX board was
painfully hot.Originally, the airfl ow in this rig was a complete disaster—shoot,
there was no airfl ow. Sure, there was a little action around the
CPU and the power supply, but as a whole, we’d hardly call that
a cooling scheme. We fi xed the problem by adding a stock 12cm
fan to the rear of the case to suck warm air out and two 8cm
fans to the front of the case to pull frosty air in. We were actually
surprised to fi nd that running the second 8cm fan up front didn’t
have an impact on the case’s ambient temperature.
Around the cooler parts of our rig we saw drops of between
5 and 10 degrees. But because we switched to a water-cooling
setup, we did see an increase in temperatures near the CPU. Our
next step with this rig would be to add a dedicated fan blowing
directly on the CPU area.
This case’s poorly conceived cooling scheme was easily remedied.Nothing beats water when it comes to cooling, save for a healthy hybrid of air and
liquids. While it would be great to rely on just pumps and tubing to turn your rig into
an icebox, even the most hardcore of water-cooling enthusiasts needs a few supple-
mental fans to cool hard-to-reach areas. It’s sad but true—try as you might, you
can’t water-block every single warm spot in your system.
Still, you needn’t go fan-crazy with a water-cooled rig. Just use enough fans to
get some air moving around the hard drives and add an exhaust fan to the rear to
complete the airfl ow circuit. Better yet, double up; make that exhaust fan the intake
fan for your radiator. And it’s always a good idea to tune your airfl ow using a software
utility such as SpeedFan or a fanbus to get the best airfl ow-to-noise ratio.We not only improved temperatures but also
made the rig look totally sweet with a UV-
reactive water-cooling setup.Since our 8800 GTX card’s cooler is pretty effi cient, we fi gured that
slapping another aftermarket air cooler onto the card would provide
little benefi t, so we cracked our knuckles and installed a CoolKit
SLI Elite water-cooling kit ($380, http://www.petrastechshop.com), which
includes a pump, radiator, CPU block, reservoir, and tubing. We
added a Danger Den GPU block ($135, http://www.dangerden.com) to
our 8800 GTX and then said a prayer to the patron saint of no leaks
before we fi red up the rig.
We were ever so happy to see a dramatic drop in tempera-
tures during our highly scientifi c “Oblivion at full power” test.
Temps on top of the card dropped from 55–60 C to a pleasant
43–50 C. Less heat off the GPU helped lower the overall tem-
perature of all the components around the 8800.