CPU Cooler help

Long story short the pump in my liquid cooler is dieing so i am in need of a new cooeler,, cant decide weather to stay with liquid or go back to air cooled,
Whats your guys opinions?
What would you recommend?
Any help would be appreciated

thanks.

 

I run the Noctua coolers on all the rigs at my place,the latest on my socket 1366 i7 950.
Very quiet and cool,$85 from MSY

http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=31&lng=en

 

Due to me having a rather large case i think a liquid cooler is better suited but was just seeing what others are running or have used at some point,, im thinking about modifying my current cooler with some better parts like a better water pump, an reservoir, an maybe a bigger radiator..

Hmmm i cant decide,, gotta be soon tho,, dunno how long this pump will hold up for

 

Unless you are into overclocking to the extreme I can't see any reason to not stay with air cooling.

 

Get yourself a ZALMAN Cooler. Air cooling is a lot easier

 

i plan to run my phenom processor with my new motherboard an run it over clocked. Not extreme but enough.. stock clock is around 3ghz but i want to run it up to about roughly 4ish.. If i can get it stable.. I have kinda gotten into overclocking

 

Thermal stability is probably the most important aspect for any kind of semiconductor. Liquid cooling will give you much better performance than forced convection (Fan). Often neglected is the thermal contact between the heatsink and the CPU. I'll use the analogy of water pipes - if you have a very thin hose, connected to a really thick hose then you can only get out as much water as you can push through the thin hose, it doesnt matter how thick the other one is. You can think of every component in your cooling system as a hose.
You want a very good thermal conductor (aka Heat Paste) between the chip and the heatsink, the silver based ones are very good as silver is an excellent conductor of heat, the rest should be pretty simple - the bigger the radiators the better. You also need to get a good volume of water through them (the bigger the volume of water you get through the more heat you can take away from the CPU) which you can do one of two ways, either increase the flow rate by running the pump harder, or put in bigger pipes and run the pump a bit slower. Obviously the harder you run the pump the more likely it is to fail.

If you are going to overclock, thermal stability should be the first thing you look at. Then look at power consumption (overclocking will generally almost double the power your CPU uses - allow 400W for an overclocked i7 for example, you dont want to push your power supply past it's rated capacity).
As long as you ensure that you have a stable power supply going to the CPU and that you're removing all that extra heat dissipated in the CPU you should be able to overclock it as much as the motherboard allows without compromising system stability.

 

I'm sorry if an electrical/electronic device is rated at 130watts max in it's specifications (ie a CPU) overclocking can not make it draw 400W........it's Ohm's law power=volts x amps

People up their CPU voltage in very small amounts..ie 1.27v to 1.35v etc to get their desired overclock

As per water flows through the cpu cooler,greater flow doesn't mean better cooling,the rate of flow has to be matched to the heat transfer capabilities of the cooler.

eg A chiller set designed to cool a 22 story building is rated at x kw of cooling capacity at x flow rate,if you increase the flow rate it actually decreases the cooling capacity of the chiller as due to the water flow increase it does not have the time to 'pick up' the desired heat load as the water is passing by the heat exchanger too fast

 

Ohm's law doesn't cover everything. You're forgetting about skin effect for one. Also semiconductors do not behave the same way as resistors with a change in frequency, think about it in terms of power lost when switching. Then there's capacitance between lines which increase due to the higher frequency also increasing the reactive power load and therefore real power losses due to non-ideal components.

I'm a Computer/Electrical Engineer and although I work with Power Transformers and am not an expert in microcontroller design the same fundamentals should apply.

look at http://pinoytech.org/su/question/16...-increase-as-the-clockrate-of-a-cpu-increases for a nice simple reference.

I agree with you in the volume of water part, I was using it in the context of firstly increasing the radiator bank - it's no use just putting a massive rad on it without changing the flow rate to match, or the other way around increasing the flow rate without matching the rads. Did not consider the 'pick up' of the load - good point.

 

There is no way a cpu can draw 400w with out melting itself and the surrounding motherboard,I work with electronic controllers all day and the only time something like that happens is when some clown puts 240V on the 24v circuit,but I digress,here are some test rigs with power draw measured at the wall.

 

Iv been doing some looking around and iv decided to get a whole new cooling system, im looking at a Swiftech H20-220 Ultima XT (refer to link) but i will be changing the res to a Syscool so i can have a little more capacity. All thats left is to buy some decent quality coolant an finish getting my new components.

Im doing a full rebuild,
New parts
Asus Crosshair IV motherboard
Amd Phenom II X4 Quad core 965 3.4GHz Black Edition AM3
Second HD5770 saphire gfx card
6gig DDR3 ram
Cosair 120gig SSD for OS
2 - 1TB Seagates running raid 0 for data storage etc

For now that is all i have. still have a few other parts im looking at but cant decide