Newbie Q.

[Youngie1337]

What advantage would water cooling give towards system performance?

Okay say we had a Quad Q6600 at stock levels, the idle temp is 25c on air, what would be the idle temp with water cooling?

I just wanted to know what the temps would be with water cooling and does it affect the temp a lot?

[Ham]

Despite what a lot of people seem to think, no water will not lower temps that much (Given that your upgrading from a decent after market sink).

What it will do is provide more stable temps, especially at load. Which is the temp you want to be monitoring. Idle means very little.

It's still ambient cooling. It's not magic.

Edit: not to mention water is quieter.

[llwyd]

As Ham said, it allows you to use far more fans, allowing use of lower flow and quieter fans. But as Ham also said it is still just ambient cooling, so in a totally perfect world where the conductivity of all bodies involved was perfect, it still wouldnt take idle temps on a processor producing 0.00000001 watts below that of the air moving through the radiator.

Water is, however, much better at handling high load and provides lower high end temps and reduces fluctuation on the way to that top end. Pretty difficult to have top watercooling performance and retain the volume advantage though.

[agentx]

a good temp for stock q6600 is 80 on liquid cooling with a room temp of 70 (these temps are in ferinhiet), with a single 120 rad (dual core).