Cooler Xtreme : Coolers
: Water Cooling : Senfu PC Water Cooling Kit
Senfu PC Water Cooling Kit
Since practically
all of the heat from a CPU comes from a very small area on top of the CPU
- roughly a centimetre square, for current models - getting rid of it can
be a bit tricky. Big chunky heatsinks with more than one fan on them are
favourite.
But then, there's
overclocking.
Overclocking
a CPU - running it faster than its rated speed - always makes it run hotter.
If you have to increase the CPU voltage to get it to run reliably, the chip
may run a lot hotter.
So the heatsink-fan
combinations (collectively called "CPU coolers") get bigger and bigger,
as do the fans used to draw cool air into the case for the coolers to work
with. Many overclocked computers don't have a case at all, for maximum ventilation.
The upper end
of the overclocking market has always been, well, debatably sane. There's
a certain, ah, perception,
associated with the activity. But compared with the truly humungous air
coolers that super-hot CPUs need, water cooling is actually a perfectly
practical proposition.
The reason why most people back
away slowly and don't make eye contact when you mention computer water cooling
is obvious. Running a water tube into your computer seems to be, at first
glance, the sort of thing that people only do because the voices in their
head command it.
Indeed, if the hose pops off
the water jacket, the computer will stop working; depending on where the
water goes, it may just hang harmlessly, or something quite dramatic may
happen.
But if you think a drowned computer's
dramatic, you should see what happens when an automobile cooling system
fails in a similar way. Water cooling works fine for cars, because the systems
used are highly reliable. All you need is to get a similarly reliable system
for a computer.
Pretty much all CPU water cooling
systems, at the moment, are to some extent do-it-yourself. Nobody sells
a water cooled PC over the counter. Well, CoolWhip
apparently do, but only within Denmark; perhaps there are other dealers
I've not heard of, too. But, generally, you stick it together yourself.
Some of the solutions are magnificently
engineered highly effective labours of love. Many are amusingly gimcrack,
but work. You can get quite effective CPU cooling, for instance, by simply
sealing a little plastic box with a couple of hose fittings on top of your
CPU, so the water flow directly contacts the top of the chip. There aren't
any contacts there; the chip doesn't care. As long as the seal holds, all
is well.
But some water coolers are,
as you'd expect, utter disasters.
To avoid the last situation,
the way for less adventurous overclockers to get into the field is, obviously,
to buy a pre-made kit.
Which is where Senfu comes in.
They sell various water cooling gadgets separately, but you can also get
the whole lot in one package. Pump, radiator, water jacket, mounting hardware,
pipes, screws. And it's this kit that I checked out. It's sold in Malaysia
by Overclocker's
Paradise, for RM750 for the whole kit. I got the very latest
version of the kit, direct from Senfu.
I built the beast on Senfu's
DIY Overclocking House, a fancy name for a quite nice looking, not very
expensive frame for computer fiddling and techno-toy display purposes. It's
not part of the water cooling kit, but it goes quite well with it, or with
any other off-the-wall computer project for which you'd like to have easy
access to every part of the machine, and for which you don't mind sacrificing
rather a lot of mechanical stability.
So the first job was to build
the Overclocking House.
