water cooled PSU?

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has anyone any experience of these? i've seen a couple on american shopsites but was curious as to wether anyone here had experience with them.
 
Soldato
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not worth it unless you have a separate loop for it as it'll dump a hell of a lot of heat into the loop and make it very inefficient. if you want a quiet one without a separate loop then get a silent psu.
 
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Deiwos said:
I don't quite understand why you'd bother with WCing a PSU.

Because if you've water-cooled everything else you wake up one morning and think - "I've watercooled the CPU, GPU, NB, SB, PWM, HDD (all 6 of them), RAM - what's left? Right. I need to watercool the PSU"
 
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WJA96 said:
Because if you've water-cooled everything else you wake up one morning and think - "I've watercooled the CPU, GPU, NB, SB, PWM, HDD (all 6 of them), RAM - what's left? Right. I need to watercool the PSU"

this guy understands me, after the psu i'm thinking about watercooling the ballbearings in the fans
 
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Sounds great in theory but they are usually very expensive and underpowered when compared to there air cooled counterparts. You could try watercooling a decent psu yourself but this goes without saying(I'll say it regardless) that it would be highly dangerous, a fire hazard and a distaster waiting to happen should there be even the slightest leak.

Just buy a decent psu with a quiet fan, the money saved could improve your current loop.
 
Don
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I've got a pair of 500W Silentmaxx ones, they tend to get very hot if you stress them with a full load system (I was using quad core + 8800GTX off one PSU), but if you're looking for as near a silent system and still have plenty of oomph for a 8800GTX then they're great.

Jokester
 
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The one place in the UK that lists it is £350!!!!!

That's a lot for a PSU, even if it is 1200W with a self-contained cooling system. And the various Corsair/Seasonic/Hiper/Tagan stuff that I already have is pretty darn quiet anyway.
 
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elfy said:
this guy understands me, after the psu i'm thinking about watercooling the ballbearings in the fans

In my quiet rig, I have no fans. Cape Cora 10 Passive Cooling for pretty much everything bar the PSU and RAM and a Silverstone passive PSU. It's exceptionally quiet until the optical drive spins up.
 
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WJA96 said:
In my quiet rig, I have no fans. Cape Cora 10 Passive Cooling for pretty much everything bar the PSU and RAM and a Silverstone passive PSU. It's exceptionally quiet until the optical drive spins up.

i was thinking next big commision i get i'd give those cora a try, good are they? how many of the individual thing do you actually need?
 
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elfy said:
i was thinking next big commision i get i'd give those cora a try, good are they? how many of the individual thing do you actually need?

I have ten on three loops. 4 to cool the CPU, 3 to cool the graphics and 3 to cool everything else.

In the summer I can plug in a long entension pipe and have them outside. They are very easy to work with and they can look remarkably like part of the furniture, rather than IT parts.

You might also like to check out the Preytek Serenity for a multi-loop silent system. They're about £60 a pop for the radiators and you just plug them in to the loop in place of a normal radiator and they cool quite well. Not as good as a Zalman Reserator 2, but a third the price so you can forgive that and have three of them at which point you get twice the cooling capacity if that makes sense.
 
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hmm...

water cooled PSU, I've seen it tried on an amature scale to disasterous effect.. but some of the implimentatios around seem workable.

Personally the PSU is one part of my system I would never get water anywhere near. Too much at stake, if the PSU goes and starts throwing 240v down the wrong rail... well... *shudders*

CPU, GFX, NB, HDD, MOSFETS, RAM and Soundcard are all viable recipents of the old W/C, and even a 120.3 with 6 fans push/pulling would be feeling the load under that.

PSU's are all designed with sufficent cooling to dissapate all the heat generated, all the way to their maximum load (if not then legal action come into play). I have my PSU drawing air from outside my case, and exausting it outside as well... its a completely seperate cooling situation to the rest of my PC.

The heat dump would be intense, so we're probally talking seperate loop stuff here, or at least another radiator 1/2 way round a loop to ensure the water is cool enough to deal with components in order. I'd feel the need to make sure I had cooled (at least ~ambient) water on both the PSU and the CPU, hence multi-loop, or two (even three) stage cooling.


/discussion
 
Don
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The heat produced by a typical PSU isn't that much, with efficiencies over 80% these days, if you're talking about a full load system, say 300W being consumed by the PC, the PSU is only generating about 60W of waste heat. PSUs only get hot becuase the cooling employed in them is very basic in standard models, little more than aluminium heatsinks over key components with a fan providing air flow through the overall unit.

Jokester

Edit: I've had a QX6700 @ 3.6GHz (talking about in excess of 200W at 100%), 2 8800GTX, chipsets and 2 500W PSUs all on one loop, cooled by a 120.2 and it never struggled to cope.
 
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