Birthday Build – car parts

The first few water cooling bits showed up.

Deciding on a Radiator requires you to decide on several factors

1. How will it fit in or on the case? Size really matters when you try to mount the dang things.
2. Do you want low noise, low temps to support over-clocking or a compromise between those two?
3. How many items in the build are you going to cool with any given radiator? Nothing says you can only have one radiator. In fact, I’ll probably end up with at least two in this thing before I’m done.
4. How much money do you have, including the kids college fund?
5. How much money can you borrow from the bank?
6. How much money can you borrow from your relatives?

I struck out on 4, 5 and 6, so I ended up with a high quality purpose built unit from Hardware Labs. It’s about 16” x 51/2”. It will attach fairly easily (easy is a relative term when it comes to this kind of thing) to the top bracing of the case. If that doesn’t make any sense, don’t sweat it. Pics will follow when I get that far.

This particular model supports the mounting of 3 120mm fans on each side in a push/pull configuration. I decided against the SR1 version of this radiator that is specifically designed for low noise. I debated it as normally my goal is a silent PC. My current PC has heat piped video card, huge fanless block on the CPU. You can’t hear it when I turn it on at all. The hard drives make some noise if accessed at full bandwidth but that’s it. So, it was a hard call to go with a noisier solution. But, an over the top build requires over the top over-clocking, which means the more powerful radiator designed for high pressure air flow.

Ok, enough blah, blah, blah … Here’s what it looks like