So I’ve dove into water cooling, I should be reviving the rest of my parts either today or tomorrow. Hopefully today because the anticipation is killing me! As promised I told you I would be doing a slight review / describing my thinking on what parts I chose and then why. So the first box came in Friday and contains my fans, fan controllers, and some thermal material removed. So lets get started.

The first and probably one of the more often debated parts of a water cooling loop are your radiator fans. This is probably the most contested part of the complete setup that everyone argues about besides radiators. Of course anyone who has done any research will see that just about every part  needed to build a complete project is debated for the simple fact there aren’t very many people doing articles like these. And because people are partial including me. So I can’t say I didn’t go with Cooler Master because they were as good, because quite frankly I don’t like Cooler Master. That’s a personal preference, however I do have good reasons for what I’ve picked, and for the price I think I picked really nice parts.

The fans I decided to go with are pictured here, they are Scythe S-Flex SFF21-G’s. One of the deciding factors I picked these was mainly because of the amount of RPM’s, CFM(Cubic Feet Per Minute) of air, and noise level which is measured in dBA. You also want a high static pressure on your radiator which a lot of case fans don’t get, for instance a 200mm fan at 900rpm w/ 110CFM will not have as high of static pressure as a 120mm at 1800rpm w/ 76 CFM. So you need high static pressure, I also wanted a high RPM and CFM with minimal noise. As of right now I think about everyone in the water cooling community agrees that the Scythe Gentle Typhoon (1850 rpm) is the best air / noise ratio with great static pressure. However as of this writing everyone I shop with is out of stock on those. grrr…. so why did you get these?

Well the simple answer is two of these fans will be mounted horizontal. Most fans has sleeve bearings that if you mount the fans horizontal the bearings wear out, other fans have 2 ball bearings which can be mounted any directions except horizontal down(face down sticker side) because if you do at lower RPMS, which will be used, it places slack into the fan and produces a whine at those speeds. This is subjective but I can hear it. These fans have what I consider a much superior solution to the common bearings, using Sony Fluid Dynamic Bearings. Meaning that the besting is actually floating in liquid suspending perfectly in the middle of the carriage and totally silent at all speeds, no matter which way you mount it. They have a MTBF of 50,000 hours which is great and I’ve used the E and F variants in different builds over the last 5 years without a single one failing.

This fan is a 25mm thick 120mm fan that produces 1900rpm fan speeds with 75CFM at only 35dBA. (Best part is they are only 0.24A per fan which means you can load up a decent controller with 4 of these per channel and not burn it up, more on that later). Which can be loud, but considering my GTX 480 is 45dBA at full speed it will be a good bit quieter even at the fastest fan speeds! The 75CFM x 2 will be providing my radiator with plenty of air to cool the water, and the static pressure on these is excellent. Even at 1200rpm I estimate these should still be pushing about 50CFM and only 22dBA which means good air and still relatively silent….I can’t hear my 200mm’s now and they are 20dBA if that helps put it into perspective.

The next part to make sure the system is totally quiet, add bling factor to the case, and a level of adjust-ability and expandability to the system is using a fan controller. The one I picked with the Scythe ‘Kaze Master’. There were several things I was looking at when picking out a controller. The most important factor obviously having enough channels to support the amount of individual fans in the system. I have at least 3 fans on my new water cooling system and will be adding one of my existing fans to blow onto the northbridge of my motherboard. So I need 3-4 minimal. The second thing to consider is I didn’t want my case screaming ‘RICER’ so I didn’t want different colors, touch screens, or bright lights. None of that is involved with this product.

I also wanted the ability to monitor temperature, and exact fan speed. It does have that. Speaking back on the 0.24A fans, I also wanted a controller than if in the future I expand my system I want to be able to control multiple fans on each channel. This controller handles 1A per channel meaning I could pace up to 16 fans onto this one controller without it going nuts or burning up. The fit and finish of this controller is excellent and well above expectations from what I thought I had ordered. It was kind of like ordering a GTS 240 and receiving a GTX 580. I can’t speak on the life span of this part yet as I have yet to use it, still waiting on parts to start grrr, however I can say it does look like I made the right purchase here.

The last part of the kit I order was the two step solution from Artic called, appropriately, Artic Thermal Material Remover. Most people clean the thermal paste and pads off their parts with alcohol or some alcohol based solution with paper towel or a Q-tip. And while this works pretty good, in the past I have seen results leaning more towards using this stuff. On average I see a 1-2c decrease in temps after using this stuff and it raises possibly higher depending on how old the paste is you are removing. This is also good to clean parts before their first application of thermal compound as it purifies the microscopic pits on your heatsinks and parts.

It’s a two step process which works pretty well, and simple to use. You place a few drops of the #1 bottle onto the part to be cleaned and let it sit for 30-45 seconds. Then begin wiping off the surface with your remover of choice. Personally I use Q-Tip’s and no lint towels, like shop towels from the auto parts store. You know those blue paper towels, they work great!

Once you remove the majority of the paste(read all of it or so it appears), then you move along to step #2 which is the surface purifier. Place a few drops onto your part and clean up the residue left over from your thermal compound. Now this stuff doesn’t just work on Artic Silver, MX, or Ceramique lines of paste it works on all of them. So don’t be afraid to try it out. At $10 for this step it may be a bit higher for your price point so at a bare minimum use 99% alcohol for cleaning. You should do this between changes of parts and heatsinks regardless because if you try to reuse what’s already there it creates micro-bubbles in your paste cause thermal issues once the parts start to heat up, meaning you’ll have higher temps.

So there is parts 1, next up I plan to cover pump and radiator choices, then clamps/fittings, and tubing choices and long with coolant. It may be a day or so till I get to that because I will be busy tomorrow installing it all! Then sometime within the next week or so I’ll finish up these articles with results before and after the kit, the costs, a summary of installation and any after thought I have. So stay tuned!