Well, without giving away the sum up, I must say I’m pretty impressed with the cooling solution I picked. And To continue on with parts and my thoughts I bring you to today where I’m going to talk about radiators, tubing. So what do you need to consider when picking up a radiator for water cooling? Well quite a bit actually, the first thing you need to find out is how much are you cooling, for instance a CPU or CPU and GPU, or maybe even the motherboards chipset? The best thing to do is find the TDP for each part you plan to water cool. In each example we will use what I’m cooling in this go round.

Q9650 @ 3.0 (For now heh) VID 1.248v

eVGA GTX 480 (Stock)

Now the TDP of both of those parts is 95w and 250w respectively or 345w of heat combined. Now keep in mind those are merely the “Thermal Design Power” or how much heat the anticipate it to output during operation, not what it will actually end up putting out. Both are also max numbers with stock setups, however if you overclock those TDPs can vary from 50-100w or higher depending on the parts. So how does that help us pick out a radiator for water cooling, easy we now know within reason what amount of heat we need to deal with. There are several pretty good sites out there that give results from various radiators paired with fans etc. etc. However I used a simpler method. But first I need to explain a bit about what sizes of radiators there are.

You’ll have all makes and models of radiators that fit 80,92,120,140, and 200mm fans. Each of those are documented with either a .1,.2,.3, or .4 at the end or by 120/240/360/480 etc. depending on the number of fans they contain. You just simply take the size of the fan and multiply it by how many there are to come up with the size. Lemme give you a picture to see what I’m talking about.

Now maybe you can tell what I’m talking about, these are the two radiators I purchased from DangerDen(I’m a reseller for them if you are interested in water cooling!). There are the Black Ice Pro and Pro II, meaning one is a 120mm and the other is a 240mm since it fits two fans. Now for simplicity sake and not needing to stretch this out very much farther I’m narrowing it down to the most common 120mm radiators. The simpler method to apply here is each 120mm worth of radiator you can place inside your water cooling loop, will dissipate ~175w of heat. Meaning a single 120(120.1) can handle ~175W while a 240(120.2) can handle ~450w. Now this is highly Dependant on the second thing you will have to look at, will it fit ,thickness wise, into my case? In this example I had about 1-3/8 in the top of my case to my chipset heatsinks to clear a radiator, meaning I couldn’t use the much better Black Ice GTX, or SR1 radiators. A thicker radiator gives you more surface area for the water running within to contact air and cool more efficiently. While the setup I have is readily handling ~345w of heat I’m still holding a delta under load of about 15c, that’s 15c hotter than room temp under full load. Which isn’t bad but isn’t perfect but you have to work with what ya got, ideally you are shooting for under 10c delta from room temperature which I could achieve more than likely by either adding another radiator or different fans. See the previous article about water cooling I wrote to see which fans I picked and why.

Now for tubing, you have various sizes available to you should you pick to water cool, 1/4, 3/8,1/2,7/16 etc. Each of these will have different outside dimensions for instance I purchased 3/8″ x 5/8″ clear DangerDen tubing, but you can get different brands that could be 3/8″ x 1/2″ etc. The most popular three sizes people use are 3/8″ x 5/8″ , 1/2″ x 3/4″, and 7/16″ x 1/2″. Each person has their own reasoning behind which tubing they pick.

Some reason you shouldn’t pick tubing out is because of the temperature differences, in most instance the difference between 3/8″ and 1/2″ inside diameter tubing will be less than 1c. However the fittings and all the things that go with 1/2″ tubing is much more expensive to your cooling system, and you can make up the temp difference with something much more efficient as a better radiator!

You have tons of things to pick from when picking your tubing for a water cooling system. As you can see in the picture, these are DangerDen 3/8″ x5/8″ UV tubes. This means they glow the color they are under UV light. And this is just the beginning depending on where you look to purchase from, however I like the DangerDen tubing because it soft, flexible, and generally easy to work with. It’s also got the right price being cheaper than the most expensive but formulated the same as, making it THE choice in my opinion for tubing.

My next mini article will cover the pumps, cooling liquid, and fittings to put into your system. And we will finish up with a brief run down of cooling blocks, reservoirs, and thermal paste. I hope some of you who are interested in water cooling find this somewhat useful, and of course if you have any questions do so in the comments!