Water Cooling the Easy Way

I recently installed a Thermaltake Big Water 735 into my system, not because I needed better cooling but because I wanted to see if a $50 + shipping (refurbished through the manufacturer) all in one would be an improvement on my OCZ Vendetta.

First I installed a Thermaltake Blue Orb II to check out the looks and temperatures, and found that I actually did a few degrees better with the el cheapo OCZ cooler.

The Blue Orb II was significantly quieter however, if that's a consideration in your setup.

The Big Water 735 kit includes a pump/reservoir combination, a radiator/120 mm fan combination, a heatsink with blue LED (not very prominent in my setup) and 8 feet of 3/8" UV sensitive green tubing, as well as 500 ml of pre-mixed coolant, which appears to be identical to regular Prestone automobile coolant with water added.

Set up was pretty straight forward, though it required removing the motherboard to install a backing plate for my LGA 775 socket Intel e8400 chip.

The BigWater 735 can also be used with a an AM 2, AM 2+ or AM 3 socket AMD cpu.

It took about an hour or so of fiddling around. I lost the instructions and made a few mistakes -- read the instructions!!! Before I got too lost I downloaded a set from the Thermaltake Web site.

The end result was a decrease in temperature -- under 100% load running Prime95 for over an hour to allow the water and radiator to warm up completely -- from about 70 C with the OCZ Vendetta (74 C with the Thermaltake Blue Orb II) to 60 C with the Big Water 735.

I should add that I placed the radiator and TT fan outside my case, and have a XION 120 mm blue LED fan in the back of my case blowing air through the radiator to the TT fan on the outside of the case. This helped lower temps about 5 C. Before I set it up this way, warm air seemed to loiter around the back of the radiator.

NO MORE LOITERING!

Not bad for a first try with an all in one $50 water cooling set up!

I have read some complaints on the internet about leaking/corrosion with this system. As a result, I decided to install it in my current dual core system, I haven't decided what to do should I upgrade to an i7 set up. Such a high end system doesn't need much overclocking, so I'll probably forgo the dangerous waters.

That said, I feel confident that this system won't implode on me. I am guessing that the incidents of leaking/corrosion occured because of overtightenting of the CPU heatsink, which is half clear acrylic for aesthetics. It is slightly cool to see the green coolant zig zag over over the copper cooling block through the clear acrylic. I made certain to carefully tighten the nuts, treating the blocks nuts as gently as my own set. If it leaks, the fault is completely TT's, and they'll hear from me.

There is a "QC" sticker on the joint betweeen the copper and acrylic, FWIW.

My setup includes an OCZ 500W SXS power supply, an Intel e8400 3.0 Ghz dual core overclocked to 4.3 Ghz, two 2 GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 1066 memory running at 956 Mhz, two Western Digital Black 640 GB hard drives in Raid 0, one Nvidia GTX 275 video card and a *Gigabyte EP45 UD3LR motherboard.

If you have any experience with the Big Water 735 or any other TT water cooling products, please post in the comments. I would value any advice or feedback offered as I'm very new to this hobby.

* I don't like buying Gigabyte products, as I have had difficulties getting warranty service from them in the past. I purchased this only because I will not own it very long, and when I sell it the warranty expires anyway ... and I usually find I don't need to use warranty support if I'm careful with my gear.

Sphere: Related Content