Even though that first heat around the whole idea of a water-cooled PC has passed, water cooling systems remain popular, because if you are a serious overclocker, no normal processor cooler will give you enough. Water cooling is good, because if constructed properly, it can be very quiet and dissipate a lot more heat than standard coolers. The main drawbacks are prices and worries about water leaks.

In this guide I will go through each component a water-cooling system consists of and try to describe it warning you about the important details you absolutely have to know before you buy anything. I will not be going into details about how to build a water-cooling system.

Water blocks: Water block is basically a piece of a good heat conductor shaped so that water can run through it and since water is always cooler than your CPU, heat automatically passes from CPU, through the bottom of water block, into water. There is a whole science about making a water block as good as it can get and there are a lot of different designs out there, that work very good. The basic idea is quite simpl, if you understand basic fluid dynamics and heat conduction. There are three goals a good water block design has to achieve:

• Its water-contact surface has to be large enough.
• The shape of water tunnels has to force water into very turbulent flow, because turbulence is responsible for good heat exchange between water block and water.
• It must not be too restrictive, because in multi-block systems (if you are cooling more than one PC component with water), this could cause flow to drop too much and you would loose that turbulent effect, which enables good heat transfer from chips to water.

Water pump: Capabilities of the water pump, which you should use, depend strongly on the number of water blocks in your system (video card, chipset, hard drives etc.). If you are water-cooling only your CPU, then even basic water pumps should do the job, but as the number of blocks gets higher, you should consider buying a stronger, more capable water pump. Why so? Each water block is responsible for a pressure drop, which causes slower flow of water and if you have many water blocks, these pressure drops add up, causing water flow to drop drastically. That is bad because of what I have written earlier -if water flows slowly, it can not achieve turbulent flow, which enables head to transfer from a chip to water more rapidly. Strong water pumps can produce higher pressure and can cope with such pressure drops. I recommend you to use a specialized PC water pump instead of different aquarium ones, because PC water pumps can be connected directly to your power supply and will turn on and off automatically as you start or shut down your computer.

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