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Water cooling. What is it with water cooling? When I say to someone "I water cool my PC", I get a puzzled look and a comment like "You're insane" or "That's stupid. You'll fry your computer". Yeah, that's the exact fucking reason I'm doing it. Because I want to kill the $1100 power machine I built myself with my own money. I don't see what's wrong with it anyway. Water is something like 5 times more efficient at absorbing heat, without heating its self up, than air is. Example: take a pound of water, a pound of iron and a pound of gold, (this bit's out of an encyclopedia) all at absolute zero (-273.15ºc). If all three were heated and absorbed the same amount of energy, the gold would melt at 1102ºc, and the water would be at -184ºc. When the iron melted at 1299ºc, the water would have reached 0ºc.
And all the heat gets dumped outside your case. Stick a massive Alpha sink on your CPU, video cards, hard drive, whatever. Hell, stick the fucking things all over the inside and outside of your case. Stick one on your monitor. Modem running warm? Put one there, too. You could put a heatsink the size of your head on your processor (and someone probably has a bigger one), and all the heat still gets dumped inside your case, making you resort to covering every avaliable surface with fans to remove heat. And removing said heat from the sink is easier said than done. Huge fans spinning at a million billion RPM and pushing a trillion CFM seem popular, even though they sound like a 747 taking off.
I read on some hardware site a line like this: "for those of you that prefer quiet over cooling performance". Sorry, but my ideal machine isn't one I have to turn off when friends come over. Nor is it one that requires the TV to be turned up while it's running. And that's why water cooling is so good: It can be as silent as you want. All the noise it makes is from the pump (although you could use natural convection), and the fans. The fans aren't strictly neccessary, but they are better than a passive radiator. And you can use whatever sort of fan you like: low noise, high noise, three pin, four pin, ac, dc, whatever. All the fan does in move cool air over the radiator to cool it down. You don't have to suck heat you could barbeque with off it. I could just imagine grilling things on an air-cooled, overclocked P3.
It's dangerous? No more so than air cooling. RTFM, do everything exactly like it says, and nothing should go wrong. That funky Alpha sitting on your CPU weighs an absolute shitload, I'll bet. And I'll laugh like a fucking hyena when it snaps your CPU in half and breaks every add-on card on the way down. The water block, the most important part of the system (apart from maybe the water), weighs practicly nothing. It's made out of a tiny amount of aluminium or copper, and it's pretty much well hollow anyway.
The price? Here's the bad bit. An Alpha sink, with fan, might cost you, say, $50. A full water kit, for example, the Senfu, might set you back two or three hundred. But here's where water cooling really starts to shine: you're paying an absolute boatload of cash for your cooler, and the manafacturers are nice enough (most of the time) to supply enough different mounting clips and plates (and screws, and bolts) to let you attach the block to almost anything. Some of those more unindentifiable bits might even let you attach the damn thing to your head. Or your car. Or your dog. They want to make absolutely sure you can stick the block on anything you fucking well want, and you pay through the nose for it.
I think sound cards are quite funny as well. Four or five years ago, you had a choice of Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster, or Adlib (they sucked). And when you bought your card it was normally bundled in with a CD-ROM and some speakers. Last year my old SB16 died (or so I thought). I'd play games, and distortion, crackle and noise was all the speakers would do. The same speakers that came with the card, of course. And five years old to boot. Bought a new ISA soundcard for $20, which promised "3D sound", a bunch of impressively techy sounding buzz-words and large numbers, and more. Plugged it in, installed the drivers, and it sounded exactly the same. Took it out, ground my teeth together and glared at the computer for a few minutes.
Went and bought a new set of cheap $20 speakers, plugged them in, and everything worked. Then I tested out its 3D capabilities. Half-Life couldn't detect its "3d sound" thingies. Quake2 performed no different. Several months later I got the Monster Sound MX300 PCI for christmas. Wow. I'm still saying wow when I play an A3d enabled game. And I'll never go back to plain old crappy 2d sound.
3d surround sound may really help you out in Q3:A, but for the "low power user" (you know who I mean), it's really unneccesary. Positional audio won't help you in Word. Spatial reverb has no effect on web surfing. And 150 effects channels won't do jack shit for your game of solitaire. A lot of stores are still selling these people systems with dedicated sound and video cards, when all they really need is on board (on the motherboard). Sure, they takes up processor time, but if you're not doing much with your processor anyway, it makes no difference.
Winmodems, however are a curse I wish on no-one. These horribly badly made pieces of crap eat cpu time like it's going out of fashion. I don't know who the genius was who though that a modem controlled by software was a good idea, but I want him dead. Now. And it seems the only way to avoid getting one is to buy a non-usb external modem. PCI modems are software, usb are too, and a lot of ISA ones are as well. The reason I haven't upgraded my rather shit 56k modem is that I want to make absolutely sure I'm not getting a crappy winmodem.
