Rated: 94.29% (7 votes)
Loading ...TJ07 - 1st time Liquid Cooling Project
Gareth Roberts
So I’ve been an avid reader of Custom PC since issue 14 or so & have been a subscriber for almost as long. My only complaint about this is the cost of it all… Not the cost of the mag; its pretty good value for money & not too many ads on the whole, but the number of times I’ve gone out to buy the latest approved kit! I’m not a drinker so I guess I need something to spend my hard earned money on though.
My trip down the liquid cooling route started a while back when I treated myself to Intel’s mighty Q6600 (G0). At the time I boought it I was using an E6600 in a BFG 680i, overclocked to 3.4GHz cooled by a Zalman 9700 LED. That rig performed pretty well in the CPC benchmarks but I wanted more.
I hit my 1st problem pretty quickly after installing the new CPU; I couldnt manage to get anything above 3.2GHz stable. Gutted was probably the best way to describe it. Countless hours of tweaking my BIOS, trying various BIOS updates & reading as many forums as I could finally helped me come to the conclusion that my shiney new quad core wasnt best of friends with Nvidia’s board.
Fortunately for me (unfortunately for my bank a/c) CPC had just landed on my mat a couple of days after I gave up on hitting the big numbers with the Q6600, inside had the review of the latest offering from ASUS, the Maximus Formula SE. With the disappointment of the 680i still stinging me, I couldnt resist driving down to Scan www.scan.co.uk to treat myself to another piece of CPC approved kit.