As you can see in the specs I'm an Intel guy. Intel CPU and mother board. And I fancy WD drives. Having said all that, I'm thinking my tower cooler which is a CM 212 evo has taken as much abuse as I can give it. I smoke and the system is sitting on the end of my bench not 3 feet from me. The filtration is not set up to block smoke ingestion.
So I'm thinking either the women hose trick on the fans or just switching to water cooling. Before you blast me, I know smoke can get on the radiator fins as easy as the air cooler. But let's just look at this as if it won't and see what water cooling system you guys suggest.
Here's a still from a vid I made when I tore it down to clean it. This shows it's a bit crowded around the CPU mount. The smaller heatsinks don't get too hot so I think any plumbing would be ok.
The big thing is all the fan openings are 120mm. So the radiator would have to fit either a single 120mm x 120mm opening or a 120mm x 240mm opening.
Now as for why, I've always been looking for a way to drive temps down as far as I can get them to go using off the shelf stuff and lows ambient temps. It's just something I have been persuing for many years.I'd like to get the temps down in the low 70's F at idle and not more than high 80's to low 90's F when running something CPU intensive.
Any suggestions? BTW the budget is $150.00usd.
