New PC - Graphical and Cooling woes

[Paper Carnival]

Hey all,

I'm going to buy a new pc really soon (place my order within 2 days). Only this time, I'm getting a monster. I've been so out of touch of hardware developments these past few years for various reasons, and every person I try to consult has given me different answers. Anyway, I've made up my mind about most things but there are two things that concern me now:

1)Graphics Card: Is it worth buying a 500 euros card, or should I settle with something less (like GTX 260)? I think that's what I'm going to do, because getting the top-of-the-line hardware just never seems to be wise. Still, I

2) Cooling. Now I'm pretty paranoid about cooling, especially because it was never enough for any of my previous computers (and I never overclocked anything), and also because the system is going to be pretty heavy. Now I'm buying a case with 4 built-in fans, and I'm trying to decide whether I should install a watercooling system or not. Keep in mind that I plan on expanding the system as time goes by (place additional RAM and graphic cards {when they become cheaper})

Is that even safe? I shudder at the thought that it could leak. I thought about putting a radiator on the side which I suppose is safer than directly putting watercooling mods on the actual components. And is that even useful, or should I only care about it once I do upgrade my system with more graphic cards? Or is it still going to make a substantial difference?

Thanks in advance!

[Oliwerko]

As for the cooling, I have a pretty fast rig and I can tell you that liquid cooling is not a necessity in general. I have all-aluminium full tower case - which means that the heat is better absorbed and that there's plenty of space there. + 2 fans - one in front where the HDDs are and one in the back behind the CPU fan. Result - 50-55°C idle and about 70-80°C when high-performance tasks are running. IMHO sufficient. FYI, the case I bought is ThermalTake Shark silver, check it out, it's some of the coolest out there

[Huw Dawson]

Watercooling is for overclockers. Air cooling will be fine.

For a GFX card, you will not need anything more powerful than a GTX 260 or a Radeon 4870.

[abstauber]

When I had watercooling, I liked an external solution, which near to noiseless - like this: http://www.kailon.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=35&products_id=132

Last year I bought a mac mini, which is actually the best computer I've ever owned

Btw. shelling out 500 bucks a graphics card is never worth its money. You're top notch for 2-3 month, after that, the cheaper cards are getting as fast as your card. And after a year, you're getting a more silent card with less power consumption for less money.

[BOYD1981]

if you plan on hooking your pc up to a tv (as secondary display) to watch movies or play games fullscreen then it's a waste of time getting an nVidia card as they've disabled at the hardware level now due to some crap about screen size copyright issues or some such nonsense, whereas AMD/ATi haven't.
but if you do intend on going with nVidia then it'd probably be worth getting the 9800 GTX/GTX+ or for a bit more oomph the 9800 GX2 over the more expensive GTX 260.
and yeh, i wouldn't worry too much about cooling, and an aluminium case does help.
i used to be paranoid about overheating to the extend i left a sidepanel off the case and had a large tower fan blowing inside the pc constantly but now i don't bother.

[Paper Carnival]

Thanks everyone, I guess I won't try to get any additional cooling unless I discover it's not enough.

i used to be paranoid about overheating to the extend i left a sidepanel off the case and had a large tower fan blowing inside the pc constantly but now i don't bother.

That's exactly what I'm doing for my current PC but then again, my processor's fan broke down a couple of years ago and I've not bothered to fix it :

The case I ordered is ThermalTake VA8000BWS Armor Black, I found its features intriguing (like, for example, the 4 built-in fans) even though it looks very ugly from the screenshots.

I don't intend to have TV-out, but I ordered a Samsung SyncMaster 2053BW, which features a TFT 20" wide-screen, 8000:1 contrast, 2ms response time and 1680x1050 maximum resolution. That's more than enough for me...

And I suppose I'm going to get a GeForce 260.

I have at least two years of gaming to catch up to

[voh]

I'm running on a single-core 1.8Ghz Sempron (a souped-up Athlon XP with a new memory controller) and I got the cheapest card I could get a year ago (40 euro, nVidia 8400GS) and I've been able to play everything released so far. Fallout 3 runs a charm, and so did Far Cry 2 for the 2 hours I bothered with that piece of shit.

Sure, I run them at 800x600 because at higher resolutions I can't run on full detail, but I'm just trying to say that a video card worth 500 bucks willl age just as fast as that 150 bucks one (which is still at least 8 times as fast as my shitty card ), and for that price you can replace the cheaper one twice when the old one's not pulling its weight anymore.

Just my $0.02.

[magintz]

I have a similar problem with my graphics card and hard drives with cooling them. After about 2 - 3 hours of gaming my games start to lag and crash so I need to turn my pc off to cool. I have 4 internal hard drives as well. Nice big case which cools well. All in all I have 2 case fans but limited room to add any cooling solutions so I usually stop gaming after an hour and a half. Get stuff to monitor temperature inside your computer as most people wont need anything significant to keep things chilled.

[Oliwerko]

Well, if you're planning to have many drives there and generally, lot of stuff inside the case, than it could be a problem. But as long as you keep it to one GFX and two hard drives, nothing can possibly go wrong with the temperature.