Since I'm still not very experienced with water cooling systems, I have a couple of questions for you experts that relate to my next project:
[list=1][*]Is it okay to water-cool the video card, northbridge, CPU, and hard drive all in the same line?[*]Is it preferrable to use only distilled water or add "water wetter" to the mix?[*]Do you have any recommendations on testing the cooling system? What happens if a leak develops?[*]Which pumps provide high reliability?[*]Is it recommended to build in a failsafe in case of pump failure?[/list=1]

1, Yes it is ok to have then on the same line. Suggestion would be Piper's waterchiller if you get a bunch on the line.

2, Distilled for your base(no elements that conduct electrical current), add what works, some use rad fluid or water wetter. They are really the same thing. Bringing the boiling temp higher so it won't dance away from the heat like a drop of water on a hot skillet.

3,Test the system before you put the computor components in. You know, leaks, drips or spraying from the 500 PSI pump hooked backwords. depending on the system most leaks are harmless, Distilled water runs off the components without any trouble.(not a rule, in general) Spraying silocone onto the components can repel any water. Let me check to make sure of the specific type before you go get something off a shelf though.

4, Not enough experience Ill leave it to Piper for that one

5, A failsafe would be a temperature cutoff. ie 120deg on the processor, it cuts the power to the system. Yes it is recommended

Hey Wixx, Nothing wrong with what Duck has told you already.
The fun thing about water cooling that I have noticed is that (barring the few really bad ones, or the idiots) for the most part all the kits and most peoples setups perform on par with each other. It's because your still relying on ambient air to cool the water in the radiator. No don't take that wrong, there is no doubt that you can get rid of more heat with a water cooling rig then an straight HSF, but at the end of the day when all the gaming is done, you still will only get within a few degrees of ambient at best. It's just physics. So if your thinking about watre cooling ask these questions of yourself;
Am I going for Extreme OCs ?
Am I looking for good quiet cooling with a dash of OC just for respectability?
Am I looking for very quiet cooling with few hassles?
Is it just for the kicks?

If you fit in one of these catagories it will help a lot in figureing out what you do, or do not need.

Actually Wixx, like Duck said it is okay to have them all online, but I would go ahead and just not watercool the mobo. When I put the mobo on my watercooling system its temp didnt drop at all, if anything it went up. Everything else is perfectly fine though

I can't help myself

Chaz, help me out here buddy, when you say you put your mobo on the water cooling system I am guessing you meant the North Bridge chip. So can you let me in on whether you had the Chipset block before?, or after the CPU block? Or was it after the CPU, GPU, etc? whatever, how'd ya have it?

My order was: CPU Block 1, CPU Block 2, Chipset Block, GPU block, HDD block.

I bet what was happening was that the more blocks and fittings you have you not only raise the thermal load, but reduce the efficiency of the pump so it really starts to work against you after awhile.

Anyway Chaz, I do agree that you don't gain alot from trying to water cool components that arn't big heat producers. If you stick with the CPu and GPU you are probably best off. Only real reason to go for everything is to try and eliminate virtually all the fans.

Seems to me like the biggest perk to watercooling is the noise reduction (assuming you get a quiet pump) and the lack of fans (coolness factor). As mentioned, it doesn't seem like that many watercoolers are getting phenominal differences. The guys that have their 80-486 running at 3.8 jiga-watts might see a difference when used with, maybe a peltier to cool the rad or something, but the standard (and even normally OCd) rigs just don't seem to make that much of a leap.

MCP it is all relative really.

I have a 240 MHz oc (20%) with FSB increased from 100 - 137 and Vcore increased from 1.7 to 1.85.

My rig runs 15 c cooler than it did with a Volcano 6 at stock speeds and voltage.

Am I an extreme OC superstar? Hell no. Is water giving me an appreciable and tangible advantage over air? You tell me.

Wixx buddy:

If you are set on cooling all parts you mentioned, you could increase performance by splitting stuff up. Instead of running everything in series run them in parallel.

Use one pump, one rad, and one res. Split into two loops just after rad. have one loop do cpu and hdd, and another do gpu and northy. bring them back together at level of res.

You could even split into four streams after the rad, cool each part independently and then bring them all together right before res.

The difficulty will be having enough pump pressure to pull this off. You will need a good strong pump. You need to go progressively smaller diameter hose as you split. maybe 1/2" off the pump down to 3/8" on cpu and gpu, and even 1/4" on HDD and chipset.

It can get complicated. As others mentioned I would prolly stick to just cpu and gpu. Even there I would run 1/2" off the pump and "y" split to two 3/8" lines. It just doesn't make sense to cool the gpu with hot cpu water.

For what it is worth I had distilled + ww leak onto vid card while gaming and saved card. system locked, but after 48hrs under fan the graphics card worked fine.

hope this helps.

I survived 3 spills without damage, it was the forth one that went into a PCI slot and I believe mixed with some accumilated dust that got me. But it had refused to boot for over 30min prior to burning up, if I had not been so persistant at trying to imeadiatly get back up, and just gone to work. That night I would have been fine probably.

You can also run an additional radiator in the line between the CPU and the other components.

Thank you all for your suggestions, I've just made a hard copy of this post for future reference. The real kicker to this design is going to be the figure out how to get the water out of the system without damaging the intake pump. I need to eject water from the system through a 1" opening at around 500psi; due to the design of the case, the water will eventually find its way back to the tank. Another goal is to try to get it as fanless as possible although it looks like I'll have to have a radiator with at least one fan on it.

Wixx, I don't know how practical this is for you but are you familiar with the principles of how water towers work?

It is simple when you think about it, you can use small pumps, (they only have to be big enough to keep up with the damand), too pump water to the top of the water tank and then gravity and the pressure of all the water in the tank supply the high pressure requirements in order to push water to the far reaches of the city.

Sooooo, what if you could pump your water to the top of say 6 foot + of 4" diameter PVC filled with water? A little math would tell you how much water pressure you would generate. You might even generate enough pressure that it could pump itself.

Just an idea to explore.

Quote: Originally posted by Wixx I need to eject water from the system through a 1" opening at around 500psi;

Why so much pressure? Youre going to blow a hole through the back of the case!

Quote: Originally posted by DuckWarrior Why so much pressure? Youre going to blow a hole through the back of the case!

You'll see :-). I'm also working on a device to generate lenticular flow.

I think I know what your going to do, but if it works the way I think it's going to, you'll be able to take someone's hand off with that... Which is fine with me.. *eg* Cool idea tho!

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You can also use it to cut blowholes in cases and cut out new grills.