Here is my test build for a rig that I use for gaming and crunching (my sig rig). It is cooled by 1. a chiller (condenser with heat exchanger) that was ripped from a piece of lab equipment ($100 shipped on ebay), and 2. a heater core + 2 deltas, plumbed in series. The flow of coolant can be shunted through both devices (for water-cooling, with condenser turned off), or through the condenser only (for chilling), by a set of ball valves. I chill when gaming (a couple of hours a day) and water-cool when crunching (the rest of the day). I switch overclock settings between the two cooling modes via saved bios settings.
I know from test builds that the temp of the coolant under load is right at 0C. With no load it gets down to about -12C, but I never run it without a load. The ambient down here in the basement is about 50F in the winter and 60F in the summer, so that helps, as does the house fan. This works well for a medium level of overclocking. The bang vs. buck for the chiller was pretty good: it has a built-in heat exchanger, all I needed to do was connect the tubing, plug it in, and turn it on to get to 0C loaded. Bios temp and software temp readings are between 45F and 60F loaded for the cpu. That gets me just under 3.9 ghz at 430 fsb, with complete stability in games, benchmarks, and crunching. I can go faster but I lose complete stability.
I knew this would work ok, the point of this build was really just to make sure I mounted the water-blocks properly. There are alot of things I can improve in build 2. Some of the tubing runs are too short, some are too long. I need to do the v-droop mod for the mobo. The video card needs alot of work: memory heatsinks, volt-mods, more insulation, and probably a bios flash. I need to finish insulating the waterblocks, worm clamps, and tubing.
Wire/cable management definitely, lights probably, case painting maybe, who knows. Or maybe I will get bored with it and go back to the unwieldy a/c conversion for some serious cooling.
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