After I got the water block installed on the CPU and the radiator installed (superglued and craft-wired) to the back of my computer, I was ready to put everything back together. I screwed everything down, connected all the wires, and clicked the “On” button on my case. It didn’t turn on! Haha.. whoops. I connected the “On” button wires to the wrong pins on motherboard. Two seconds later, I turned on the computer and it started to boot up. Instantly I realized that the fan on the radiator was really loud. I mean, it’s not THAT loud, but it’s got kind of a high pitch to it since it’s such a small fan, and that high pitch just annoys the hell out of me. I was, again, disappointed because I was hoping to have something that was quieter than what I already had, but this wasn’t the way it was. Oh well, it’s all installed and superglued so there’s no going back now, at least not in my mind.

I went right into the BIOS setup screen and set the bus speed from 100mhz to 120mhz. This took my computer from 2.5ghz straight to 3ghz, about a 17% increase, just like that. Everything booted up fine, and aside from the crappy fan noise, everything was very satisfactory. I played around with stuff on the computer for some time, allowing the computer to heat up, and when I opened up photoshop, my computer just crashed! The computer restarted without warning, so I checked out the temperature in the BIOS. I have it set up so the computer will shut down/restart when the temperature hits 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) so I thought that was the problem I was having. Nope, the BIOS was reporting the temperature to be a cool 38 degrees Celsius, which was only a few degrees hotter than my room. My room was about 96 degrees Fahrenheit and the processor was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Eureka! It would seem that the water cooler was, in fact, doing its job. I gave the computer plenty of time to heat up nice and hot. I’ve done this with my heatsink/fan before and it was the heat (60 degrees Celsius) that made the computer restart, but not in this case. This puny, sad excuse for a water cooler was actually doing a superb job of keeping the CPU somewhat chill. Amazing!

Continue to Next Page >>