Well, if you have a good enough cooler, you can use a quiet fan.

My Socket-A system is using a Thermaltake Big Typhoon which uses a 120mm fan.

I've also modified a stock Socket 939 Opteron heatpipe cooler for use on a Slot-A Athlon setup. Runs absolutely silent and runs extremely cool.

I do have a NOS EverCool WC-101 setup on the way to play with.... got it cheap.

Looks neat.. that new old stock?

I remember the first kit I had... got it from some place I don't quite remember the name of. very basic mounting hardware (pain in the ass thought I would kill my Duron by chipping it), came with a pump and electrical box for a reservoir (was actually nice and quiet too), and some generic Alu radiator...🤣

cannibalized the box for my Diamond 56K USB modem (still have it) to make a shroud for the radiator... went to radioshack and bought a big ass generic fan and then 7v or 5v modded it to keep it quiet. Had that setup for a couple years actually. Went to some random motor cycle shop looking for Water Wetter with my mom, 🤣... ended up talking to some guy there about the Cray super computer.

yep. Seller's pic:

It isn't supposed to be all that good of a setup, most likely due to the really low power pump.

There was a better model, the WC-201 that also had an additional 80mm radiator.. but I doubt I will ever see a complete one for sale. The difference is a fancier bay control box and the additional radiator and a GPU water block. The CPU waterblock also doesn't have fins or a fan.
https://www.overclockers.com/evercool-water-c … ler-kit-wc-201/

I remember those old Koolance cases, man I wish they still made those.

http://www.thg.ru/cpu/20011029/print.html

I have a dual 2.7GHz Powermac G5 whose watercooling took out one of the CPUs, the entire motherboard and the power supply.

So kind of no.

I still hope to get another one someday that hasn't eaten itself and convert it to air cooling, maybe with a modified pair of big heavy PC air heatsinks fed by the stock fans.

Yeah I've had my share of leaky systems / mishaps but I have always been paranoid so I usually caught those things early or during leak testing. Its definitely a risk.. I'm quite happy with my modern Noctua air cooling solutions, but not really made to be stuck on top of old CPUs either.

No fluid is ever going inside any of my systems, if they are powered on. That is for shure.
To me, water cooling have always been about reduction of heat. Not about reduction of noise.
In the mid-00's, this was the case, when water cooling started to catch on.
Somehow, I still think about water cooling as some sort of supercomputer thingy.

I've never really considered it or saw it as worth it... most really old H/W doesn't get hot enough to begin with; meanwhile, things like Prescott P4s require adequate VRM cooling along with CPU cooling, which most water blocks typically don't accommodate. At that point, adding a fan blowing at the CPU socket area becomes required, which tosses the "lower noise" argument out the window.

SW-SSG wrote:

I've never really considered it or saw it as worth it... most really old H/W doesn't get hot enough to begin with; meanwhile, things like Prescott P4s require adequate VRM cooling along with CPU cooling, which most water blocks typically don't accommodate. At that point, adding a fan blowing at the CPU socket area becomes required, which tosses the "lower noise" argument out the window.

Just add a NorthQ 3310 all-copper cooler to those Socket478/SocketA CPU's, and you do not need any water cooling and will have low noise. Just keep in mind, that the cooler weighs in, at aprox 610 gram (Aprox 1 pound) of pure copper.

Oh no, don't get me retro-ing on my cooling gear too! 🤣

I had MAZE2 and MAZE2-2 rigs at one point. Air cooling got really good after that, so I didn't go much further.

SW-SSG wrote:

I've never really considered it or saw it as worth it... most really old H/W doesn't get hot enough to begin with; meanwhile, things like Prescott P4s require adequate VRM cooling along with CPU cooling, which most water blocks typically don't accommodate. At that point, adding a fan blowing at the CPU socket area becomes required, which tosses the "lower noise" argument out the window.

Some people drag race mustangs or whatever.

I drive a pontiac vibe. 😜

Different solutions for different goals.

I always had bad opinion of liquid cooling any systems cause I always thought the possibility of water leaking out from cables or whatever but I am reconsidering this with newer already assembled closed circuit cooling systems. I recently bought a Coolermaster 120 for my Core2 E8600 and beside the not easy installation process (to find a good place for the radiator in an old case and generally the time it takes to actually finish the installation) it's now working and cool to have in an old mainboard. Probably I'll need it when I'll switch eventually to a Q9550/9650 cpu.
But as other said a real cpu fan would be better for the cooling also other components close to the cpu.

SW-SSG wrote:

I've never really considered it or saw it as worth it... most really old H/W doesn't get hot enough to begin with; meanwhile, things like Prescott P4s require adequate VRM cooling along with CPU cooling, which most water blocks typically don't accommodate. At that point, adding a fan blowing at the CPU socket area becomes required, which tosses the "lower noise" argument out the window.

Also beside the technical need to have a real fan running in the pc I find that a completely silent pc is someway boring. The same thing I'd say for SSD vs usual and older hard disk drives.

386SX wrote:

I always had bad opinion of liquid cooling any systems cause I always thought the possibility of water leaking out from cables or whatever but I am reconsidering this with newer already assembled closed circuit cooling systems. I recently bought a Coolermaster 120 for my Core2 E8600 and beside the not easy installation process (to find a good place for the radiator in an old case and generally the time it takes to actually finish the installation) it's now working and cool to have in an old mainboard. Probably I'll need it when I'll switch eventually to a Q9550/9650 cpu.
But as other said a real cpu fan would be better for the cooling also other components close to the cpu.

My wife's computer has had a Corsair H100i installed in it since I built it for her. I bought a refurb unit at the time because it was much cheaper than a new unit.

It has been running flawlessly for the past 3 years or so. I just have to blow the dust out of the radiator every once in a while.

The newer AIO units are not going to give the same cooling performance as a high end water cooling setup, but they do work just fine.

They also are not going to cool the CPU quite as well as a high end heatpipe setup such as a Noctua NH-D14 (what I have in my system).

The pluses are that the system is much easier to work on AND the hot air from the CPU cooler is exhausted out of the case.