Liquid Refreshment

I've always wanted to move to water cooling in my main rig as long as I've had a computer. And with the nagging engineer in the back of my head telling me never to mix water and electronics, I took the plunge anyway.

In this article I will cover an easy way of essentially "buying" your way into water cooling without the worry of matching up hose diameters and connectors etc.

The first thing to do is to get a suitable motherboard and there are a lot out there. But if you are going to water cool then you will want an enthusiast / high-end board that can support some decent overclocks while running your water cooling setup.

I have chosen GIGABYTE's EP45-EXTREME motherboard; this because I have RAM that can be seriously overclocked as well as a new 45nm Wolfdale CPU. But the main attraction of this board is the pre-built water block for the Northbridge.

The Northbridge is an essential item to cool and is just as important as the CPU and GPU if you plan to overclock. You don't have to buy one with a pre-fitted Northbridge block; you can buy a block separate and fit it yourself.

However, if you don't want to overclock and are merely going for a silent system, then look at a motherboard where you can fit a silent fan to blow some air over the heatsink of the Northbridge. This is essential as normally your CPU fan would provide airflow across the Northbridge.

The EP45-EXTREME features all the latest technologies from GIGABYTE which includes the Ultra Durable 2 series of components on board, Dolby Home Theatre chipset, DDR2 speeds up to 1200 MHz and an FSB of up to 1600 MHz.