Reserator II for Dual CPU system

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Thu Aug 02, 2007 9:47 am

I currently have a dell Precision 490 with Dual 5160 3Ghz XEON, 8GB RAM, Diamond ATI 2900XT video Card. My hard drives were 2-15K SAS drives but I have removed those to go with 4- 2.5" SAS drives. The machine getting to noisy still and think it is the video car and system fans. I am thinking of getting a new case for it (Antec P182) and then adding the Reserator II water cooling. I know zalman does not make waterblocks for that chip but i found other vendors that do. I want to make this machine silent but not lose performance. I am going to switch to SSD hard drives as soon as I can get a hold of a couple 64GB ones to raid together. I will also be upgrading to the Quad core version soon. So the question is can the Reserator handle 2 CPU's and the Video card? Also would I be able to disable some of the fans in the P182 to cut down the noise even more.

Also I know I will need to replace my PSU since te dell one will prob not transfer to the new case. What is the best way to find out what my current power draw is? RIght now it has a 700W PSU but that fan is noisy to so I would prefer somethign quiter.

Thanks for any help

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Thu Aug 02, 2007 11:51 am

Although the Zalman Reserator 2 is very quiet its not that powerful.

It's good enough to cool a single Nvidia 8800GTX card but the hotter ATI HD2900XT plus a pair of Xeon 5160 3ghz 80w processors would overload a single Reserator 2.

You'd probably need to consider a pair of Reserator 2s: one for the graphics card and then one for the two processors.

If you're going to fit quad core Xeons soon you may find it necessary to use a reserator 2 for each CPU though.

That could work, although the next problem is that Zalman don't make waterblocks for the Intel Xeon 5160 Socket 771 CPUs or the ATI HD 2900XT graphics card.

The Zalman Reserator 2 is made from aluminium, so you really want to use aluminium waterblocks too to minimise the risk of galvanic corrosion.

If you added copper waterblocks (eg. Danger Den products) you could potentially run into problems over time.

Anti-corrosion additive could slow this enough to make it workable but it's something to bear in mind.

It would probably be better to use an active water cooling setup instead with some fans on the radiator.

For checking the power draw of your PC something such as a kill-a-watt power meter will tell you how much power your PC is using.:

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/kil ... tor_review

.

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Thu Aug 02, 2007 12:54 pm

Thanks for the info. I will start checking out the reviews of the active units.

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Thu Aug 02, 2007 3:38 pm

For active watercooling it's usually best to build the system from components.

You'd probably still want seperate loops for the different components.

echn111's PC is a good example of a quiet watercooled PC:

viewtopic.php?t=41300

Have a look at the stickies on the xtremesystems.com forums as they have lots of useful information also.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/for ... y.php?f=70

For a discussion of using a Zalman Reserator 2 to quietly cool Nvidia 8800 graphics cards have a look at this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=40686&start=0

.

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Thu Aug 02, 2007 9:07 pm

Wow, thanks for all the information and great links. i have lots of reading to do so that I can make an informed decision.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 7:32 pm

er

the res 2 handles quad core, and sli gtx's.

you have a similar power need to cool. Just skip the chipset. less it has to push through the better.

people think that the "passive" res fails on high end heat. It doesnt.

the more heat you put into a res, the better it works to lower that heat. I have a res 1. yes, my system is not demanding, it is only a x1900xt and a 2.2ghz 4200. However, there are many examples of this very REs1 cooling down a quad and an ultra fine and dandy. the res two has even more cooling surface. The hotter it gets, the greater the difference to the room temperature, the less passive it gets and starts to really cool things down.

I would be astounded if the Res2 couldnt do a dual quad and single 2900xt. People have this idea that the 2900xt is a power monger. It isnt. it uses almost the same exact power as a 8800gtx. At idle, it uses LESS. I dont like the card personally, but it still is strong and would be fine with 2 quads and a res2.

tehfire · Post by **tehfire** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 8:58 pm

I really don't know and am just asking whether the Prescision has industry standard (e.g. ATX) parts? Usually Dell uses proprietary everything.

So taking it out of the stock case could be a problem. Doing watercooling on it may work, though

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 11:07 am

You are correct, the parts are not all standard. I am planning on switching cases with most likely the Antec P182. I will most likely go with the Corsair 620HX power supply. I have not decided on the motherboard yet. I will then transplant the rest of the gear to the new case. I do plan on upgrading to the newer XEON quads when they hit later this year so I want to make sure the new motherboard will support it.

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 2:19 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:er

the res 2 handles quad core, and sli gtx's.

Is that two 8800 GTX cards?

Have you got a link where someone has done that please.

What sort of load temperatures did they get with those three components in the loop?

Based on my reserator 2 using the stock pump I'm not too convinced about that.

One 8800GTX or Intel Core 2 Quad CPU per loop is fine but putting them all together is a whole different matter.

There are also examples of people stating a CPU and 8800GTX in the same loop doesn't work well:

http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=1856

".okay, built my first water cooled system using a zalman reserstor2 and a zalman reserator 1v2. i was lead to believe that the reserators would be on operational limits if i cooled just the pair of sli 8800gtx's on either of the units, this in mind i thought "no worries just split the GPU's problem solved"OOOOOOOOH how wrong was I.

my machine:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ 3.00GHz (Socket AM2)
Asus M2N32-SLi-DLX nForce 590 SLi (Socket AM2)
2x Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator DHX PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB) (yeah i know 8gig is overkill)
2x BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB Silent WaterCooled
4x Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500AHFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache (in raid0+1)

bare in mind i was going for silence not overclockability so extra fans on the zalmans is not an option for me.
after extensive arsing about and finally getting hardware monitors that work on vista ultimate 64bit i found i had a real problem when running certain games, for instance shadowrun ran just fine, looked all shiny and i had nothing to complain about, try LOTRO that meant instant machine shutdown (at this point i had no monitoring due to driver issues) got the monitoring sorted and realised,the loop i was running the cpu and the GPU on was cooking my cpu. the water wasn't cooling off enough as it was recirculated,the upshot of this is i need yet another reserator which i was less than happy at having to fork out for. i've decided i'm gonna plump for another 1v2 as that way i can run each gpu on its own dedicated reserator. i hope you can learn from my rudimentary mistake (once i thought about it GPU's run at 80 c give or take,cpu most definately does not). good luck with running a reserator cooling solution though, shame its not as easy as it looks." Efro

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 6:20 pm

I've ordered the Kill_a_watt meter so I can check my current power usage so I can gauge the neded power supply. Whether or not the reserator will work seems to still be up in the air. One common answer is a custom built one will def perform better which I understand but these are real nice as they are pretty much put together. I dont have the time to really make my own enclosure so the premade ones I am hopefull will work. I see they have a new one called the XT. I like that design so will prob go with that. I am hoping to see some reviews soon to find out how loud it is. They claim it is quiet with the one fan but then again every manufacturer claim they have the quietest.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 6:33 pm

I am having trouble finding links to a sli setup and zalman.

Have you seen the temps on a gtx with the retardedly pathetic air cooling they come with? 60-70 is a good temp. nothing like that with the crappiest water system would occur.

if one had the cash and one was concerned, you could get two zalman res 1's and use one for 2xsli and the other for cpu and northbridge. I have only seen a couple of people do this, but you could handle ultra's oc'd on that sort of thing.

i found one about 6600gt's in slie with a slightly oc'd 939 chip. not enough to show you what i know about the res1, but here goes for now.

older sli + old zalman

another link sorta

All of these folks are not using the res 2. Does the res 2 have better cooling? I dont know.

bah forget this. why work for someone else. just call zalman and also google reserator sli

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 3:46 am

Well, my questions was really about the dual CPU and then also the Vid card. But I guess if it could handle to video cards and a CPU it would probably work. I could not find anyone running dual XEONs with water cooling via google. Zalman said it could handle it but I was hoping to find someone else out there also to get info first hand.

I guess I will play gunea pig. I will post back when I find out.

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 4:07 am

Have you decided which waterblocks you're going to use?

Let us know what your results are.

Turas · Post by **Turas** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 4:52 am

I am most likely going to use the DangerDen waterblock for the 2900 since it is the only one I can find. The CPU block will most likely be the Swifttech Apogee GT. Both of those are copper though so I will have to make she I keep plenty of anti-corrosion additive in the system.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 7:41 am

I wouldnt cross brands.

qualities of the metal used are different. Some say it wouldnt matter with high grades of copper so I guess regular old car antifreeze would work for that.

You definitely cant mix a zalman with anything else. it uses anodized aluminum. would still rust no matter what.

I dont know what your intentions are for radiators and such though.

peteamer · Post by **peteamer** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 9:06 am

~El~Jefe~ wrote:You definitely cant mix a zalman with anything else. it uses anodized aluminum. would still rust no matter what.

If the aluminium is anodized and has a proper/full covering, errosion or galvanic corrosion will not happen.

For an outstanding explanation and then further discussion see here.

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 12:27 pm

Here's a review of the new Danger Den HD2900XT waterblock:

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?p=420265

.