I am considering watercooling for my Athlon 64 build I will be doing next month. I have never done any watercooling before and wanted to know if it is worth the expense and are there any other serious problems I should consider like leakage? How safe are these things? What is a good brand for watercooling.
These days most watercooling devices are very safe. Back in the day of home-made versions, you needed to be a little more careful.
Are you planning on doing some serious overclocking? If not, then I would not waste time or money on watercooling. There are perfectly good Heatsink and fan units on the market that will suffice for where a overclocking etc is concerned.
If you go watercolling, study up. It may be your best bet to buy a kit rather than assemble the unit yourself from the various accessories you'll need to buy, however, you'll gain a better understanding of your rig.
Hey, Aron posted a review a while ago, and I've been happy with it. Only reason I switched to aircooling was because the power quits so often here, then I'd have to give the resevoir a few whacks to get it pumping again. watercooling is boffo if you have a good utility company.
I read an article not too long ago about a guy using a refrigeration unit to pump incredible performance out of an inexpensive chip. It was in one of those Ziff Davis extreme tech mags. I think he was cooling the CPU below 0 C. I think the unit was about $900.