vapochill questions ........

[weebroonie]

one day il be buyin a vapo i was wondering do they put out alot of heat after all they cool the cpu so well somethins got to give how quiet are they compared to your average water setup with a few fans ? how long do they take to start the boot process i know they have to chill down before letting the cpu kick in

[Synthohol]

Vapochill explained (http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q1/asetek-vapochill/index.x?pg=1)

(link to Tech-Report.com)

<paragraph from Tech-Report's review>

When you finally fire up the Vapochill, you'll find it does... nothing. Well, that's not really fair. It definitely powers up. The power light comes on, you can hear a couple of quiet fans and what sounds like a dorm fridge if you listen closely, and there's a hyphen crawling left to right across the display on the front of the case. But dammit, it won't POST! Your mind ponders how long you spent putting everything together, and the thought of going over everything to look for mistakes makes you cringe.

Well, fear not; this is all perfectly normal. See, if the Vapochill hasn't been on for a few days (or, for example, since it was tested by Asetek prior to shipment) it takes several minutes to start cooling the evaporator effectively. If the system were allowed to POST at this point, the CPU would likely overheat before the evaporator started working. Therefore, the ChillControl computer holds the motherboard's reset line high (the equivalent of holding down the reset button) until the evaporator cools down to -5C. Incidentally, if your system does actually POST when you first turn it on, turn it off and check to make sure the reset line from the case is hooked up correctly. When I assembled everything, I was off by a pin, and going into the BIOS revealed the CPU temperature climbing very high very quickly.

Within five or so minutes, the display on the front of the Vapochill will start counting down from 10. At this point it's actually displaying the temperature of the evaporator in Celsius. When it hits -5, the system will POST. The display will continue to count down until it reaches the target temperature set in the ChillControl computer; by default this is -15C, or 5F.

[weebroonie]

thanks synth that was a good read :)

[Kill-Switch]

Vapochills don't put out a lot of heat, I think most of the heat actually comes from the PSU ... can't really feel much more than slightly warm air near the compressor and everything.

As for quiet, the Vapochill as standard comes with one 120mm fan which is really quiet. When you fire up your Vapochill you'll only hear a very slight noise from the compressor as it kicks in, after than you'll not hear it. The fan itself runs really quiet .... I moved from a watercooled system to vapochill and can safely say the noise level has dramatically dropped.

Boot up time kind of depends how long you leave it turned off for. The very first time you fire it up after installing everything you'll wait the longest which is only about 3 minutes, maybe 4 at worst. My Vapochill was dormant for well over a month and it only took 3 minutes to fire up. In general it will probably take about a minute to fire up, thats if you shut it down at night and then fire it back up sometime during the next day.

[weebroonie]

sounds good so far well my pc at the mo has 5 120 mm fans so i dare say it should be quieter is there alot of room inside them coz i would idealy like to put in whats left of my water cooling system back in for the likes of the northbridge and graphics thing is there enough room in the case for it ?
i dont like about my system is the heat it outputs into my room my rooms always hot for some reason an the pc on all day doesnt help would the vapo be better ?
i suppose with this new nvidia overclocking utility i could up the fsb up and down as required even change the voltage on the fly in windows so is it possible to adjust the vapo for how much it cools so i could turn the fsb and voltage down and slow the fan on the vapo down on the fly or does the vapo speed have to be set in the vapo bios ?

[Kill-Switch]

There should be enough room to put a watercooling loop in to cool your GPU and Northbridge ... Asetek (the guys who make Vapochills) also produce a watercooling system called Waterchill which is made to go in the Vapochill case. I suppose you should be able to get your stuff in there easily :)

Even with a Vapochill your system will output a air amount of heat, like I said the PSU will put out most of the heat ... and you do need a good PSU for a Vapochill, not a cheap nasty underpowered one either.

You can control how much cooling the Vapochill does using the chillcontrol utility. This cannot be done "on-the-fy" and requires a little messing around to use .... it's all explained in the manual though :) (Asetek are developing an Windows version of the chillcontrol so you'll eventually be able to alter things "on-the-fly")So if you want the Vapochill to be quieter you can slow things down a little to lower the noise, but will incur an increase in temperatures. Or if you want the best temps just turn it on 100% and watch the temps drop :D

At the end of the day the Vapochill isn't really noisey at 100% although most people like to set it at 80% as they find it the perfect balance between less noise and acceptable temps.

[Synthohol]

Man, i don't know, even a used vapochill 1.xx (will fit my a7v266-e) is 500.00+.
with the great advice of the members on this board i'm sure i can build a slammin' TEC super system soup to nuts for less than that.
I think Fara's at 15c with his TEC system, for the extra 20c i could knock off that temp, for me its not worth it when all it cools is the CPU.
with a good TEC system on CPU, GPU and a Z-block on the northbridge, i feel thats more bang for the buck.
(not that I'd be able to afford either when my wife keeps paying all those darn bills that keep coming to the house)
she won't understand that over-extension and minimum payments is the american way of life, we will probably never truly catch up, but whatever.
we just got a 1200.00 check from the govt. because i knocked her up 3 times, lets see how much of that she lets me spend!!:D