WHAT .. you can't expect anyone to believe that you are going to enter an overclocking contest using a cooling system that is designed for a single GPU card ..!
Okay, so even I had doubts about this working but again the "Price was Right" since during the holidays a online retailer was practically giving these away (provided you called in you order at midnight before they sold out and sent your rebate off on time.)
The reviews on the Aquagate Duo were not kind when comapred to the top air cooling units. I had a Typhoon in my primary box as a back-up, but the new Aquagate Duo Viva did show some improvements over the first generation. With an improved pumping system and better water blocks I thought it was worth a try. The water system would also give me 2 advanatges;
1. The radiator allows me to move the heat out of the case
2. Additional cooling could be applied to the radiator to help disapate heat
I did consider using the second water block to cool the NB chip and since the block had a mirror finish on both sides I even looked into adding a heat sink to the back to help shed more heat. But air cooling on the NB heatsinks proved to be sufficient and I definately preferred running the CPU in a single block configuration (one block, one radiator, one chip to cool.)
Since this is a ghetto .. err, budget overclock I also decided to involve some ice in the final run. At drag strips we used to pack the intake manifolds with ice to help improve short-term performance, and I decied to do the same thing here. The big surprise was that 0 degrees celcius would not be cool enough. I ended up using some additional agents to get the immersion system temperature down (salt, and wiper fluid.) I immersed the radiator in wiper fluid and ice, and with the help of some kosher kitchen salt, got the immersion temperatur down to -4 degrees celcius. The idle temps on the CPU held at 7 no problem and at load the CPU barely touched 22. Not bad using $10 bucks worth of tubes, bins, wire ties and wiper fluid from Home Depot.
With a larger bin, more ice, more salt, and more patience it is documented that the immersion fluid can hit -15f.
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