Hi there,
I own a Thermaltake Symphonie and the noice level is very quiet, hardly to notice at all. I actually can only hear the airflow trough thr metalcover, but not the fans. The cooling effiency is just great. I cool an AMD FX55 @ 2800 and an Geforce 7800GTX@520/1350 and also the Chipset @ 255 from my DFI Lanparty Expert Mainboard. I uninstalled the two standard (to weak for my taste) pumps in the Symphonie chassis and installed a software controlled Eheim 1046 12v Aquastream pump from Aquacomputer Germany directly on the bottom of my Thermaltake Armor Tower. I can't hear the pump, it's so quiet and vcause of rubber feeds any vibrations are gone too. The pump is running permanently overclocked @70Hz and I never ever had a problem do far with it. The stream delivers 40=l/h with anything installed: Symphonie Tower, chipset cooler, Cpu cooler and Geforce cooler and a flowmeter from Aquacomputer) I would highly recomend the Symphony for its fantastic cooling power and its beautyfull appearance. I was a newbie when I started 2 years ago with watercooling and even I was successfull with the described product. Bevor that I used Phase cooling with a MACH II GT from Nventiv.

Cheers from Switzerland
andi

Actually, I worked with HX's for many years. The heat transfer from the CPU to the heat sink, to the air stream (via a convective air flow from the axial fan) is pretty direct. If you introduce an intermediate fluid, you now have a pathway that goes like this: CPU to heat sink to water loop thru a HX (air-to-water) to your axial-fan-driven air stream. Your approach temps using the intermediate step of water are much smaller; therefore less heat transfer.

The only way a water system could be superior to air only is two ways 1) a larger water reservoir that could absorb heat for hours - would need to be gallons. 2) a phase change that drops the coolant temp well below that of the atmospheric air.

The analogy I can think of is gas engine manufacturers used an air to water to air (two complete HX's, one cooling turbo air using water, the other cooling the water with atmospheric air) evolved to air-to-air - using atmospheric air to directly cool turbo air via a single HX. ATAAC is far more efficient than ATWTA.

Sorry, just had an epiphany. I would NEVER recommend a non-phase change water cooler, it could never possibly work as well as a heat sink w/ fan. Basic laws of heat transfer invalidate water cooling w/o a phase change as an option to straight air cooling.

Well, Zalman's solution is passive yet it works much better than any air cooling.

well thats all very well and good except for the simple fact that you can get more 12 mm fans on a water cooler system then an air cooled one, thats the main bvenifit. i mean the best air cooler out there would probibly be something like that zalman, altho perhalps with a shroud. with three radiators, you are essentially getting three zalman coolers.

bah that was terrible grammar... sorry im doing 5 things at once here...

Well, not for me.
I really miss Corsair's excellent WC units, the now discontinued Hydrocooll 200 which is still keeping my 4400+@2.8GHz around 42-44C on full load, the updated Hydrocool 200EX and Corsair's current products: Nautilus 500, marketed as the world's easiest installable WC and the COOL Water, an internal solution from Corsair.

Corsair Hydrocool-family: http://www.corsairmicro.com/corsair/disc_hydrocool.html

Corsair COOL Water: http://www.corsairmicro.com/corsair/COOL_water.html

Corsair Nautilus 500: http://www.corsairmicro.com/corsair/nautilus_500.html

Can you elaborate on this? I'm still debating Reserator + vs Symphony... pls explain.

GiGabyte 8IEpP1000
Intel 3.0g 478

this was running 45 idle and 60 fully boinced
I put a reserator in, with the vga block onto the 9600 VGA card and the spare vga block onto the northbridge
and it runs under 40 degress fully boinced, reserator is cooling all three

They are Russian manufacturer, not yet available outside ex-USSR region :(

So why include it in your tests? All the other kits seem to be widely available, at least in the US.
As others have mentioned, it seems to be a fairly random selection.

Despite this the article was both hugely informative and well presented, many thanks for helping us understand these products better!!

They need coolers in Russia? :-)

I would suspect the Russians would need coolers as much as the next person running hot inefficient equipment. They are one of the last countries still making vacuum tubes lol. They're only used by guitar amp and botique stereo equipment companies mostly. Now those put off some heat.