I've recently built an economy model PC (see signature) and just added an Antec Kuhler h2o 920 water cooling system. It is all self contained with no maintenance necessary.
The FX 8350 runs a little hotter and I could see problems when the hotter weather comes in the summer. While it's no competition to the Intel cpu's, it does a decent job. The TG2 benchmark took 10 minutes exactly (really, it was exactly 10 minutes!) I had set it to use a minimum of 8 threads and maximum of 64. But the important thing to me was the maximum temperature was 33.9C or 93F. The ambient temperature was 22.8C or 73F.
I also ran the Prime95 torture test (inplace large FFT's and it maxed out the same as the TG2 render. The idle temperature is 11.1C or 52F.
One of the nice features is the included control software. The unit plugs into a motherboard USB port and you can set the cooling to silent, extreme (that's what I used in the tests), or custom.
This leaves a lot of "room" to overclock, though I'm not too sure I want to. I'll probably wait until those hot summer days first to see.
Installation was relatively easy, though not as easy as the manufacturer claims. The instructions are rather sparse and it's best to lay everything out and just study it before starting.
This is what it looks like: http://store.antec.com/Product/cooling-cpu_cooler/kuhler-h20-620-liquid-cooler/PREORD-H2O.aspx
So this is a little review that may be interesting to some of you. It's amazing how quickly the cpu temperature rises with a full blown render.
Thanks for the review! Interestingly, TG seems to stress PC hardware as much as almost anything else I know of. So it's a good test. :D I have a water-cooled, overclocked system myself and up until recently it was working great, but now it's not cooling as well as it used to. Not entirely sure why yet, I need to find some time to look into it...
- Oshyan