I built up my P182 case with a water cooling system a week ago with the Thermaltake Bigwater 745 kit. However going one week without tinkering with my computer was too long, so time to open it up and add some refinement.

Here is the inards of an Nvidia G8800 with the stock heatsink removed. The screws come off easy, but the existing thermal greese was a little more difficult to navigate, the resistance was enough to make me keep looking for screws I might have missed, but all it needed is a nice tug.

The G8800 is quite a beast with the heatsink on, but it looks pretty slender without it. A wolf in sheeps clothes.

The koolance cooler comes with two types of heat transfer pads for the memory modules, pink and black. The black is thinner and feels more like fiberglass, the pink is thicker and feels like foam. I chose pink because I wanted as tight a contact as I could. However, it might have been almost too thick resulting in the water block raised slightly off the GPU chip. Nothing thermal greese couldn't fill up but I think I would go with the black thermal pads next time.

shinny

unfortunately there was not a single bay grill bracket to replace the original dual bay. While it is removable, I would rather have a grill then no grill. And nothing a dremmel can't fix if an opening is needed.

There are a couple G8800 water blocks out there, but these are the reason I went with Koolance. Without a doubt compression nozzels in my opinion are the way to go for all connections.

Switching gears over to the radiator. I like the fact the thermaltake kit comes with two radiators, one you attach to the case either internally or externally, and a freestanding radiator. My only issue with the attachable radiator was a pointless metal stub that stuck out, maybe you could hang it to the wall like a picture frame? Anyways this useless piece of metal was the only thing preventing the radiator from fitting inside my computer, so dremmeled it off and rounded the edges.

voila, it fits!

This is my GPU at stock speeds and stock heatsink and fan. Note the temperature, 88 degree celcius!!! One of the reasons I went with a liquid cooling system. If you really want to push your GPU card hard, the real time hdr rendering does quite well.

here it is, the computer maxed out and pushed beyond. Unlike the previous image I am also running CPU burn in at the same time as the HDR rendering in order to push my GPU and CPU at the same time. Also note the clock frequency, I have overclocked my GTS's GPU past that of the much more expensive Ultra. I have also overclocked my CPU from 2.4Ghz to 3.0Ghz and raised it's voltage 0.15v. Note, these Jpeg reduced images don't give the HDR rendering program anywhere near as much credit as they should, it looks much better than these pictures can portray.

For further reference of the system temperature, this is the temperature of everything stock cooled in my original old case. The case was a cheap free one I got quite awhile ago. Note the temperature on my hard drives, this is strictly the difference between having them in a case which stacks them close to each other with little airflow, to my new p182 case which I have them seperated with fans blowing over them. 62 degree to 44. Note that my stock CPU runs hotter than my overclocked watercooled CPU. Note that my stock GPU without HDR rendering and running idle is the same temperature as my heavily overclocked watercooled HDR rendering setup.

My stock system rank was 81%. One of my goals in this was to push my computer to the top 10%. After overclocking, it is now finally in the top 6%. I guess this is acceptable, for now.