Tax time is upon us here in Australia.

Thinking of using my refund to get 3-way SLI setup on my PC. Also contemplating setting up water cooling.

The later still scares the living shit out of me but the performance boost is supposed to be quite significant. Anyone here running water cooling?

I looked at water cooling in a Midi tower, I decided that if im careful with the case I get air cooling could be almost as effective but less than 1/4 of the price.

I'm using a thermaltake bigwater 760is on this computer. It's not going to be sufficient for your needs, as it's got an internal radiator. For a rig like you're building, you're going to want to have an external radiator, which is going to be a bit of a pain.

I'd recommend looking at kits, at least to start with, my kit wasn't too hard to install, but if I ever get around to it, I'm tempted to get a waterblock to cool my HDD and probably one for my GPU as well.

My i7 rig is watercooled, but on the CPU. I didn't do a loop for the video card. I'd recommend against it unless you're going to overclock. In that case it would be worth it as it's a far more effective cooling solution. Otherwise, stick with air cooling.

Keep in mind with a water cooling loop, you still have to drain it at least once a year, which can be a real pain (this is made much easier if you install a T-line). I do mine on a regular basis, but I don't look forward to those days.

SLI is shit. You're better off getting one damn good card than daisy chaining cards. Even then you're getting less bang per buck the higher up you go. Check out some benchmark tests to see what's worth getting.

You might want to consider getting an SSD instead. That will show a far more significant increase in performance than having a card twice as powerful as anything on the market can use.

Only for loading files. Nothing more. It doesn't speed up the processing.

Benchmarking shows otherwise. Look at the comparison of various cards and you'll see the difference.

SLI offers a significant performance boost. However, I would not recommend a triple setup as the performance boost on a triple SLI system is not really worth it, unless you are just going for bragging rights. Not to mention the price of all 3 cards is going to be insane.

Stick with 2 cards and get a nice air cooling system. I don't care how nice water cooling is, water and computer components should never be near each other. I always think of the worst case scenario, and putting $1500 worth of hardware in that situation never sits well with me.

In a lot of games, the time it takes to load resources from disk is limiting, causing anything from stutter to interminable loading screens. This is where an SSD (or even better, buying a lot of RAM and running the game from a RAMdisk) has a big payoff.

What you shouldn't do is the common and wasteful mistake of running Windows from an SSD. So Windows loads faster: big deal. I want applications to load and run faster, without spending their time and mine waiting for the disk to rotate. Also, Windows scribbles all over its system disk, and that's wasteful when your system disk is an SSD.

Whether SLI is worthwhile still depends on whether you could do better by buying one much faster graphics card and flogging the rest on Craigslist.

It's wasteful in just about every sense. It's not going to offer any noticeable performance boost over a reasonably powerful rig with a single decent graphics card. I don't know why people would consider such options when consoles have seen to it that damn near every game is designed around 6 year old hardware.

By the time such hardware is actually taxed equally powerful options will be about half the price - if not less, the way things are going. Sometimes loading files can make all the difference. A lot of games are crippled by the way the engine loads files.

Not really. Because it very quickly hits a peak of what's actually needed. There are no games that really tax current hardware. The first Crysis was the last game that dared to do that and that was 4 years ago now.

he Windows Experience Index is actually not all that bad at highlighting where any major weaknesses lie. Suffice to say that with me, and probably most people, hard disk speed is the weak link.

It really depends on just what the rest of the system looks like and what you're trying to run. SLI gives the biggest performance boost when dealing with larger screen resolutions, so if a person's monitor only supports up to, say, 1440x900, you're not going to get much out of an SLI setup (and at even lower resolutions SLI can actually be detrimental to performance), while someone running a game at something monstrous like 2560x1600 would see some serious performance gains from SLI.

the thing I learned from running multiple video cards is that they don't do anything extra, they just do what they do better.

going from one HD4850 to a pair of them simply gave me a better frame rate, however if a game didn't like going past a certain point on the AA slider before I upgraded; it still didn't like going past that point after I had upgraded. (but I'm talking about 3x the frame rate here when I say "better.")

I still recommend plopping in a second card over an upgrade, the only way you see a significant improvement when doing a straight upgrade is if you hop a generation (like going from a 4xxx generation card to a 6xxx one) but that will cost you somewhere around 3-4 times what it would for a second card and your still not going to be getting all that much more performance for it.

also keep in mind that the grade of the card highly matters, a high grade video card that is three generations old will still generally be better than a low grade card from the current generation: going from a HD58xx card to a HD65xx card would be a significant downgrade.

as for the water cooling: it only matters on two issues.

overclocking & noise pollution.

I personally dislike overclocking because #1 it's damned hard to see a significant increase in performance vs the instability that it brings with that performance and #2 I like my systems to last for a long time. on the other hand all these god damned case fans are ruining my hearing and have forced me into exclusively using an over the ear, DJ style headset in order to deaden the fan whine to a level that wont give me splitting headaches if I spend too long on the computer (and I like spending too long on the computer).

so I really like the idea of high quality silent cooling, but I'm not sure that the noise from a water pump constantly running will be all that much better and I too am kinda a pussy when it comes to the concept of liquid + my PC.

Water and electricity just do not mix - Bad idea all around in my opinion

They don't generally use water. I realize that's kind of odd given that I think I often call it water cooling. The stuff I'm using is propylene glycol and it doesn't conduct electricity. Neither will water for that matter, but keeping it completely deionized is nigh impossible and if you screw it up, oh boy.