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h2o looping question

J

jadawgis732

Gawd
Joined
Jun 18, 2009
Messages
536
How much maintenance is required for the upkeep of a waterloop involving just the cpu and gpu? I have a Corsair H50 right now, and it requires no upkeep, which I like. But looking at the sweetest rigs around the internet leads me to believe that a waterloop is required for a sweet looking rig, and I'm afraid it may require a lot more attention. So how often does someone need to change the cooling, check for leaks, that kind of stuff.
 
Pretty much any loop requires very little upkeep and with a reservoir it's even easier. Just top off the water when it gets low. For example, I've been running my cpu loop for about 4 months and the water level has dropped 3/16" in that time. As long as you do it correctly there isn't much risk of leaks as long as it's fine when installed. 1/2" fittings w/ 7/16" tubing is the ideal setup, virtually no risk of leaks with that fitting/tubing combo.
 
It can be very low maintenance if done correctly, just like Tune says. Keep in mind that most tubing, connectors, and reservoirs allow small amounts of evaporation, but that amount can differ from component to component.

I have built a few custom watercooling rigs, and they're a lot of fun to build. Not so much fun to tear down and upgrade, but a lot of fun to build and watch the whole thing work correctly. Also, the spending can easily get out of control, especially with the sexy new Bitspower fittings that are available. I just built a rig for work that had over $150 in fittings alone, and that didn't even have a CPU block.

But you can do it on a budget. I recommend a windowed case so you can easily keep an eye on fluid levels and monitor it for leaks. Plus, if you spend all that time on it, you're going to want to show it off, right?

I learned how to build a watercooling system from the watercooling forum here on [H] about 7 years ago with my personal account. My current system just has an H50 in it, but one day I'd like to do another full WC rig.
 
how much are we talking, all in? Pump, reservoir, rad, fittings, tubing. And what's the ideal setup for a 5850/70 and an unlocked Phenom X3 720 @ 3.6 with 1.4875v. I don't see too many setups with AMD NB/SB blocks, plus my gigabyte ga-790xta-ud4 has a pretty big heatsink over the mosfet/nb already, so I assume I don't need to cool them.
 
It depends on what you want to spend and if you buy used. For example, I made my CPU only loop for $120 after buying everything.
 
if you buy everything new, probably ~300 for good quality with minimal parts (which won't really be much better than air, but you seem to be in it for the 'bling' factor so expect to spend a good chunk of cash, lol). if you can find good used waterblocks and fittings you can cut the cost considerably, but I'd probably recommend you get at least the radiator(s) new (once those go to shit it's near impossible to get them back up to 100%).

choose your fan speed before you pick out a radiator, this pretty much determines your balance of cooling performance to comfortable noise level (there's tons of tests/reviews out there that help you pinpoint which radiator will best suit your fan speed preference).

the tubing you choose will have a large effect on the maintenance cycle, esp. if you want to keep everything looking clean+clear (plasticizer is the devil!). even if you use solid tubing I'd probably suggest you at least flush the system 2x a year minimum (once you see clouding, ideally you'll want to re-tube+clean to keep components from getting gunked up).
 
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A 360 would be good for a gpu/cpu loop, most people use a 240 for just the cpu.
 
I'm not sure if the cpu will see any cooling performance boost from that configuration over a performance heatsink, but the gpu should.

do you know exactly which silverstone fans are being used? the variable speed ones seem like decent rad fans for low fin-density, but the static speed fans look like garbage for rads.
 
i got my first water cooling setup for a lil under 150 with a heater core and parts from dangerden. it has run with 0 upkeep for 4 years running 24/7
 
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