New System WC cooled Temp opinion.

[IceEmQuick]

Now don't laugh, but my previous system was of the following specs. Q9650, 8 gigs of Ram, Rampage Formula, Dual 4890's in Crossfire X, and yes I had a Corsair H50 with a slightly custom setup. I Dremeled out my 92mm fan in the Acrylic case to 120 mm and had the Radiator hooked up to that and a Silverstone 110cfm fan pulling air into the case. I also had 2 exhaust fans each 120mm, one on top, one out back.

I was able to get to a 4.18 Ghz OC with that setup and using LinX for testing, I never saw temps go into the 70's ever....mostly they stayed at 65 or under. Ironically I had an Ultra 120 that showed slightly worse temps, but only a little bit, as in that I hit 75 in LinX one time, but the system was always stable. So my first taste of WC was not bad. I know that the H50 seems to either get good reviews from other sites, or bad reviews from here. I played around with radiator and fan settings and found that is probably why it performed so badly here.... if you don't give it cool air and try to cool your HOT GPU with HOT case air(that North Bridge is going to be pumping hot air into that case, along with the memory, its only fair that if your internal temps are hot, that you are not going to realize what even an el-cheapo H50 can do. I have more proof, read below.

New system:

Asus Rampage 3
Core i7-930 OC to 4 GHZ flat
G.Skill RipJaw DDR3 2000MHz UC to 1444
Diamond ATi 5970 OC to 950mhz, memory to 1250mhz, voltage 1.300.
Cooling is 4 intake fans(230mm, 140mm front, 2x140mm bottom of case), exhaust is 5 fans, 1 top 120 50cfm, 4 Silverstone 110 fans on my WC radiator.
Waterblock is the Swiftech Apogee XT with the Dual Radiator with the built in pump and reservoir.

Before I had the Silverstone fans, I had some unknowns CFM 120 fans, only 2 pulling air through the radiator and I was touching 74+ in LinX. I thought something was seriously wrong as I saw people with Air systems running way cooler than that. So I get down and open the radiator and measure the temp of the water.... lets just say it was very warm....

So I ordered up 4 of those nice Silverstone with the Controllers and set those up. Push/Pull top and bottom.

My Max temp running 20 runs of LinX was 53 degrees C. If I kept my room cold enough and kept the fans running at max speed, I could get a few cores to drop into the high teens for cooling... 19 degrees.... if you knew what I kept my compuer room at, that is realistic...

For giggles I did install the H50 on this board (what a bitch that was because the back plate sucks) and the temps were horrid... however I could see that if I did my modification and did a push pull with 2 Silverstone's and mounted the fan/rad combo to the side case as before... my max temp would be in the low 60's. Which seems to fall in line with some other sites that found if you took your time and figured out how to get the coolest air into your system by having it pass through that rad first.... it will work just fine.

It seems too many people like to complain. Just because you have used that fan as an exhaust fan doesn't mean it has to be one forever.... It could easily be the front case fan.... or if you have a big raid array, you turn around your window fan.

There are always answers and ways to maximize even what you think are the worst systems. But I question the common sense of someone who goes out of their way to say the cooling sucked because we didn't use common sense and used 50 degreeC air to "cool" err I mean heat the processor up.

The simple fact is that your goal should be to have the system blow enough air through that radiator that it never really gets warm. You would be shocked at how cool that air is that is coming from my Radiator while at run 10 using max memory....

If you setup any WC system, even the lowly H50 that way, you will find that its performance will go from what in this case SoftOCP did testing it, to what some other sites found when then got the proper airflow for the system. It was always at or near the U 120.

I lied, I did a round of TEC cooling back 7 years ago.... forgot about that.... same song and dance.... keep the air that flows through the Rad cool and your system stays... cool...

I have yet to even mess with the voltages AT ALL. 4GHZ on 1.16 volts with a QPI of 1.25. Either I got a great processor batch, or the cooling is very good, or the Asus Rampage 3 is a kick ass board, or all 3... I don't know... Temp wise/voltage wise/Ram speed wise, it appears I have room to go high...

My guess is probably no higher that 4.2... what are some of your guesses?

Cheers...