Please, help me understand my water-cooling loop

E

einmannbude

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 16, 2014
Messages
128
Hey there,

I am still new to water-cooling, but gained some experience with building custom loops inside the NCASE M1. At the moment I have a Magicool DCP450 pump and reservoir combo hanging at the outside back of the case. An EK Supremacy EVO block on an Intel i5 4690k at stock settings, Magicool G2 240 Slim radiator at the side panel and EK Titan X block on the highly overclocked GPU.

I am concerned about the temperatures inside the case under load. Reservoir, tubing and fittings get very hot. I barely can touch them. I don't have the possibility to measure the water temperature, but I have the feeling it is not healthy for this parts in a long term. GPU temp is in the 60s and CPU hits 70°C when gaming. Ambient temperature is 22°C, so in the upcoming summer, this might get a problem.

Now there is several things, I am curious about.

#1
I installed two 140mm fans in the bottom of the case and elevated the feet. They are pushing fresh air into the case from the bottom up. This does not result in better temperatures at all. I assume that the GPU, which is big in size, is blocking the air flow, so much of the air does not come to the top of the case, but I expected at least some minor improvement. The side fans are also oriented as intake. This might disturb the air flow even more, but flipping them as exhaust, where fresh air rises from bottom to top and gets exhausted to the side resulted in even worse temps.

#2
The highly overclocked and 100% utilized GPU is still cooler than the not overclocked and not so utilized CPU. Why is that? I checked the mounting and thermal paste spreading several times.

#3
At the weekend I changed the setup to air-cooling with an Noctua C14 and Accelero Xtreme III. When going from idle to load, temperatures were rising pretty fast and going from load to idle lowered them pretty fast again. With my water-cooling loop temperatures are rising very slowly and lowering also very slowly. With the hot tubing and fitting, I assume, I have a water temperature issue here. Am I right, and what can I do about it?

The Magicool radiator has a fpi of 16. I ordered an EK SE radiator, which has a fpi of 22. It will arrive this week. I will test, if this helps. Also I can install the Magicool in the bottom of the case and see if this changes anything.

If you have any hints for me or can explain to me, why my loop is behaving like it does, I would be glad to hear from you. Thanks in advance.
 
1. Your watercooling components are getting hot from the water in the system. That means your radiator/fan combination is not sufficient for cooling your system. Add more radiators and/or higher speed fans.

2. This is normal, especially for mainstream Intel CPUs. Delid your CPU for better temps.

3. Water has a high specific heat, so it takes a lot of energy to heat it up. Copper and headpipes don't need much energy. Also, refer back to 1.
 
Tsumi said:
Add more radiators and/or higher speed fans
Click to expand...

Thank you very much for your answer.

As I said, I already plan to do this. What role does the flow of the water play in a water-cooling setup? Can water flowing too slowly be an issue?
 
einmannbude said:
Thank you very much for your answer.

As I said, I already plan to do this. What role does the flow of the water play in a water-cooling setup? Can water flowing too slowly be an issue?
Click to expand...

It is possible depending on the restriction of you block, however radiator space is most likely the issue. You have 300W of heat to sink from your GPU and another 100+W from your CPU. Presuming your pump is flowing and operating you simply need more rad space.

If the fittings are too hot to touch, that is an alarm bell.
 
einmannbude said:
Thank you very much for your answer.

As I said, I already plan to do this. What role does the flow of the water play in a water-cooling setup? Can water flowing too slowly be an issue?
Click to expand...

If everything is uniformally hot to the touch, then flow rates is not your issue. If you have hot areas and cool areas, you have a flow rate issue.
 
Tsumi said:
If everything is uniformally hot to the touch, then flow rates is not your issue. If you have hot areas and cool areas, you have a flow rate issue.
Click to expand...

Well technically in the first case...flow could be an issue, if you have a dead water pump and no flow and the system has been running long enough for the heat to saturate the coolant and spread by conduction to the other components.
 
Skripka said:
Well technically in the first case...flow could be an issue, if you have a dead water pump and no flow and the system has been running long enough for the heat to saturate the coolant and spread by conduction to the other components.
Click to expand...
Well, I know for sure that the pump is running. I just noticed, that the air bubbles in the tubes do not move very fast. I have some quick disconnectors to take the system apart quickly. If doing so, there get some air bubbles into the loop. I mean the flow is enough to make the bubbles disappear and I always turn the case to some angles while running the machine to make sure all air moves out. So air stuck in the loop is not my concern, I just wanted to know if there is some rule like: the faster the flow, the better the cooling.
 
Yes, the faster the flow the better the cooling. However, it is a case of diminishing returns. At first faster flow helps a lot, but then as flow increases, the benefits of going faster decreases.
 
Tsumi said:
1. Your watercooling components are getting hot from the water in the system. That means your radiator/fan combination is not sufficient for cooling your system. Add more radiators and/or higher speed fans.

2. This is normal, especially for mainstream Intel CPUs. Delid your CPU for better temps.

3. Water has a high specific heat, so it takes a lot of energy to heat it up. Copper and headpipes don't need much energy. Also, refer back to 1.
Click to expand...
Exactly this.

You need more radiator surface area or more air flow across your radiator, or both. Period.

The components of your loop should not be HOT to the touch - pumps tend to wear out when they get hot.
 
One other thing ...

It's unclear from your posts whether you have any fans exhausting air from the case. It sounds like (if I read the post correctly) you've got at least six fans set up as Intake (the two bottom 140s, two side mounted fans, and two on the rad) While it's certainly great that you've got plenty of intake fans and maintaining a positive air pressure, the vent holes, cracks between components, etc. are probably simply not sufficient to exhaust enough heated air. The exhausting that is taking place is completely uncontrolled, as the air being pushed out (by the positive pressure) is taking the route(s) of least resistance. Rather than achieving a somewhat linear flow of air from one end of the case to the other, it's likely there are one or multiple (possibly quite large and precisely where you don't want them to be) pockets of stagnant hot air.

I strongly suggest you find a way to add at least one, preferably two exhaust fans opposite from the majority of the intake fans, either by adding additional fans or if need be, by replacing one or two of the intake fans with exhaust fans. You'd still maintain the desirable positive pressure, and probably improve interior case temps substantially.
 
Thank you for all your answers and helpful hints. They all seem plausible in theory. Here comes the update with reality ;-)

Nicepants42 said:
You need more radiator surface area or more air flow across your radiator, or both. Period.
Click to expand...
As I announced, I installed an EK SE 240 radiator in the bottom of the case. I replaced the two 140mm Noise Blocker fans with two Cooler Master 120mm slim fans as exhaust and placed the radiator over them. If you know the NCASE M1, you know why. There is simply not more space. I left everything else like it was. The result is no improvement at all. I noticed air bubbles in the tubing, which barely moved or were stuck completely. Nevertheless I started my first test - I always run MSI Kombustor stress test for 15 min. It resulted in exactly the same temperatures as before. Maybe one degree better, but this is not satisfying at all.
Then I was concerned about the water flow even more than before and added a second pump to the loop, which I had laying around. It is a DCC, it runs at full speed and moves a lot of water. I did my test again and got around 4°C better results. Fittings are still not touchable for more than a few seconds. As a last step I ran the fans at 100%, just to see what happens. It lowered the temperature another 4°C. Fittings are still hardly touchable, tubing is acceptable, pump temperature is reasonable in my opinion. This is the temperature area I could live with probably, but I am not willing to accept the noise level with 100% fan speed. In addition, I was not able to close the case because the second pump would fit nowhere inside the case. I could move off the bottom radiator and place the pump there and use the higher fpi radiator at the side panel. But with only one radiator and closed case the temps might be higher again. Frustrating.

NeedleArtist said:
It sounds like (if I read the post correctly) you've got at least six fans set up as Intake (the two bottom 140s, two side mounted fans, and two on the rad)
Click to expand...
The side fans are the radiator fans. So there are 4 fans. I did a lot of tests switching the fan orientations and came to the conclusion, that with a water-cooling setup in the NCASE M1, side fans as intake are better than exhaust. As I wrote in my first post I tried bottom intake and side exhaust, which resulted in worse temps than side intake, although side intake fans are pushing hot air against the motherboard. Bottom fans on the other hand do not play a role at all, no matter how big they are or if they are exhaust or intake.
I would love to fit slim fans at the side radiator in addition to the regular fans for a push-pull configuration. I need 90°-fittings on the radiator because of the PSU. To fit the slim fan between the radiator and the 90°-fitting I had to rise the fittings 3mm. I didn't find a 3mm riser yet. Maybe a 15mm fan || radiator || 25mm fan and riser plus 90°-fitting config is more promising. Didn't measure that yet.

The big conclusion?
First possibility I see: Go the two radiator route and find a way to fit a strong pump in the case. Apogee Drive II might be the key here, which is hard to get. But again, the setup would be only worth it at highest fan and pump speeds resulting in noise. Not ideal.
Second possibility I see: Mod the case. Orient the GPU 90° with a PCI-E riser. Then something like an EK Predator would fit in the bottom of the case and air could travel from the bottom to the top unrestrictedly and even slim fans would fit in the top as exhaust when cutting something off the PSU bracket. It is the most time consuming solution but sounds promising to me.
Third possibility: Get another case. Most obvious solution, but I love my NCASE so much.
 
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Seems to me that side intake, bottom exhaust (with the case off the floor a bit, as you say) would be my approach. At least that way you shouldn't have air pressure fighting you.

I would not put a Titan X on a riser. I might not know what I'm talking about here, though.

Bubbles not moving doesn't mean poor flow, unless you're talking about large bubbles. Those tiny bubbles often stick to the tube wall and basically stay put. A DDC should be powerful enough (I think) to drive through 2 blocks and 2 radiators, but I don't know what pump is used in your current combo.

Not really sure what else to say. Lots of heat tends to need either lots of space (for fans and surface area) or lots of noise. Your case looks nice, but so do other, larger cases, and you've already got a pump/res combo warting it up back there.
 
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