the decreasing need for huge radiators

[Mungler]

I was browsing the interweb when I saw this article on another site about the gigabyte-geforce-gtx-980-ti-xtreme-gaming-waterforce. This is a watercooled, OC'd card out of the box but that 120mm rad looks like a slim one!!

So this is causing me to rethink my stand point on water cooling overkill.

I currently have a Corsair Hydro aio cooler for an i7 with a 120mm rad on it. This works fine and is nice and quiet. I don't overclock this machine so the performance vs. noise is great. I intend to add a 980ti to the system and was looking at making a custom loop for it. This was going to involve adding 2x 240mm rads in place of the current 120mm. For both balance in airflow as well as the increased thermal load of the GPU.

But now, even if I get a non-OC 980ti, I find myself asking if I would need more than a single extra 120mm??!?

Looking at the TDP of the 980ti and the i7, using a handy radiators spreadsheet I have used for a while, would suggest that this isn't possible unless I live inside the arctic circle and have fans running at speeds that wouldn't be too far from 12 on the Beaufort scale.

What do the rest of the OCP crowd think of this? What magic sauce is in these aio coolers that allows them to do this?

 

[Supercharged_Z06]

AIO coolers work, but they generally don't hold a candle to the cooling capacity of a full custom loop using nice, big, high capacity radiators and quality fans.

AIO are generally louder and run a given device hotter. (They can still cool better than air, but they are nowhere near the temps/sound levels that a true custom loop can offer.)

Finally, AIOs are usually targeted at a specific device - if you want to use them for a couple of cards and your CPU, you end up with three separate AIOs and that can get pretty messy/crowded within a case.

Also, when it comes to radiators and a custom loop, it is ALWAYS better to go bigger than trying to figure out the absolute minimums and tailor it for your specific current needs. (Loops tend to get re-purposed where you upgrade a CPU or add something else to the loop or increase your OC which requires more cooling power than before.) Also, more radiator means you can run the fans slower/quieter.

Also, thin radiators in AIOs are shortcuts to using less material and keeping costs down... they make up for it by running the fans faster.

Just my 2 cents on the topic. Other concerns though may be case space, amount that you can spend, etc.

 

[Mungler]

These are all good points. To summarise the delta on an aio is almost always going to be a lot higher than a custom loop. Materials will have been cut back to within millimeters of running too hot and will be much noisier due to cheaper fans. Thanks

I'm still going to go the custom loop route. Nothing beats it in terms of getting that balance and future proofing. But it might mean I start to consider getting some deep 120mm rads and high quality fans rather than trying to shoe horn 360's into a mid tower case.

 

[Supercharged_Z06]

These are all good points. To summarise the delta on an aio is almost always going to be a lot higher than a custom loop. Materials will have been cut back to within millimeters of running too hot and will be much noisier due to cheaper fans. Thanks

I'm still going to go the custom loop route. Nothing beats it in terms of getting that balance and future proofing. But it might mean I start to consider getting some deep 120mm rads and high quality fans rather than trying to shoe horn 360's into a mid tower case.

Excellent idea. A quality/deeper radiator will offer much more heat extraction - just be sure to match it with a quality rad fan like you said (something like a GT 1850), perhaps even consider a push/pull arrangement if there is room (mounting one of the fans case external.) Rad fans with really good static pressure are important - a normal case fan simply won't cut it with a deep rad.

Also, consider stepping up to a full tower that is designed with water cooling in mind. Shoehorning a custom loop into a mid-tower case can be done, but man does it also causes a lot of headaches with the install!

 

[Tsumi]

Another point to add is that AIO radiators tend to have aluminum fins, if not made entirely out of aluminum. Aluminum is much cheaper and has worse heat transfer than copper. Today's high end radiators are made entirely of copper.

 

[Mungler]

That just increases the question of how they manage to produce an oc'd 980ti with one, thin, cheaply made, 120mm rad. That doesn't just completely suck!

 

[Nebulous]

Probably run it stock. Once you start to oc that thing, I'll bet you can warm up your lunch with the heat output, lol.

 

[Mungler]

Probably run it stock. Once you start to oc that thing, I'll bet you can warm up your lunch with the heat output, lol.

sorry, you missed the fact that the gigabyte-geforce-gtx-980-ti-xtreme-gaming-waterforce is delivered already OC'd

 

[Tsumi]

That just increases the question of how they manage to produce an oc'd 980ti with one, thin, cheaply made, 120mm rad. That doesn't just completely suck!

A 120mm radiator has significantly more cooling area than a stock blower style heatsink. Both have aluminum cooling fins. A 2000 RPM 120mm fan is significantly quiter than a 3000+ RPM blower, and moves more air. The 120mm aluminum radiator will still suck as compared to a 120mm UT60.

 

[Mungler]

A 120mm radiator has significantly more cooling area than a stock blower style heatsink. Both have aluminum cooling fins. A 2000 RPM 120mm fan is significantly quiter than a 3000+ RPM blower, and moves more air. The 120mm aluminum radiator will still suck as compared to a 120mm UT60.

This is true, I keep forgetting just how much of a difference in cooling there is between stock air coolers and even the cheapest water cooling..... I can't remember the last time I actually used an air cooler. I guess my perspective is somewhat skewed.

 

[nintari]

I'll chime in here since I now have experience

I will say this if you are running and AIO on your CPU and you have SLI forget the AIO watercoolers for GPU. Waaaay too crowded and you wont get the full benefit.

Second the AIOs on these GPUs are too hit and miss when it comes to performance and noise. I have and H110 on my CPU worked greay, before it I used two H100s and an H60.. loved them all. all silent, all performed great. The h110 on my current righ keeps my 5930k @ 4.6GHz nice and cool. But I have two titan X cards and a full loop has always been on my PC bucket list. I found the EVGA Hybrid kits on sale on amazon for $74.99 each, I got an extra $10 off for signing up with their credit card and 6 months interest free financing. I though this might stifle the itch for me to get past wanting to do a full loop..... boy was I wrong I just started something more.

First let me say the EVGA Hybrid coolers work great. you get to leave the stock cooling for the VRMs and memory! With the stock fan in SLI I was hitting about 45c on my cards and I wasn't throttling down at all. However part of the point of me buying these was to have silence... that was my first mistake. If you research around you will see tons of forum posts complaining about pump noise. The pump buzzes and vibrates so loud and so much it resonated through the whole case!! Second the stock fan is so damned loud it isn't even funny. and finally... one I dreaded.... by tapping in to the power off of the cards on board fan headed you are drawing more amperage... most of the time which the card can not handle.... which in turn messes with the circuitry and fries stuff causing your GPU fan to run at 100%... thus defeating the purpose and causing more noise and problems.

I quickly tried a few things and soldered a 3 pin connection in on mine to allow me to connect them to a motherboard header. This allowed me to run the pumps at 1400 RPM instead of 1850 RPM which helped a lot with noise but didn't eliminate it. Second I replaced the stock fans with corsair SP120 quiet editions. But attaching them to the fan header from the pump head causing and odd buzzing and ticking in the fan which made things noisy as well. once I hooked it in to the mobo header and controlled it I got things much quieter at idle.... however under load it was too much for the little system that could to handle, so I setup fan profiles to increase fan speed and pump speed while I was gaming.... which ended up being almost as loud as with the stock cooling...but granted I was between 58-62c now instead of 83c

so in the end my itch wasn't scratched...and now I have been snatching up water cooling parts to put together my bucket list build ... yes I admit a bit early in life to scratch something off but I did always want to do it and man it's going to be sweet!!

 

[jyi786]

First let me say the EVGA Hybrid coolers work great. you get to leave the stock cooling for the VRMs and memory! With the stock fan in SLI I was hitting about 45c on my cards and I wasn't throttling down at all. However part of the point of me buying these was to have silence... that was my first mistake. If you research around you will see tons of forum posts complaining about pump noise. The pump buzzes and vibrates so loud and so much it resonated through the whole case!! Second the stock fan is so damned loud it isn't even funny. and finally... one I dreaded.... by tapping in to the power off of the cards on board fan headed you are drawing more amperage... most of the time which the card can not handle.... which in turn messes with the circuitry and fries stuff causing your GPU fan to run at 100%... thus defeating the purpose and causing more noise and problems.

I quickly tried a few things and soldered a 3 pin connection in on mine to allow me to connect them to a motherboard header. This allowed me to run the pumps at 1400 RPM instead of 1850 RPM which helped a lot with noise but didn't eliminate it. Second I replaced the stock fans with corsair SP120 quiet editions. But attaching them to the fan header from the pump head causing and odd buzzing and ticking in the fan which made things noisy as well. once I hooked it in to the mobo header and controlled it I got things much quieter at idle.... however under load it was too much for the little system that could to handle, so I setup fan profiles to increase fan speed and pump speed while I was gaming.... which ended up being almost as loud as with the stock cooling...but granted I was between 58-62c now instead of 83c

so in the end my itch wasn't scratched...and now I have been snatching up water cooling parts to put together my bucket list build ... yes I admit a bit early in life to scratch something off but I did always want to do it and man it's going to be sweet!!

This sounds EXACTLY like what I'm going through right now.

 

[Mungler]

thanks for sharing your experience. I myself have never been tempted by the coolers that leave the stock fan doing the other bits on the card. I would say if you are going to spend the money on getting water cooling for the GPU it is only a little stretch to get a full card block. So looks like I dodged a whole lot of pain there. best of luck with the next rig/build

 

[NoOther]

You can do water cooling for ultra performance in which case, there is probably going to be a bit of noise, or you can do it for silence, in which case, you may only get mediocre performance. It is hard to get great performance and silence at the same time, unless you don't have a lot of parts to cool. There are a number of tricks you can use to help, but ultimately you still need some way to dissipate the heat, and the most efficient way is with high performance fans to pull heat out, which tend to be loud.

coincidentally a larger radiator will allow you to dissipate heat more efficiently with less fans. You can get along fine with a smaller radiator, if you use a push pull configuration, which will up the noise. At least that is my experience. I preferred to use larger radiators with pull fans that I hooked up to a fan controller and could control how fast I wanted them to spin, and thus could tweak it to get the noise to performance ratio in the sweet spot for me.

 

[darrpara]

My issue with these GPUs is that I don't feel they handle VRM cooling well. Even some reviews note that the VRM temps get over 90C www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_980_ti_extreme_gaming_waterforce_review,37.html

 

[undertheradar]

I prefer a large radiator, like my Watercool MORA3, so that I don't need to run fans at all. Once you go above a certain threshold, the radiators can just be run in a passive manner. Its nice having a computer without any fans at all... no optical drive, no hard drive now either with the SSD's. My PSU is 80+ Ti certified, and oversized so its fan turns on for a few seconds every few minutes and I can't even hear it. I run two pumps in series for my loop, so sometimes I can hear them resonate with a mild hum, but as long as I'm not gaming, I can just turn one pump off and the system is silent again. Silence is so nice, but even more so, not having something that acts like a dust collector/recirculation device is even nicer.

 

[jyi786]

I prefer a large radiator, like my Watercool MORA3, so that I don't need to run fans at all. Once you go above a certain threshold, the radiators can just be run in a passive manner. Its nice having a computer without any fans at all... no optical drive, no hard drive now either with the SSD's. My PSU is 80+ Ti certified, and oversized so its fan turns on for a few seconds every few minutes and I can't even hear it. I run two pumps in series for my loop, so sometimes I can hear them resonate with a mild hum, but as long as I'm not gaming, I can just turn one pump off and the system is silent again. Silence is so nice, but even more so, not having something that acts like a dust collector/recirculation device is even nicer.

Dude. Pics and specs of your rig. I'm building one very, very similar to yours! It would be awesome to get some of your feedback. The cornerstone of my WC build will be the MORA 3 Pro, the one with 9 x 140mm config.

 

[nintari]

Actually just finished up on my custom water loop I've had it on the test bed at work now for the past couple days first doing leak testing, then the whole is the loop working are blocks making contact phase of letting it sit idle for a long time. Then I moved on to the ok lets heat this puppy up phase to see what it could do.

360mm rad on top, 240mm on front D5 pump set to about 2 or 3 on speed. XSPC GPU Block, alphacool CPU block.

Order is reservoir to pump (combo unit) -> 240mm rad -> GPU 2 -> GPU 1 -> 360mm rad -> CPU block -> reservoir

If I leave all the fans at 100% (which I don't plan on doing but it is really not that noisy) my top GPU stays between 43-46c, my bottom GPU stays about 41-44c and my CPU stays about 50-55c while running Heaven in demo mode for a couple hours.

If I let the Asus AI Suite determine fan speed which is more of the silent mode (and it is pretty damned quiet) under the same load my GPU 1 stays about 57c GPU 2 at about 54c, and CPU about 59-66c


I still need to get this home and tweak the fan profiles so I may still be able to keep it near silent with better temps. but since I have this on the test bench at my work there is a lot of fan noise coming from the back room and it is hard to determine what is "silent"

Also I don't think I have the CPU block right... I just feel like the temps are too high, but figured I would post this up. Getting ready to take this baby home and put it back in line and play some stuff tonight!

BTW the lights are RGB

 

[Erasmus354]

I always recommend getting the largest radiator that fits your case and budget. The cost difference in getting a larger radiator usually is not that great. If you are worried about price of fans and that is holding you back on getting a larger radiator....just dont fill it up with fans. A 240 radiator with 1 fan is still better than a 120 with 1 fan.

 

[undertheradar]

nintari,
I see something that might be a concern and maybe causing some problems on that CPU. Does the outlet from the CPU block just drop into the top of the tank? This leads me to believe that if you were to cut the power to pumps, the water in the CPU block would dump into the tank and air from in the tank would end up in the CPU's water block, right? I would hope that the top hose going into the tank has a pipe inside the tank extending it all the way to the bottom of the tank so that if the pump is turned off, air won't rise up into the CPU block. The downside is that any air that might be inside this internal pipe will now want to rise inside that pipe as well as the hose, providing more back-pressure on the pump when there is any air in the loop.

If air gets into the CPU block every time you start, it will take some time to clear out 100%. Sure, water flow will purge a bunch a while after the pump turns on, but there will likely be pockets that stick around in the top half of the CPU block because they want to rise. Pockets of air in there will prevent cooling in those areas (at the same time that your CPU is just booting up and actually under good load). Also, if your CPU block internals are filled with air every time you turn off the computer, corrosion will be quick. If its not an issue, then ignore this. But if your plumbing is allowing air to get backed up into the CPU block, I would fix it.

Even if there is a pipe inside the tank to extend the top hose's water flow path to the bottom of the tank, I would still not like the fact that every time I want to fill that tank, the process of taking the cap off with a hose on it would mean getting air into the hose coming from the CPU. Having to deal with a hose plugged into the top cap of the tank would be a pain to have to work with every time I wanted to open the tank or top it off. I would plumb the hose from the CPU to the bottom of the tank like the other hose.

 

[nintari]

nintari,
I see something that might be a concern and maybe causing some problems on that CPU. Does the outlet from the CPU block just drop into the top of the tank? This leads me to believe that if you were to cut the power to pumps, the water in the CPU block would dump into the tank and air from in the tank would end up in the CPU's water block, right? I would hope that the top hose going into the tank has a pipe inside the tank extending it all the way to the bottom of the tank so that if the pump is turned off, air won't rise up into the CPU block. The downside is that any air that might be inside this internal pipe will now want to rise inside that pipe as well as the hose, providing more back-pressure on the pump when there is any air in the loop.

If air gets into the CPU block every time you start, it will take some time to clear out 100%. Sure, water flow will purge a bunch a while after the pump turns on, but there will likely be pockets that stick around in the top half of the CPU block because they want to rise. Pockets of air in there will prevent cooling in those areas (at the same time that your CPU is just booting up and actually under good load). Also, if your CPU block internals are filled with air every time you turn off the computer, corrosion will be quick. If its not an issue, then ignore this. But if your plumbing is allowing air to get backed up into the CPU block, I would fix it.

Even if there is a pipe inside the tank to extend the top hose's water flow path to the bottom of the tank, I would still not like the fact that every time I want to fill that tank, the process of taking the cap off with a hose on it would mean getting air into the hose coming from the CPU. Having to deal with a hose plugged into the top cap of the tank would be a pain to have to work with every time I wanted to open the tank or top it off. I would plumb the hose from the CPU to the bottom of the tank like the other hose.

Actually the top of the Reservoir has a separate fill port but either way the out fomr the CPU in to the reservoir does indeed have a nice long tube to extend it down in to the water well below the air inside (as well as providing noise reduction benefits )

I did recently discover however I am not getting quite the performance out of the CPU block that I should. I remounted it several times, shook all air out of the system, including while the cpu block was off shaking the hell out of it with the pump on. No air anywhere...but reading around it seems as if my expectations for the CPU being cooler than it is is a common misconception.... I'll post about it soon enough after I try a few more things.

here is another pic BTW that shows a little bit more since it is white light instead of red. still hard to see the tube in the reservoir but it is there.

 

[Mungler]

Actually the top of the Reservoir has a separate fill port but either way the out fomr the CPU in to the reservoir does indeed have a nice long tube to extend it down in to the water well below the air inside (as well as providing noise reduction benefits )

I did recently discover however I am not getting quite the performance out of the CPU block that I should. I remounted it several times, shook all air out of the system, including while the cpu block was off shaking the hell out of it with the pump on. No air anywhere...but reading around it seems as if my expectations for the CPU being cooler than it is is a common misconception.... I'll post about it soon enough after I try a few more things.

here is another pic BTW that shows a little bit more since it is white light instead of red. still hard to see the tube in the reservoir but it is there.

I'm interested to know what reservoir that is, did it come with the vertical mounting bracket or did you get that separately/make it? also, what model of fan is that? and the model of rad too please.

I may be wrong, but it looks like you have the 240 fans pulling into the case and the 360 fans pushing out of the case. Is that right?
Therefore, I am guessing your fan profile tweaks involve running the 3 top fans slower than the 2 front fans in order to balance the intake/exhaust airflow. I say this as the PSU fan is also facing down, so it is not serving as another exhaust. is there a vent on the base of the case?

lots of questions, sorry.... also offtopic a bit, sorry again (to me, myself and mods)
looks great!

oh, on topic! I can't quite tell if they are regular or deeper rads.

 

[Koween]

I am running a Corsair h75 AIO on a GTX980 Ti with a Kraken G10 bracket and it is seriously overwhelmed. I can see that the GPU is pegged at 70 degrees without overclocking, which means it can't even reach maximum boost on stock clocks. Using a single SP120 QE at ~1000RPM. Can't see how a single 120mm radiator would be able to handle an overclocked GPU at acceptable noise levels.