Water cooling the GPU? Is it worth it?

The R9 295X2 "gets by" but is a fail from a noise/cooling perspective. It's far louder at idle than even aircooled SLI'ed GTX 780's. Hardly the comparison you want to make.

Likewise, if anyone invests the time and effort and money to try to properly water cool their system, and the result is a system that merely "gets by", let's be honest, that's a fail. Anything will work, including the stock cooling, and if that's the only objective, why even bother? A well built W/C system should be whisper quiet at idle and remain quiet after hours of stressing the CPU and GPU.
 
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echn111 said:
The R9 295X2 "gets by" but is a fail from a noise/cooling perspective. It's far louder at idle than even aircooled SLI'ed GTX 780's. Hardly the comparison you want to make.

Likewise, if anyone invests the time and effort and money to try to properly water cool their system, and the result is a system that merely "gets by", let's be honest, that's a fail. Anything will work, including the stock cooling, and if that's the only objective, why even bother? A well built W/C system should be whisper quiet at idle and remain quiet after hours of stressing the CPU and GPU.
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Well that depends. What if you want to cram a 295X2 into a MITX style custom case?
 
echn111 said:
The R9 295X2 "gets by" but is a fail from a noise/cooling perspective. It's far louder at idle than even aircooled SLI'ed GTX 780's. Hardly the comparison you want to make.

Likewise, if anyone invests the time and effort and money to try to properly water cool their system, and the result is a system that merely "gets by", let's be honest, that's a fail. Anything will work, including the stock cooling, and if that's the only objective, why even bother? A well built W/C system should be whisper quiet at idle and remain quiet after hours of stressing the CPU and GPU.
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Iol my only point was simply that given the R9 295X2 squeezes by with a single 120mm rad for 500W of heat, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an overclocked 3930K + 2x 780 with a total heat output of say 650W can be managed by a single 280mm rad. Wasn't trying to draw any comparisons or conclusion or whatever.
 
n=1 said:
Iol my only point was simply that given the R9 295X2 squeezes by with a single 120mm rad for 500W of heat, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an overclocked 3930K + 2x 780 with a total heat output of say 650W can be managed by a single 280mm rad. Wasn't trying to draw any comparisons or conclusion or whatever.
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I think it would be fair to point out that the 295x2 cooling is a hybrid solution which, unlike most full cover waterblock setups, pipes some of the hot air into the system, rather than out via the radiator. Its 120mm rad doesn't have to dissipate all of the heat on its own.
 
If I'm not mistaken, the fan only cools the memory chips and the VRMs? The GPU cores alone are worth 500W, and I don't think the fan has any role in their cooling if you look at some of the disassembly pics (the Asetek pumps completely seal the core from the outside environment).

EDIT: nvm reading comprehension fail, memory + VRM heat is not dumped into radiator I see what you're saying
 
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spugm1r3 said:
I think it would be fair to point out that the 295x2 cooling is a hybrid solution which, unlike most full cover waterblock setups, pipes some of the hot air into the system, rather than out via the radiator. Its 120mm rad doesn't have to dissipate all of the heat on its own.
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Yes it does.........

It doesn't matter whether the air from the radiator goes to the inside of the case or the moon, the cooler still has to dissipate all of the heat generated by the chip. Otherwise you have an imbalance in heat generated vs heat dissipated and the temperature of the chip will keep increasing until you either hit an equilibrium or the chip melts....
 
Erasmus354 said:
Yes it does.........

It doesn't matter whether the air from the radiator goes to the inside of the case or the moon, the cooler still has to dissipate all of the heat generated by the chip. Otherwise you have an imbalance in heat generated vs heat dissipated and the temperature of the chip will keep increasing until you either hit an equilibrium or the chip melts....
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Please read more closely. I said the 120mm rad doesn't have to dissipate all of the heat produced by the card. The onboard fan dissipates the heat produced by the memory and the VRMs.

I'm just under the impression the heat produced by those is not insignificant, so the load placed on the 120mm radiator is not as great as it would be, say, using a full cover waterblock with the same sized radiator.
 
ebduncan said:
for a 980+ CPU i'd recommend at least 360mm of radiator space. General rule is 120mm radiator space per 100 watts of cooling needed. 360 radiator gives you the ability to cool 300 watts of heat with out getting heat saturated which will be enough for that system.
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what do you mean by heat saturated? it's not like a radiator can only dissipate a certain amount of heat. the amount of heat it dissipates just goes up as the water-air temp delta increases, and it doesn't plateau or anything... so it just depends on how high of a water-air delta and how much noise you can tolerate.

http://martinsliquidlab.org/2012/04/14/360-radiator-shootout-summary/

lienarly extrapolating, 300w on a 360mm rad with those fans at 1000rpm would give a 20c water-air temp delta. so i'd say your general rule is really safe/conservative or geared towards really quiet setups.
 
I run a heavily oc'd 670 with a custom bios (for higher voltage) and a 4570s on a swiftech 240 rad, I have no doubt that you can run a mere 165w 980 GTX and a cpu on a 240 rad with low speed fans.

EDIT: FWIW my gpu has never seen over 37C even in the summer with 80F+ days. The CPU on the other hand gets up to around 55C max but I'm using a lowes-esque ghetto rig to keep the old d-tek block on and its a haswell with TIM under the IHS so I didn't expect that much. I do have a temp gauge shoved in the radiator and it hovers around 25C-28C, though on really hot days it can go to 30C.
 
Really worth it. I managed to cool my MSI Radeon HD 7950 from 90c on air to ~45c (or lower depending on game) on water.

Not to mention that now my pc doesn't sound like a freaking jet engine during take off.

Now I have to find a water block for my Radeon R9 290. It really needs one, big time.
 
Worth it? yes, cheapest way is to get a G10 bracket and do a AIO waterloop.
 
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