What hardware to watercool?

[EnterTheWormhole]

So just sticking my toe into watercooling, I need to know what pieces of hardware need/should/could be water cooled.

The two obvious I can think of are:

Processor
Graphics card

But what about the memory sticks? Is there a watercooling setup for that? Is it needed?

What about SSDs?

Anything else I'm not thinking of?

 

[Dayaks]

Processors and graphics cards. If you want to OC the graphics card a lot you should look into one with unlocked voltage (classified) or doing the pencil mod, ect. Obviously it's at your own risk. Oh and BIOs mod the cards. If you're not OC'ing hard it's relatively pointless to watercool a graphics card.

 

[SticKx911]

If you're not OC'ing hard it's relatively pointless to watercool a graphics card.

other than consistent noise levels. It was nice to load games on my 480 and not have to deal with the leaf blower. I also like the aesthetics of a water cooled gpu, but that doesn't do anything of value.

If you have a board that allows to cool the moffests and stuff built in (some of the mpower boards) than there's no reason to not include them in the loop, but otherwise just cpu and gpu. They make blocks for ram, but I've never had a heat issue with ram. Unless you're pulling some crazy clocks and bumping the voltage, there's no reason. All storage is the same. SSD or HDD, heat is only an issue if there is 0 airflow, but water cooling them is going a little overboard.

You just need to know why you're going into water cooling. If it's for fun, than cool everything you can afford/justify.

 

[Kardonxt]

If you're not OC'ing hard it's relatively pointless to watercool a graphics card.

I feel the exact opposite with all the low wattage cpus. Water cooling the cpu seems to get me like 1-300mhz over decent air unless you are shooting for cpu killing volts. If you are running 6 or 8 core socket 2011 cpus then I could see the need for water cooling cpus again.

Now I usually just WC my cards and run a decent heat sink on my cpu. This gives me pretty low noise levels and better gpu OCs which tend to help games more than a few hundred mhz OC on an already OCd cpu does.

Like the poster above said, it's all about fun and what you can afford. Start with CPU and GPU and go from there. None of the rest of the components really run hot enough to justify it for any other reason than fun.

 

[rive22]

The mobo chipset and capacitors are important

Memory modules not so much unless oc'ing the crap out of them, which of course isn't recommended for most people.

SSD's, definitely not

10k+ rpm HDD's can benefit, but a good cooling fan works just fine.

 

[Dayaks]

I feel the exact opposite with all the low wattage cpus. Water cooling the cpu seems to get me like 1-300mhz over decent air unless you are shooting for cpu killing volts. If you are running 6 or 8 core socket 2011 cpus then I could see the need for water cooling cpus again.

Now I usually just WC my cards and run a decent heat sink on my cpu. This gives me pretty low noise levels and better gpu OCs which tend to help games more than a few hundred mhz OC on an already OCd cpu does.

Like the poster above said, it's all about fun and what you can afford. Start with CPU and GPU and go from there. None of the rest of the components really run hot enough to justify it for any other reason than fun.

I agree. I'm running a 5960x so I pull around 300 watts encoding.... depends which CPU you use I suppose. I was a little biased there. Not everyone runs a 9590 or 5960x?

Overall you watercool for the fun of it. But for some kind of gain, albeit not necessarily noticeable in some cases, people generally WC the CPU/GPUs.

My VRMs on my Rampage V Extreme don't go above 50C. That probably changes mobo to mobo for sure..

 

[magoo]

CPU can benefit from any sort of after-market cooling.
Thing to remember if you watercool is there will be a decrease in airflow around the circuitry.
I always make sure the case fans can direct good flow near the CPU area.

Memory does not really need WC, but again make sure some air goes by.
I'm not much of a memory OCer.

Biggest benefit is the GPU/GPUs. WC allows you to raise the VCore and OC by a good bit while keeping the temps low and the noise to zero.

I watercool for the fun of it, but certainly enjoy the lack of noise from the GPU fans.