How much WC is enough???

Waza said:

Assuming that air cooled system has decent circulation and case design that system could run fine for at least 3 years and more even without maintenance.

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Sorry I wasn't clear, apologies. If you ran, as suggested in this thread, both Prime95 for the CPU and FurMark for the GPU at the same time how many hours before an off the shelf cooled by air 4770 I7 with a GTX760 would crash? I'm pretty sure it would crash within hours.

Waza said:

But if you would decide to overclock or add one more gfx card and the case Isn't designed to handle that you would run into overheating issues or at least shorten the lifespan of critical components.

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Not that certain that if it was running on air the situation wouldn't be worse

Waza said:

The idea of water cooling is to either increase your overclock headroom or go for virtually silent operation or both. As a bonus you probably get a good year or two more out of your water cooled components since their operating temperature is lowered typically 10-20c or even more.
Building air cooled system is fine but usually is louder than liquid cooled system. Almost all aftermarket cooling components are aimed for overclockers and to those who prefer silent operation.
I myself like to run my processor under 55c load and as quietly as possible, at the same time I like to run benchmarks and push the system just for the kicks of it. It's just my preference.

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Same here and why I chose to watercool in the first place. My wife would constantly complain about the CPU and GPU fan noises while I played games. Now I'm running my processor under 57C, the GPU is cool and it's totally silent. When the wife is happy the house is happy.

Waza said:

If people would give a better idea of what they were after then the recommendations could be more suited. Most just want maximum performance and that's usually why recommendations are what they are.
For first timers that look for that little performance boost for games over air cooling solution there are pre optimized WC kits available that will do their job really good.

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I would say that the majority of people what what we are doing. Running well under air temps and silent operation. The people that need to run 24x7 100 percent are a very minor part of the computing world.

Thanks for your replies. We have not been to Finland yet, I hear it's beautiful. We climbed to Mt Everest base camp two years ago and last year we did Thailand Cambodia and Vietnam. I think this year we may do a comfort vacation but since we are moving we may skip this year.

GTXJackBauer said:

Please explain. Giving advise may differ a bit from others but generally meet at the same junction.



There's a lot of great information and links to sites on our watercooling stickies. To state that comment is misinformed because I push new comers to read those stickies all the time. This is a hobby and watercooling eletronic components is serious business. Its not riding a pony or anything. I want people to take it serious but have fun with it when all is said and done.

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You have been more than helpful Jack, thanks. Earlier in this thread I got this response to adding another universal water block.

"You already met the thermal limits of the radiator with the GPU alone. If you add another 760 to the loop, you might as well take out your processor and throw it into a fire."

I've read other similar responses on other threads in this forum. Fortunately for me not only am I thick skinned I am not afraid to try things with my PC. For someone looking at water cooling they would probably run in fear of damaging their system

You already said you dont use your pc's full potential. And beyond that, for your heatload and overclock you have enough radiator to use your pc's full potential for hours on end so long as the room you are in stays a reasonable temp, i.e not 40c+. You have enough radiator to fully load your cpu and gpu at your current settings. And as long as you kept you cpu overclock so small, and your expectations so low, you probably could run 760 sli off that radiator. Once you understand how radiator surface area affects the delta between ambient air and the water temp it is easy to see why that is true.

Nobody tries to scare anybody away from this forum. Most of the people here just wont hand hold and pick parts for someone who has no clue how watercooling works. Because that doesnt teach them anything.

Beside coin mining, we have another subforum for folding@home, loads cpu and gpu 100%

Rosetta? similar thing.

Seti@home? again full load.

So let me repeat, just because you dont use your computer at full load does not mean that nobody runs their computer at full load. Fun fact by the way, the further you overclock a piece of hardware the lower its stable temperature will be. You saw this a lot with 7970s that were rock solid stable at stock at 85c, but as they pushed the core higher they would start seeing artifacts at 70c.

Custom watercooling is a niche market, it isnt meant for people who are happy with a store bought box that could run all day on stock air coolers. One group of people it is for are users like me, who like a very quiet computer that is still overclocked beyond what air is capable of. Have you heard a radeon 290 at 100% fan speed? Because thats what it would take to get 1200/1500 out of one, and you still might not get that high. Even the aftermarket cards are unreasonably loud once you turn the fan speed up enough to run 1200 core.

There is also every bit of information you could ever need to figure out exactly what amount of radiator you need listed in the sticky and the links within. Right down to specifics on if you want a low fpi rad or a high fpi rad and what rpm of fans you want for it to hit a target water temp under any load range.

Clovett said:

You have been more than helpful Jack, thanks. Earlier in this thread I got this response to adding another universal water block.

"You already met the thermal limits of the radiator with the GPU alone. If you add another 760 to the loop, you might as well take out your processor and throw it into a fire."

I've read other similar responses on other threads in this forum. Fortunately for me not only am I thick skinned I am not afraid to try things with my PC. For someone looking at water cooling they would probably run in fear of damaging their system

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Have you read the WC stickies yet? If not, we all highly recommend you read up on it. We all have read up on the WC stickies and have done some sort of WC to our computers.

The reason why we say to run Prime95 and Furmark together for 20 minutes is to see if your current cooling setup would be sufficient if that load amount actually happened to your computer for any amount of time. Crysis 3, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 are heavy hitters on the cpu along with the gpu.

If you don't want to listen to reason, you don't have to. But we all are giving you sound advice and you're fighting us along the way.

"We can lead a horse to water but we can't make him drink from it."

yamaharacer19 said:

Have you read the WC stickies yet? If not, we all highly recommend you read up on it. We all have read up on the WC stickies and have done some sort of WC to our computers.

The reason why we say to run Prime95 and Furmark together for 20 minutes is to see if your current cooling setup would be sufficient if that load amount actually happened to your computer for any amount of time. Crysis 3, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 are heavy hitters on the cpu along with the gpu.

If you don't want to listen to reason, you don't have to. But we all are giving you sound advice and you're fighting us along the way.

"We can lead a horse to water but we can't make him drink from it."

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Yes I've read the majority of the stickies, there is some good info in there.

If you had read my original post before the recommendation to run FurMark and Prime95 together for 20 minutes you would have seen that I've already played Ghosts for 3 1/2 hours on high video and it ran fantastic with my computer only heating the water in my system 5C. Ghosts is terribly un-optimized and uses at least as many resources at Battlefield 4. That being said running the tests after the fact makes no sense. It's not a matter of leading a horse to water, the pond is dry.

Clovett said:

Exactly! But mine doesn't. My water temp raises 5C after 5 minutes of running prime95 on torture with 8 instances. My radiator and the 250ml resevoir are both located outside my case, could that affect it? Also I was incorrect when I thought this radiator had 2 rows of pipe it's actually three rows of pipe all copper with all copper fins 60mm thick and the pipe is 13mm ID and 2mm thick walls. 7FPI fins

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5 minutes of prime is borderline irrelevant. It takes longer than that for even the smallest loops to stabilize.

Clovett said:

Now that is where we disagree. The more I have thought about it the more I question what is being thrown about as "heat load". I based the wattage for the GTX760 on competent reviews that it pulls about 170 watts when it's maxed. But I thought about it and the CARD is pulling 170 watts with the VRM disipating quite a bit of that load. I'm not using a full coverage block and am only cooling the chip itself. With that said whatever the temp of the chip itself is I am also not pulling that either. Same goes for the CPU. If I leave 57C on the chip I am only disipating part of that load. I'm not disipating the entire load for either case.

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VRM dissipation is nominal, they're quite efficient and only warm up from having to switch on and off. What makes you think you can dissipate only part of what the card is using? What type of energy are you converting the incoming electrical energy to?

Clovett said:

I agree for the most part and thanks for a reasonable reply. However the point I am trying to get people to understand is I can use my PC's whole potential for quite a bit of the time under my current water cooling, I just can't do it constantly for hours on end which I would never do. There are very few instances that someone would unless they dedicate to something like coin mining. A fair estimate would be that this represents well over 95% of all PC usage.

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Firstly, you're getting into grounds of rationalization by acknowledging replies that agree with you as reasonable, I don't think many people will hang out to help you with that kind of attitude. Reasoned dissent is perfectly acceptable, but no one likes beating their head against a brick wall.

Designing your computer such that it can overheat is just bad practice, IMO. There's plenty of games out there that hit my computer just right and max out, or close to max out, both the processor and the graphics (Civ V comes to mind), personally, I think having to worry about that and monitor it defeats the purpose.

Clovett said:

So why are we trying to scare people that are looking to water cool their PC's away from this forum? To my knowledge there is no sticky that explains any of this in a form people can understand. It's more like if your system can't run balls to the wall for 24 hours it's not ready for prime time and that is about as far from reality as it gets.

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This, quite frankly, is kind of offensive. The people who frequent this board regularly give of their time and knowledge to help people get their watercooling systems setup. There has been a lot of effort put into our stickies by the people who wrote them, and further effort by the testers who did the research that allowed them to be written. It's impossible to explain everything in a sticky, the goal is to get you to a point where we can have a discussion and understand each other (same vernacular, etc) as well as to dispel common misconceptions.

Clovett said:

If I bought an off the shelf system with a decent video card and a 4770 I7 running on air and ran a benchmark program that maxes both CPU and GPU how many hours do you think it would run before it crashed and burned? And that system is quite suitable for the above average user for years.

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I can't tell you how it would go, because that's a very vague scenario, however, if I bought an off the shelf system and it couldn't stress test non-stop until a chip died a few years later, I'd be expecting a new, free, off the shelf system that could. Stability is an absolute must for me.

First let me apologize to anyone I have offended here. Wasn't intentional I just assemble concepts and facts differently than other people. I just wanted to see how you guys viewed water cooling as a whole and I have a clear picture of that concept now.

I'll look into the VRM heating, I really can't find much about how much energy that they use/dissipate. I just found it interesting that nowhere does it list how much the actual chip uses, just how much the card itself uses. But the rub is this. My CPU in every setup is always rated at less power than my GPU. But my CPU always runs much hotter than my GPU even when both are stressed. Hence my VRM scrutiny.

My reply wasn't rationalization when I commented and thanked Waza for his reply. It was just that he seemed to be the only person that understood there are other uses for water cooling besides running 100 percent all the time.

As for scaring people you can find that kind of offensive or you can learn from it. You want sugar coating don't come to me, it's not in my personality profile. I didn't say or mean to imply you intentionally scare people new to water cooling. I'm saying that they are already apprehensive when they come in the forum and it takes very little for them to chuck the idea of a great water system and go buy a closed loop that will meet the need.

Which brings me to the original topic. How much is enough? From testing I can find, which is what others can find, this is what I see. If you don't agree it doesn't matter this is the information out there and why closed loop systems are so popular.

Any closed loop cooling system will cool their CPU at stock speeds better than air, period. Lots of tests on the internet to support that. Some are louder than others for all closed loops.

For a mild to mid OC any closed loop system will cool their CPU better than air over a stock cooler.

For a higher end OC they need a 120.2 closed loop.

For a high end OC they should build a custom loop.

I've been water cooling for 7 years on a Thermaltake Symphony system that everyone says is a POS. But I cooled an overclocked Q9550 and a GTX 560 and never had an issue until the pumps finally died. The water flow from what I can see in Youtube videos was about equal or slightly less than a Corsair H100 pump flow. And it worked for me.

The closed loop manufacturers fully understand what I am trying to convey. PC's are like PBX systems in a way. Sure you have 100 phones at your business, but there are really just 12 phone lines and it's rare to get a busy signal. But if you are a telemarketing firm you just might need 100 lines. The truth is almost all businesses run minimal actual lines and rarely get a busy signal.

Clovett said:

Which brings me to the original topic. How much is enough? From testing I can find, which is what others can find, this is what I see. If you don't agree it doesn't matter this is the information out there and why closed loop systems are so popular.

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How much is enough is a direct descendent of what your cooling needs are. The safest bet is always to design the system around the worst case scenario. Which brings you to the next step ...

What do you want to happen in the worst case scenario in terms of thermal load? If your top priority is silence, maybe you build a system with more rad area, don't chase maximum overclocks, decide you'll accept a dT of 15C, or some combination of these. If you're chasing top clocks, maybe you decide noise isn't a big concern for you so you buy some high speed Deltas to keep the dT as low as you can. These are compromises and tradeoffs that can happen even between two identical systems with identical cases and identical cooling setups in terms of blocks, tubing, pump(s), and rads.

You've obviously decided that you're ok with a higher dT and are comfortable with the CPU throttling itself if it needs to. That's fine. That's your choice. Others might not make the same choice. That's fine too as long as it works for them. A lot of people want a no-compromise system. They want quiet, low temps, and high overclocks. So that's what the most of the advice is geared towards, because that's what most people are shooting for. The name of this forum is "Overclockers" after all.

My system doesn't generally approach my max stress temps. Certain games do get close, but I know I don't have to worry because I already know exactly what's going to happen in my rig in a worst case scenario and I know I don't have to be concerned about it.

JeremyCT said:

How much is enough is a direct descendent of what your cooling needs are. The safest bet is always to design the system around the worst case scenario.

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+1, and that is bottom line. Intel per their whitepapers designs cooling solutions for ambient of 35C, high humidity, highest stock TDP, ie worst case scenario.

If your designing for yourself, to each their own, nothing at all wrong about just meeting your needs. But when offering advice to others, I will follow advice of professional companies in the business, and design for worst case scenario, and avoid the potential for a bad outcome on someone elses dime.

Besides, if you spend a few to several hundred on a water cooling setup to get a 15C delta air to water, when you could spend just another $70 and get a second rad and cut that delta air to water in half, seems like your missing a great bang for buck opportunity.