I'm pretty new to water cooling myself, so hopefully one of these pros can correct me if I tell you anything incorrect.
Through extensive research and questioning here and on other forums, let me debunk some myths that you seem to have in your mind.
I need the "coolest" water going into my blocks:
As some have indicated, loop order literally does
not matter. The water inside your loop is like a body of water that is going to be within a 1-2C range anywhere you measure it inside the loop, as long as water is moving.
My intuition may not be exactly correct, but I think of it like heating up water in a pan that has a hot plate on the bottom but somehow has the sides of the pan actively cooled. In your loop, the cpu block acts as the bottom of the pan (heated by a hot plate), and your radiator acts as the sides that are cooled somehow.
Now imagine this set up with someone stirring the water. Is the water going to be hotter at the bottom and cooler at the top? No. It will be one unified temperature because someone is stirring. There is a certain amount of heat going into the pan via hotplate, and a certain amount being extracted via cooled sides, so eventually the water in the pan is going to reach an equilibrium temperature. The point being though, that the temperature is going to be the same in the bottom of the pan as the top of the pan because the water is being stirred.
It is exactly the same in your loop. Your loop is a body of water. You may not think of it as a body of water because it isn't a container of water like you'd generally think of a body of water, but it is still a body of water that is formed in an odd shape contained by your tubing, res, etc. As long as the pump is going and water is moving, the water is going to be mixed around in your res and other parts of your loop to where it will essentially be the same temperature at any point in the loop.
What does all this mean? You could put 4 GTX580's and an i7 3960X OC'ed to 5Ghz in order and then follow that with 4 huge radiators. You could also have a radiator between each component. You might think having a radiator in each component would cool better because each block is getting "cooled" water. Not so. The whole body of water is cooled. The whole body of water is also heated, but it's moving so that's where the equilibrium temperature comes in. It does not divide up into sections.
Also, water doesn't really spend enough time in a block to "heat up" enough to really see a difference. It's in and out and might heat up 1C, but it's the continual passing of water that is at an equilibrium temperature that cools it.
All that said, if your pump fails and water stops moving the water in that block will heat up in a heartbeat and you will have major heat issues. A water block doesn't act as a very good air cooler
.
EDIT: As m0r7if3r pointed out, you do want your res to be before your pump in the loop. That is the only order that matters.
I need a pump to pump liquid "up":
You only need one pump in your loop, and it doesn't matter where in the loop it is. Again we have to think of it like this body of water that is flowing. There won't be any air or anything in your system, so it's completely occupied by water. There is a pump pushing the water. Any water that needs to go "up" is going to be pushed by the water behind it all the way until it's ultimately driven by the pump.
Graphics cards generate more heat, therefore need more radiator:
I fell victim to this assumption as well so don't feel bad. I really don't even understand the reason behind it, but it has something to do with heat transfer area I think. It was explained to me on here, but it was over my head so I just took their word for it. Basically, your CPU needs more radiator than your GPU. I can't explain it, but some of the pros on here can.
Insert from m0r7if3r: The reason graphics cards are happy in a loop with a higher dT is due to the fact that the heat transfer out of the core is better.
---------
Two great websites to read product reviews are
Martin's Liquid Lab and
Skinnee Labs.
What I would do is read radiator reviews. Each review should have some kind of graph that shows watts of heat dissipated on the Y axis and fan speed on the X axis. There should be lines representing various temp deltas. Basically how well do you want it to perform.
There are basically two variables that determine the cooling capability of the radiator: fins per inch or fpi as it's commonly called, and the fan speed you run through them. I know thickness can play a part as well. Obviously heat exchange area or size of the radiator is the biggest, but I'm talking about comparing two radiators of the same size.
A higher fpi radiator will often perform much better but require higher fans speeds to do so. They don't perform as well as low fpi radiators at low fan speeds (quiet). At the same time they offer big incentives or performance gains to using high fan speeds (noise). These radiators will often times benefit from a push/pull fan setup more than low fpi radiators too.
If you don't have a clue what fan speed you could tolerate, give
this guys youtube channel a look. He has video of what seems like every fan available being ran from dead stop all the way to full speed. You can get an idea of what a fan might sound like at "half throttle". I will tell you though....I thought the high speed Yate Loons that he showed in his video sounded extremely loud, but I bought them anyways. Enclosed in the case they aren't near as bad as it sounds on his videos with the camera right next to the fan.
If you aren't dead set on the case, you could look at a Xigmatek Elysium case. It's absolutely massive. I just finished my Black Devil rig using that case and I got a 420mm in the top and 240mm in the front with the only modifications required being to modify the screw holes in the top to fit the 420. That was simply a problem with my radiator because for some odd reason, the Black Ice GTX420 has a small space between fans and the case was drilled for a radiator that has the fans bump up against each other. One thing to note is a 420mm radiator (140x3) is actually larger in surface area than a 480mm radiator (120x4), so that would improve your cooling big time over a 360mm rad.
You can check out
my youtube channel here for videos of how I set it up. I'm going to update the thread here, but I just haven't had time this week yet.
Hopefully I haven't thrown too much incorrect information at you. I'm trying to learn myself and these guys here have been great to me. Can't thank them enough. They'll jump all over me if I'm too wrong
