CPU and GPU cooling questions.

I have a few questions about cooling and performance. I am going to be building my new rig within the next few months and i am looking to make this a gaming/benching rig. More emphasis on the gaming part morethanlikely. So here are my questions.

First, if I wanted better or higher performance out of a GPU would a better cooling solution help me reach that goal?

If so, what kind of cooling should I be looking at?

Can the cooling needed be done inside the case or will the system basically have to be built outside the entire tower itself?

If I cool and OC my GPU for better performance, does the same NEED to be done to the CPU? Or would that only serve for better benches?

If I have 2 GPU's will that change how the cards can be cooled because of space limitations? Or would i not need another card with a better cooled single card solution?

I will ask more questions as i come up with them. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to look at this and post, or point me in the right direction.

There are four general types of cooling.

1. Stock. This would be the stock cooler that comes with the CPU and the "reference" cooler on the GPU. Minor overclocking can be done on these, but they're designed to cool the chip at stock levels and be as cheap as possible.

2. Aftermarket air/Sealed liquid (Also called LCLC for low-cost liquid cooling or AIO for all-in-one liquid cooling). Most reasonable 24/7 overclocks can be achieved on this type of cooling. These sealed liquid units usually perform about the same as high-end air coolers. Many options available for CPUs. Aftermarket GPU coolers are usually included with more expensive versions of the card (Gigabyte Windforce, ASUS DirectCuII, MSI Twin Frozr). There are few options that can be purchased separately, mostly just the Arctic Cooling Accelero series.

3. Custom liquid cooling. This requires putting a waterblock on the CPU and GPU, connected in a loop with some radiators, a reservoir, and a pump. Coolant is just distilled water plus some biocide. While more costly than sealed liquid or aftermarket air, you get the advantage of this being expandable. You can add more radiators to the loop to increase cooling capacity. This lets you get the performance of high-end air or more while running extremely low speed fans, you can get performance and quiet. Simply limited by how much you can spend. Radiators can be mounted inside or outside the case, all you have to do is route tubing. It is also recommended to drain and tear down the entire loop, clean everything, and put it back together every 6-12 months.

4. Sub-ambient/Sub-zero. Rarely used for 24/7 purposes. Sub-ambient means that you're cooling the CPU below the temperature of the air in your room, which is impossible with the forms above. This usually requires that you insulate your other components using vaseline or art eraser to prevent condensation from damaging them. There are options for 24/7, such as TEC (Thermoelectric coolers) and phase change coolers, but these are expensive, bulky, costly, and inefficient. The other method is simply strapping a big copper pipe with a closed end (called a pot) to your CPU and filling it with a mixture of acetone and dry ice (-79C) or liquid nitrogen (-196C). This obviously gets things really chilly, and is used for short amounts of time to try to achieve overclocks not achievable on any other form of cooling. Welcome to competitive benchmarking.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. So how dangerous to components is custom liquid cooling? Is there any chance that it will just leak and and ruin my system? Or is it pretty safe? Don't want to spend $1600+ on a new rig only to have a little water set me back.
How expensive is custom liquid cooling btw? Can it be done on a budget? Maybe around $200-$300? Or would I be better off with something like the H100 if I don't have the right funds for real liquid cooling?

It won't leak if you do it right and follow all the necessary precautions. We recommend lots of leak tests and the sort, very methodic and detailed practices to avoid disaster.

Note that if you though choosing components for your build was hard, picking the right parts for water cooling is a lot more involved. Requires more learning, a bit of science, and lots of research to do right. Check out the stickies in the WC section if your interested. Read them once or twice, maybe even three times. Might take you a day or two to get through all of it.

Thanks. I will look into it. =]

Though I may need to go through cases again to find one that can hold a radiator or two.

Yup. If you want to do internal water cooling, there is no such thing as a case that is too big. Being handy with a few tools and being willing to cut/modify the case would give you more flexibility as well.

That is good to know, should make my choice a little easier bow that I know to look for radiator space which a lot of cases seem to accommodate. Any recommendations on cases to start with?

Not sure myself, as I don't watercool. It always made sense to me to do the watercooling calculations first though, that way you'll know how much radiator space you need for a given amount of performance and noise, and then could choose a case based off of that.