Radiator selection for I7-920 + 4870x2 in Antec P193

[Resonance]

Background:

I got my feet wet, both literally and metaphorically speaking, on watercooling on two different Koolance cases over the last decade or so that I've been less than completely pleased with, but I've never hand-built a watercooling system before. My priorities are stability and quiet before speed, but I don't want to lose speed if I don't have to. I'm guessing I'll probably OC the 920 to around 3.2Ghz and stop there as "good enough". I do own a Dremel and am not afraid to punch a few extra holes in necessary spots, though I'd like to avoid something so extreme as removing sections of case wall, particularly since one of the features of this case is sound insulation.

The new system I'm building is for a gaming/programming desktop replacement for a system that I've pushed far past its normal life cycle. The case, an Antec P193, has already been selected and ordered. I intend to put in it a MSI Eclipse X58 with an I7-920 chip and a single Powercolor Radeon 4870x2, both watercooled, and most likely a 10gig ethernet card and a sound card later, along with three hard drives. I'm aiming at keeping the water temperatures to 50C or below.


Proposed Components and Questions:

A couple days of research has led me to the following components as likely best suited for my purposes:

CPU block: Swiftech Apogee-GTZ w/GTZ-Ci7 Hold-down
Video block: Danger Den DD-4870-X2
Hard Drive block (for main drive only): Alphacool HDD3 (using this forces 3/8" tubing or a converter)

I had selected the Swiftech MCRES-MICRO-REV2 reservoir to be placed on a swing-out L-bracket mounted to the side of the 5.25" drive bays as being a good combination of quiet and easy access for filling, draining, and removing air from the system, but was also contemplating sacrificing one 5.25" bay for a XSPC Plexi Bay reservoir. I'm already sacrificing 1U for the controller/monitor, however, so I'm leaning towards the Swiftech.

For a pump, I'm intending to use the Swiftech MCP350 for reasons of both size (it looks like it'll fit inside a single 5.25" bay, and I'm going to have some blank space inside one behind a temperature display/control unit), but I have some question about whether or not it's going to be sufficient for everything in the loop. The case is large, especially since I'm not sticking most of my storage in it for this build, so I could in theory allocate some of the extra space for a second loop, but would prefer to keep things simple if I can, so question 1 is:

Q1: Should I use a Swiftech MCP655-B or some other pump instead?

I'd had my eyes on those two as being explicitly advertised as very quiet, but will cheerfully consider something else instead. I do note, however, that going to the 655B forces me into 1/2" tubing, which may conflict with my plans to cool my one high-speed drive, and it seems to have lower pressure, if that's significant. I can probably live with just air-cooling for the drive if necessary; the case should have fairly good airflow.

The case itself comes with two 120mm fans pushing air out the top, and one 120mm fan pushing air out the back, as well as two tube ports built into the back and a single 240mm side intake fan. A picture can be found here. This leads up to the part I'm guessing randomly at: what kind of radiator setup I need, and I'm guessing I'm going to need a lot of surface area because I want to keep the fans quiet.

Plan 1: I stick a XSPC RX240 on top of the case, and a XSPC RX120 behind it. This has the advantage of being very simple, with the fans inside the case pushing air out through them. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time guessing if it's going to be enough, especially if I decide in the future that I want to get really silly with my video card and go for a second board in a quad-crossfire rig. I probably won't do this, but wouldn't mind not having to repurchase a completely different radiator system if I did.

Plan 2: I stick a XSPC RX360 on top of the case, hanging out towards the back, add an extra fan blowing downwards, keep the XSPC RX120 behind the case. This gets a bit more surface area, at the cost of some awkwardness (which I can live with) and possibly a small amount of extra noise, but since the case seems to end right after the fan mounts, it might be workable. It can be made easily workable if I move all of the fans outside the case, but then I lose some of the noise shielding.

Plan 3: Again, I keep the XSPC RX120 behind the case, but I stick a pair of linked Swiftech MCR220-QP-STACK radiators on top. This gets me the equivalent of 5x120mm radiator segments, but notably raises the height of the case and moves two fans outside the sound shielding of the case.

Plan Mod B: As with each of the above plans, but replacing the rear port fan on the inside of the case with a 38mm deep fan, sticking it on the outside of the rear port, and replacing the RX120 with a RX240 there hanging down, and hoping that the nearly 4cm of spacing room is sufficient to get all the cables and tubes out of the way behind it. This scares me a bit, but gets me extra surface area.

Plan 4: I pull out the top two fans and completely seal the top opening with soundproofing material, keep a RX120 at the rear, but then run the tubing out a little further and stick either a RX480 or a dual MCR320-stackable with attached fans around the corner of my desk, just standing up against something. That generates a lot of surface area, and maybe hides some of the sound of the external fans, particularly if I liberally apply thick soundproofing material to the desk itself.

So, the next questions are:

Q2: How much surface area do I actually need, cooling at a minimum a 3.2Ghz I-920 and a 4870x2, with a maximum coolant temp of 50C?

Q3: Which of the above plans seems like the best general way to get there, if any?

And then finally, on the topic of monitors and fan controls, perhaps someone could recommend between these two:

Lian-Li TR-5B and Koolance CTR-CD10. The Koolance is more expensive and bulkier, and I know it's not exactly a favored name, but it does seem to have a substantially better interface and the ability to set fan speeds automatically.

Thanks for any advice you may have.

 

[Spawn-Inc]

i never read all that just yet, i will tomorrow when i'm not half asleep but i will say this for now. hard drive water blocks are useless and a wast of money a fan blowing on them (low speed) is plenty.

 

[dealmaster]

Plan 2 will give you the best temperatures. I personally wouldn't run an overclocked i7 (which put out insane amounts of heat) and a 4870x2 (which also put out a lot of heat) on a single triple radiator, even an RX360. Having that extra RX120 will help. However, with this choice, you'll have to cut up your new case to make the RX360 fit, and you'll probably lose a few 5.25" slots because of the radiator/fans taking up that space.

A note for fans - have them sucking air from outside the case and blowing it through the radiators into the case. This will give you the best temperatures. For best temps, you always want the coolest air possible blowing through your radiator. A lot of times, for watercooling setups, this means that your airflow in your case is kind of backwards, with the top and back being intakes and the front, side, and bottom as exhausts, but it works just fine. So you'd probably want to flip that side fan around and flip the bottom-front fan to make them both exhausts.

Also, coolant temps don't matter, focus on the temperatures of your components. Further, to echo what Spawn has said, don't watercool your hard drive. It's a huge waste of money, a low-speed fan blowing across it will do great. The only components worth watercooling in my mind are CPU, GPU, NB, and MAYBE MOSFETS, but that's a big maybe. Anything else is silly.

Plan Mod B - you'll have to cut out the rear fan grille for the fan to fit on there and spin. Otherwise, this would work fine. Plenty of people use radboxes or fans to hang radiators off the back of their case, I've seen quad radiators hung off the back, so hanging a double radiator is no big deal. If you can afford it, having the RX360 up to and a RX240 hanging off the back would give the best cooling out of any of your plans, but would probably be overkill.

Regarding Plan 4 - soundproofing material doesn't do a whole lot for fan noise in my experience. Get yourself a good fan controller, get the fans running at 7v or less, with your RX-series of radiators, you won't need high speed fans at all, and you'll be fine. Soundproofing material is a waste of money considering you can get better noise reduction for much less.

As far as fan controllers go, get this one. I have it and it will drive 20 watts on each channel, plenty of power for 3 or more medium speed fans. It's also super cheap.

Post back if you have more questions or need advice. I'm a watercooling newbie and recently finished my first setup here, with lots of help from the experts on these forums. Don't be afraid to ask for help!

 

[Conumdrum]

Dealmaster might be kinda new but it's really well written solid info. I agree with all of it. A 360 and a 320 is optimal.

Good write Dealmaster!

 

[Resonance]

Thanks for the advice, I'll drop the hard drive cooler from my plans, though I do have some followup questions.

Plan 2 will give you the best temperatures. I personally wouldn't run an overclocked i7 (which put out insane amounts of heat) and a 4870x2 (which also put out a lot of heat) on a single triple radiator, even an RX360. Having that extra RX120 will help. However, with this choice, you'll have to cut up your new case to make the RX360 fit, and you'll probably lose a few 5.25" slots because of the radiator/fans taking up that space.

I was thinking of mounting the RX360 *outside* of the case, on the top, with the third 120mm area hanging off of the back. I wouldn't have to cut anything that way.

Can I take it from this selection that the Swiftech stacked radiator system doesn't work very well? I couldn't find any reviews on it.

A note for fans - have them sucking air from outside the case and blowing it through the radiators into the case. This will give you the best temperatures. For best temps, you always want the coolest air possible blowing through your radiator.

Hm, this lowers the heat on the water system at the cost of raising the heat on the air-cooled components, which will include the northbridge/southbridge, the hard drives, and the other add-in cards. The NB/SB on the MSI X58 eclipse are connected by heat pipe to a very large passive heatsink, and I wasn't sure if it was worth the trouble to pull them off and pray that a Swiftech NBMAX/MCW30 would fit properly. If someone knows for a fact that they will, I can do that, though. Also, hard drive stability and lifetime are reasonably important to me, as I'm looking at several terabytes of data. Are you sure this is an optimal trade-off?

Plan Mod B - you'll have to cut out the rear fan grille for the fan to fit on there and spin. Otherwise, this would work fine. Plenty of people use radboxes or fans to hang radiators off the back of their case, I've seen quad radiators hung off the back, so hanging a double radiator is no big deal. If you can afford it, having the RX360 up to and a RX240 hanging off the back would give the best cooling out of any of your plans, but would probably be overkill.

Actually, although I couldn't find a picture of it, I'm hoping the rear fan grille is perfectly flat, the way the top one is, so I wouldn't have to cut it either. I can afford to pay extra up front for something that works well; mostly I'd like to avoid wasting money on something that doesn't that I'd have to replace later.

I hadn't heard of a radbox before you mentioned it. Looking at one now, I'm thinking that maybe the way to go is to put a radbox + a shroud + a fan, generating a very large standoff distance to the case, and then simply put a RX360 at the back, and then mount a RX240 or even a second RX360 on top, possibly on top of its own shrouds, though you say that RX360+RX240 is already overkill, so maybe I'll keep it simple. The only downside I see is that a RX360 at the rear is long enough that it will be taking hot airwash from the power supply, but that's probably more than made up for by having mostly external airflow. Thoughts? In particular, does going with two large radiators affect my choice of pump?

As far as fan controllers go, get this one. I have it and it will drive 20 watts on each channel, plenty of power for 3 or more medium speed fans. It's also super cheap.

The case front has a cover that will likely be blocked by the protruding controls, I'm afraid. The two contrllers I mentioned I had picked for clear display and for having flat-front controllers.

 

[Conumdrum]

If I already had a Swtfty rad and needed a bit more cooling ability I'd think of slapping a stacker on it. It's not the most optimal solution, the second rad will get warmer air. So look at it like instead of adding a 320 sized rad, your adding a 220 due to the loss of some effiency.

WC the NB/SB isn't as bad as it used to be. The i7 NB really isn't that hot. A decent fan placed to blow on it is usually just fine. A nice thing is the custom waterblocks for the NB/SB in one massive piece of copper. It's not for all boards, they have to be custom made. Here is a link to a store that carries more of them than anyone else.
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=241

You'll also have to buy a block for your mosfets too. So it gets pretty expensive pretty fast and the loop gets complicated. And it can start to impact the flow rate, especially if you try and put a CPU/Rad/Rad/GPU/NB/Mosfet/Pump/Res in one loop. You want to go WC the NB, please consider running two loops, one for the CPU/NB and another for the GPU.

The inside case temps would go up some with blowing warm air from the rad into the case. We watercool the most temp sensitive parts, the rest of them do well enough with a bit more heat. If your rad air is 5C hotter, your CPU temp WILL be 5C hotter if you use that air.

Reverse the side 240mm intake fan and have a 120 in the front blowing room temp air over the hard drives, that might work. Don't worry about the rest of the parts.

If your good with a dremel, I wouldn't worry about a rad box etc. Long threaded rod bolts, nuts, skinny alum tube to go over the rod etc work very very nice as standoffs for a rad out the back. Look at the tons of rig pics posted here and other places.

XS (down for a bit) had a review and a very very long discussion on a new Koolance fan controller, can't say if it was the same. Something was discovered by XS members that really put a bad taste in their mouth. Can't remember what it was. I'll link it once XS is back up.

Why auto control? You get good rads and fans, you don't need to adjust the fans much. Turn knobs when gaming, turn nobs when not gaming. It's a nice thing to have tho. I hear of the Big NG Aquero or something like that for auto control, might look into that.

 

[Resonance]

WC the NB/SB isn't as bad as it used to be. The i7 NB really isn't that hot. A decent fan placed to blow on it is usually just fine.
[...]
Reverse the side 240mm intake fan and have a 120 in the front blowing room temp air over the hard drives, that might work. Don't worry about the rest of the parts.

Okay, from some of the pictures I've seen, it looks like the side intake fan isn't trivially reversible, but that may not matter. I intend to remove the separation plate blocking airflow from main case to the power supply, and using that as an exit path. I can invert the front case fan in front of the hard drives and use that to pull air out. Between the two, and the fact that I won't be pulling air out the back of the case, that's probably a fine airflow path.

XS (down for a bit) had a review and a very very long discussion on a new Koolance fan controller, can't say if it was the same. Something was discovered by XS members that really put a bad taste in their mouth. Can't remember what it was. I'll link it once XS is back up.

Hm. Please do, thanks. I'm actually rethinking physical knob fan control at all, now, and using a programmable controller like the NG, but in truth I don't have to do it now at all. It's really easy to switch fan cables around later. It's draining, filling, and bleeding a loop on a change that's a bloody nuisance.

Any comment on the pump? Is the 350 good enough for this, or should I go to the 655?

 

[Conumdrum]

The MCP 355 is the newer pump over the 350. It's small and pretty powerful. The 655 is a great pump, bigger in size and stronger than the basic 355 and well rated. The 355 with an aftermarket top (XSPC ones) is rated better flow and pressure than the 655. Either pump is a good one.

XS is the Premiere overclocking etc web site. Been down over a week now, the swap to SSD's isn't going too well. So if I remember to post it, I will.

 

[dealmaster]

I have the 350 and I bought it primarily for silence, but I was planning on doing the RPM mod to see what difference it made (increasing the RPMs to those of the 355), and wiring in a switch so I can toggle between modes. I don't know when I'll do it, but if I happen to do it before you get your build finished, I'll let you know what the sound difference is.

Conundrum, thanks for your kind words, everyone here has been instrumental in me learning this stuff, and I'm glad that it's been worthwhile!