Total Watercooling Noob needing help and advice

[GSquid]

Hi everyone, I am currently waiting for all my new goodies to arrive and I am wondering if I can have some advice and pointers from the Water Cooling Community, as I am a total useless noob when it comes to water cooling.

OK, here goes:

My current rig was bombed due to an act of nature... Seriously, lightning struck the house and I guess that's all I need to say...

So I have been giving a new rig some thought. I have come up with a build that I think will meet all my needs at home, as well as possibly cater for some needs in the future too.

The components that are on the way at the moment are:

CPU:
Intel Core i7-6950X 3.0GHz 10-Core Processor

CPU Cooler:
Cooler Master MasterAir Maker 8 66.0 CFM CPU Cooler

Motherboard:
Asus X99-E-10G WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard

Memory:
Corsair Dominator Platinum 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-3333 Memory

Storage:
OCZ RD400 1TB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
6x Samsung 850 EVO 4TB 2.5" Solid State Drive MZ-75E4T0
2x Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

Graphics Card:
2x Nvidea Titan X Pascal 12GB DDR5

Case:
Cooler Master Cosmos II - Ultra Tower

Power Supply:
Super Flower Leadex 2000W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply

Optical Drive:
2x LG BH16NS55.AUAR10B Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer

Sound Card:
Asus STRIX RAID DLX 24-bit 192 KHz Sound Card

Case Fan:
12x Cooler Master XtraFlo 120 Red LED

Monitor:
3x Asus ROG SWIFT PG348Q 34.0" 100Hz Monitor

Keyboard:
Corsair Gaming K95 RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard — Cherry MX Red

Mouse:
Corsair Scimitar RGB Black & Corsair M65 PRO RGB Black

Headphones:
Corsair VOID Wireless Dolby 7.1 RGB Gaming Headset — Special Edition

I'm not an overclocker, but I just cannot bring myself to say that Water Cooling doesn't look damn awesome and that it is not effective.

What are your suggestions in terms of water cooling my rig? I don't game every day as I am away from home for work often, but when I am home I like nothing more than shooting away at the latest and greatest that was published.

Please advise as to whether the Cooler Mater case will be good enough for a very good water cooling system to be installed. If not, no harm no foul, we upgrade the box to something else, or I can modify the case. (Something I will already have to do to a small extent to accommodate the power supply)

What type of blocks would I need?
How many loops to keep the PC as cool as possible?
What pump or pumps would be the best?
What can I water cool and how do I do it? (I am the biggest noob to water cooling you have ever seen )

Thanks!

 

[EarthDog]

Wow.. that build...impressive. Could have saved thousands though...

You need a decade core cpu for your work?
Why a sound card?
Why 2Kw psu (could have easily used 850W and had PLENTY OF headroom)?
Are you using close to 32gb of ram now to warrant 64GB? Otherwise, I would have went 32GB.
You need 20TB worth of platter storage?
You need 24GB of SSD space??

Awesome build, but so few people need your setup

Anyway, have you taken the time to read the watercooling sticky threads? I'd start there.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...Water-Cooling-Your-PC-***-READ-THIS-FIRST-***

You can do one loop and cool both gpus and the cpu. D5 pump... go to EK site and look up your cards to get the block... same with cpu.. there are other companies out there as well of course.

But check out the stickies, twice, to knock some of that self proclaimed noob out of you so you understand why.

 

[GSquid]

Thanks for the reply EarthDog.

The PC is currently running my home automation in addition to my home network. I work from both home and a few offices world wide.

When I am home though, myself, my fiance and my daughter game online, we currently run it from the same PC until I have time to assemble similar rigs for them. In addition to my day to day work, I have a few memory and graphics intensive hobbies that also make me a bit of money.

about 55% of the storage is dedicated to my normal day to day work, due to the large number of clients I have. At my head office i have a server that the company uses, naturally; however i have a test server that I run from this PC.

Yes, I might have more than I need, but I have everything I might need or want in the near future.

Thanks again for your insights.

 

[SuperMiguel]

So "most" people want to water cool because they think it looks cool or they want to overclock, let says you change your mind and change to become an overclocker, people i know that overclock systems like that do not run it 24/7 if you want this computer to run your home network and your home automation, this may not be a good idea, If you have this much money, why not just buy a very small computer, to be on all the time and use that for your home automation and network?

Also must home automation, and network operating systems are linux based and are dedicated to this task only, so YES that is a monster computer but may not be the best solution to achieve the task you are looking for.. I would rather run my home automation network on an Raspberry Pi than on a bad *** computer like that

 

[DWTech]

I personally run 2 loops, one for 3x 980 Ti SLI, one for monoblock on rampage extreme. They run great. I use 480mm radiators to dissipate the heat with Corsair SP120's on in push-pull config. 2x res, 2x d5, lots of rigid tubing and many many hours of fun with a heat gun.

You can do it a number of ways. Alot of people prefer to run 1 loop with everything in there. I went with dual myself.

If you want to do it, the d5 pumps are awesome, just grab one with a good pump top, then grab a res, go from res to pump, pump to block, out the block into the radiator, back to res on each loop, or out the block into the radiator into the next block into the next radiator back to res for all in one. Whether you use flexible or rigib tubing boils down to the aesthetics I think more than anything, oh and I personally found when I went thru a stage of constantly wanting to mess with it, flexible tubing made that a bit easier, very easy to just bang another piece of tube in to change something, I eventually settled down and got on the rigid tubing myself though, love it.

Don't get carried away with these crazy fluids unless you want to be spending alot of time in maintenance mode. They have all kinds of dramas associated like changing colours, gunking up, or you got the show liquids like Aurora that have pearls in which end up dropping to the bottom and causing issues. For me, I run a slightly blue Mayhems X1 liquid, I've found it gave me the least drama. I have used Pastels from them before without much drama just that, I got bored of the solid pipe look, I actually prefer it to look kinda transparent so you can tell it's got water in, to me pastel = why not just go coloured tubing but then again my Mrs loves the pink pastel lol.

I like your config the only parts I gulped alot on was the crazy amount of SSDs, that is a serious fortune right there, but the rest of it, I can't say much lol, pretty similar here.

 

[GSquid]

Thanks for the replies guys!

SuperMiguel:
At the moment that is the current setup. the home automation is run from Linux in a virtual environment. I do travel a lot and as a result I was home only from the 24th December 16 to the 1st January 17, during which time I did not want to tinker around with PC's, so I spend time with my family. I did order parts for a dedicated server to run the automation, my work fiddle server and the test server. This will hopefully be assembled and the transfer completed by mid Feb 17. Thus, the two 10TB drives will be shifted out my rig to a better suited home.

DWTech:
Bud, I think I will go your route and use rigid piping. The colours I rate I might play around with once I get to spend more time with the beast! I also prefer the look of water running through the tubes, so I will definitely have a look at what they have.

Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed! for now, lunch is over and its back to the grind lol

 

[GTXJackBauer]

to OCFs.

I would also recommend everything EarthDog has said. If you're willing to maintain such a loop, have at it. If properly configured, you'll get low temps and low audibles. The only issue I would worry is not having the PC on frequently to allow the fluid to circulate other than having it stand still. I've seen and heard of enough systems that can be problematic when the system is off for a long period of time as well as in very humid environments and in direct sunlight. Some good premium pre-mixed fluids should take care of things but I still think issues can arise.

Don't forget, you could build a beast of a system through air as well. This is all up to you as custom liquid cooling has a learning curve and strongly advise in reading our intro to water cooling stickies. I will also post a video that's great for beginners as well.

 

[Dlaw]

I honestly wouldn't watercool a computer that you make money on. There's a lot of reasons I feel like that, but I'll give you the headliners:

1: Maintenance. Every time you need to maintain that loop, your system is going to be down. If you end up finding problems, it could be an indefinite period of time before you can bring it up. Money lost.

2: Leaks. When done right, leaks are a minimal concern in a water loop, but they're always a concern. If you have a leak, it could easily take hardware, including drives with client data that can't easily be replaced. Money lost two fold.

3: Initial cost. When building a system that you intend to make money on, you should always consider how long it will take for the system to "pay for itself", so that it starts turning a profit for you. My loop cost around $1500, and I'd imagine yours would be even more expensive. Since you aren't overclocking (currently), that money would be spent on parts that will net you no gain. Money spent on no gain is money lost.

Now, having said that, you seem to intend to ask an awful lot of that single system. As suggested, I would spend that budget on 2 or 3 systems, and maybe watercool the system primarily used for gaming. A 6700K or 7700K actually beat the 6950X in terms of framerates in a lot of games due to higher single core IPCs and higher clockspeeds. Not by a noticeable amount, which is just another argument for the cheaper chip, but still.

If none of this has turned you off from the badassness of what you want to build, I don't blame you one bit. That is a monster PC you have parted out there, and I can't think of one thing it wouldn't be able to do outside of maybe control a spaceship. I just thought I'd share my thoughts.

 

[DWTech]

Yes I think alot of it depends on your perspective. I work on my main PC, which is water cooled etc, and I take into account maintenance and possibility for leaks, as such you should always ensure you have a spare floating around you could 'edge along on' until your main PC is back up, for example if I found my temps went crazy and had to shut it down but the part I needed took 3 days to arrive because my local store hasn't got it, what do I do? Well in my case because I'm a complete lunatic and waste insane amounts of $ on hardware I have other systems lol.. but not everyone is in that boat (many times my Mrs wants to kill me for this).

But I found that generally speaking, the loop is not an issue, and because I run everything over clocked and game on the same PC I prefer to work on, not really a hard choice for me personally. I'm a software developer also.

In terms of data loss tho it shouldn't ever -be- a big concern, you should be having real time backups performed, for me it's to external drives to the PC, and then when the PC is idle to the cloud.

 

[GTXJackBauer]

Yes I think alot of it depends on your perspective. I work on my main PC, which is water cooled etc, and I take into account maintenance and possibility for leaks, as such you should always ensure you have a spare floating around you could 'edge along on' until your main PC is back up, for example if I found my temps went crazy and had to shut it down but the part I needed took 3 days to arrive because my local store hasn't got it, what do I do? Well in my case because I'm a complete lunatic and waste insane amounts of $ on hardware I have other systems lol.. but not everyone is in that boat (many times my Mrs wants to kill me for this).

But I found that generally speaking, the loop is not an issue, and because I run everything over clocked and game on the same PC I prefer to work on, not really a hard choice for me personally. I'm a software developer also.

In terms of data loss tho it shouldn't ever -be- a big concern, you should be having real time backups performed, for me it's to external drives to the PC, and then when the PC is idle to the cloud.

I think you've answered it perfectly. The man wants to build a BEAST of a machine and he's going to tease us with images on these forums. Deal? Ok, deal. Now back to reading up on the basics of custom watercooling. It's a lot of fun when you get the gist of it which I feel you will do just fine.

 

[GSquid]

Hi Guys;

I will be migrating the work aspect of things as well as the home automation to another dedicated PC I will build when I'm home at the end of Feb.

I am not overclocking at the moment, there really isn't a need for that yet, but once I get to be home more (soon... I hope! My business partner took 6 months off because we haven't had chance to take leave yet... my six months are fast approaching!) Then i will start with moving everything where it needs to be and setting everything up the way it should.

That's the point where I will start the water cooling project, until then, I'm looking at the stickies and what people say to each other on the forum.

DW, i think i might be a little more lucky on the missus front... My lady is an avid gamer as well, so i rate very soon she will buy the parts she needs for a similar monster to occupy the games room... What is a benefit though, is that when the time comes for her machine to be water cooled, i might look like a know a thing or two hahaha

Data recovery isn't a big concern either, everything is backed up once a day every day, once a week to a separate repository and once a month to a third repository for continuity. (Which was a blessing as we got hit by hostage-ware and I just laughed, took the system offline and started working again from the last backup that was made... the employee on who was cruising around on Russian websites and caused the malarkey, had their internet use severely restricted as a note)

If something goes horribly awry on the beast, then i at least have my Alienware 17 to fall back on, which I'm actually typing this reply on at the moment. What use is it to be away from home and not being able to game when i have the odd spare minute

To everyone who says I waste money (or spend too much of it on something stupid) I always reply with: I work bloody hard for the money I make and to have gotten to where I am, so if I can give my family and I the best we can have, then why not?

Thanks again for all the replies guys, i appreciate your input!

 

[Robert17]

In your first post you mentioned that lightning blasted your PC. Perhaps you should spend some budget money on a better grade of surge protector and a UPS as well.

 

[GSquid]

Thanks Robert, Yeah, lightning friend most of the electronics in my house because the electrician that inspected the house, was a friend of the previous owner whom I bought the house from. After this uhm, blessing in disguise you can call it, I decided to take the house off the electrical grid and I have sufficient surge protecting now, lesson learnt there. I am currently waiting for the UPS to be delivered that i will run the server and my PC from, and i rate in the future the wifey's PC too.

The house has enough battery power for 18 hours, should something go awry with the solar panels. I can also resort to municipal power, should the batteries decide to permanently say goodbye, or i can start the generator up... I might seem anal about backups and backups for the backups, but i lived in South Africa for the first 20 years of my life and rolling blackouts and unexpected and unscheduled power cuts do irritate the crap out of you and can wreak havoc when the power switches on again with the surges that almost always come with it. Also, one can never be too careful hey.

So, now I don't spend money on electricity so that creates a saving, well in the not so far future. In the end, should the manure hit the fan, I will now be ok.

 

[DWTech]

Haha, my Mrs games a bit too with me, I'm redoing her loop as we speak, pink pastel though. Ugh.

The one area though that she perhaps doesn't share my opinion on is the constant need for MORE hardware and upgrades.. she's like, this works great, why do we need more? LOL

 

[Dlaw]

To that, I would respond "cuz 'merica"!