So as the title says, I haven't touched water cooling for years, my last project was one called Project: Qube³, where I built a loop into a Mountain Mods case. I can't remember the specs of that rig though. I used a LCD screen modded into the front of the case as well for displaying a media player and system stats. I used soft tubing and was never happy with that choice. I ended up selling the case and using the components in a stock case. So I've just upgraded my current PC with a new to me graphics card, new PSU, new case and 4k monitor. The current specs are: MSI X570 Tomahawk Ryzen 5800x PNY RTX 3090 Fractal Designs Meshify 2 XL 32GB DDR4 - 2x16GB 2x Sabrent Rocket 2TB M.2 Drives 850W EVGA PSU 3x Corsair QL 120mm fans and Light Commander for air intake on the front of the case So I've specced out the watercooling, based on the configurator on the EK website and gone for the following: EK-Quantum Vector² RE RTX 3080/90 D-RGB Water Block - Nickel + Plexi EK-Velocity - AMD AM4 - Nickel + Plexi CPU Waterblock EK-Quantum Surface S420 Triple Fan Radiator - Black EK-Quantum Kinetic TBE 200 D5 PWM D-RGB Pump / Reservoir Combo - Acetal 10/12 PETG hard tubing 3x Arctic P14 Static Pressure 140mm PWM PST Fan for the radiator, which will be top mounted. So according to the configurator on the EK website, the above kit will cool my components effectively and offer some headroom too. I'm not bothered about overclocking though as the system runs all my games at 4K at a more than acceptable frame rate. The 3090 runs hot, meaning very hot, so it'll be dumping a lot of heat into the loop. The 5800X runs hot too, so I was conscious of that when I considered the loop. At the moment the 3090 sounds like it's going to take off when the fans kick in, the fans on the PNY 3090 are rubbish!! I'm struggling with a few aspects of the new loop though, one is logistical and the other is experience. So logistically, getting hold of fittings quickly for the watercooling gear is proving problematic. I'd ordered the fittings from a well known online retailer, but apparently they couldn't locate them in the warehouse so the order got cancelled. All the other retailers are showing limited stock or no stock for the fittings I wanted. With the experience, this is the first time I'll have worked with hard tubing, I've bought a heat gun and bending kit so have all the gear but no idea ;-) I've ordered extra tubing to compensate for user error! Anyone switched on to watercooling, do you think the specs of the loop are OK for the components I have? Does EK put out decent kit? Any tips would be appreciated for planning the layout and tubing too!!
The 3090 fans are ikely reacting to the memory junction temp, not the GPU temp. Swapping the thermal pads can make a big difference, even to air-cooled cards.
EK make great watercooling gear, so you should have no trouble with the quality of them. They are very popular and fittings of the most popular colours can be tricky to get. Their own webshop might be worth a try. I'm pretty shocked their configurator said a slim 420 rad would be enough, seems woefully inadequate to me. I would add another rad to the loop, or you'll still have noise problems with having to run the fans at high speed to keep the temps down. I see you've already got some ql120 for the front, so at least a 360mm rad, or a 480 and pick up another fan would be even better. Just a warning to check the height of your ram, as a 420 can have fitment problems with tall ram If you haven't already got all the watercooling gear, i would suggest going for a thicker P420 (44mm) rad up front, as the arctics are great fan for radiators and shouldn't have trouble pushing through a thicker rad. Then an S360 or s480 in the roof with the Corsair QL fans, as they're more for the pretties and wouldn't cope with a thicker rad. With the tubing, you will need to hear up more than you think you would, a good 3-4 inches. If you only heat up a small area, that then has the stretch more to make the bend and leaves you with bends that are noticeably thinner, often flattened on the exterior arc. Have 2 bowls of water to hand. One with warm soapy water to dip the silicone insert in to help get it out after, then second with cold water so once you've formed the bend around the mandrel, you can dunk it to cool everything and fix it in place so you're not left holding it forever. For layout planning I'd take a pick of the case as is, then use paint or pant.net to draw crude plans on. Paint.net is great as you can add layers to the image for each run, so erasing mistakes on one run doesn't mean erasing everything. 90 degree adapters are your friend, use them where you need to rather then trying to immediately do a sharp 90 or have too many bends in a run.
Yeah I'd been reading about that with the thermal pads. I was tempted to try that instead of plumping for WC but I fancied trying the WC so hopefully I'll have a cool and quiet PC at the end @The_Crapman, thanks for the advice, especially with the hard tubing. This is the part I'm least looking forward to!! The configurator did recommend the P420 but I checked the S420 and it stated that it was OK. I've already ordered all the kit, I've already blown my budget in the process too. I ended up paying a lot more for fittings than I'd budgeted for due to stock shortages etc. etc. Wish I'd posted before I ordered the kit now! I'll see how I go on the S420 and if needed I'll definitely drop another rad in. I know it's going to be a ballache draining the loop and all that but I'll work with what I have for now. I'm pretty sure the 140mm's at full belt will sound a lot better than the stock fans on the 3090. They are horrible!!
I have a 9900K (stock) and a 3090 FE (stock) and water-cool them in a much smaller case with a pair of slim 280's. My fluids are up to 10C when gaming and rise to 15c when torture testing and saturated. I use a 40% fan speed setting rising 80% fan speed setting when fluid is more than 15c over ambient. Fans are Noctua Chroma 140's. My suggestion is to consider adding something like a aquacomputer Quaddro for fan speed management based on fluid temps. You can then fit a temperature sensor in the loop and use the fluid temperature to control the fan speed.
I do this straight off of the motherboard, so check what your motherboard can do you may not need an external device, you may be able to control fans off of one of the internal mobo temps or if like mine you can pump water temp into motherboard fan controller.
Good point @Goatee. You shouldn't think of the rads and fans as cooling the components, they're their to cool the coolant. You should be able to get a temp sensor in the loop hooked up to the Corsair fan controller and control them that way. Set the fan curve as a gentle slope up to about 30, then exponential the curve up to 100% @40c
Agreed you can on some MB's, however, given the smallish cost (compared to the wonga you shell out for WC gear) and the ease of use (some MB's only do this in Bios) I am a big fan of the AC suite and the control it gives. Obviously YMMV
Yup, all depends on motherboard implementation but my aquaero 5 has been rendered redundant by my motherboard feature set.
Thanks for sharing your tips everyone. So I got the loop fitted today, took me all day too! Couple of things I'd have done differently, first was the tube, I wish I'd gone thicker. Second is that I don't have a drain or fill port. Something to add at a later stage. Third is I don't have a temp sensor, again I'll add it at a later stage. This project has cost me an arm and a leg, I remember water cooling gear being expensive when I was into it years ago, but it seems way more expensive now. Took this photo while leak testing. The results of this loop are excellent, I have a massively quieter PC when gaming. The 3090 isn't being throttled and it's all been worth it
I managed for years without a drain port. It's definitely more convenient to plumb one in, but not essential. Re temp sensors, just stick one on the side of your rad and use that. I find that a temp sensor stuck there is almost bang on the same as the one monitoring my coolant fluid.
That's a nice job. Yeh ek stuff on particular has got very expensive. There a few cheaper brands like barrow that I use for fittings, adapters and other bits to keep cost down. The price range can be mental, just checking aquatuning they have 360 rads from £56 to £159.
@VictorianBloke Thanks, I'll try that! @The_Crapman Thanks, I wasted 500mm of tubing by messing the bends up but I did expect some wastage. So I've been really happy with the reduced noise and temps, just been running some 3DMark runs with HWInfo64 loaded up. I noticed that performance has been throttled but not thermal throttling, it says due to "reliability voltage". I've never heard of this, is this just a way of stopping the card from running at too high a voltage?
Probably, you can use a curve overclock to drop the vcore but you'll not get much more out of it just retain higher clocks for longer but these thing suck down so much just it will ultimately throttle looks like you've not opened it up at all with a 350w cap, now it's under water you can let it rip, open it up, I think the 3090 limit is 450w. temps look nice and low but that is a short test, run a stress test and see where you are at.
