Ok Wyx covered most of the important points in his user review of the BigNG here but I just wanted to do a followup for watercooling enthusiasts, because the online documentation isn’t very clear, and reviews for this from a WCing perspective are few and far between. The main advertised use of the BigNG is its ability to independently adjust fan speed/Pump RPM on the fly, dependent on monitored temperature. First of all you need to know a little bit about how I have things setup (and also so you can see my rig which I am proud of) My aim was ultimately to create a rig that ran almost silently while at idle or during light use, but could provide ultimate cooling for my setup in the heat of a BF3 firefight. Outside of using a H50, I’d never done watercooling at all, so I bought almost everything second hand on the marketplace to keep costs down, including Pump/Res and both the 480’s with their EK full cover blocks and the EK Supreme LT. Rig basics: OC’d 2500K & SLI 480 GTXs Case Cooling: Dual front 140mm intakes 1x 140mm Air Pen intake on floor (not pictured) 1x 140mm Air Pen intake on back panel Radiator Cooling: Front Radiator - Dual 120mm fans in pull Top Radiator – Dual 120mm fans in pull The dual front 140mm intakes push cool air onto and over the front 240 Rad, and the dual 120mm fans pull it through The floor 140mm pushes hot exhaust air towards to meshed roof of the case The rear 140mm pushes cool air from outside the case straight into the path of the 240 rad in the roof The top dual 120mm suck up this air and exhaust it. Green arrows denote fans BigNG setup. The BigNG allows for up to 8 Digital inputs, 10 Analogue inputs, 2x flowmeters. It also allows for 4 controlled outputs for fans or pumps up to a maximum of 80W How I have it setup Inputs: 2 Digital probes • One monitoring temps on the reservoir • One monitoring temps on my motherboard VRMs 2 Analogue probes – I didn’t use any of the 6 or so it shipped with, but instead two Aquaro G1/4 inline temp sensors. • One monitoring temps as they exit the second of two EK 240 Coolstream XTXs. • One monitoring temps as they exit the last of my GPUs Outputs: • 1 controlling dual front 140mm intakes (using Sharkoon fan splitters available from Scan for £1.18) • 1 controlling bottom and rear 140mm intakes • 1 controlling 4x 120mm fans on Radiators • 1 controlling Switftech MCP355 Pump (Using 4pin Molex to 3 pin fan adaptor available from Yoyotech for £2.28) This setup allows measurement of the water at its coolest, and at its hottest, and obviously the Delta T (change in temperature) The manual is here in PDF form and maybe useful as a reference for the below After hardware installation I setup the software from the provided disc which was painless. I then ran through the configuration assistant that helps with getting you started. It’s not the most intuitive software of all time, or the prettiest, but once you’ve worked out what some of the jargon means, anyone with more than 50 posts on Bit Tech should be ok. The software allows you to label the various sensors. I labelled my two Digital sensors ‘Reservoir’ and ‘VRM’ and my two analogue inline water sensors ‘Before’ and ‘After’. It then allows you to assign control of either one, some, or all of the fan outputs to any of the available sensors. This is called ‘Configuration of sensor assignment’ in the manual I assigned control of all 3 fan outputs to ‘After’ (remember the 4th output is assigned to my pump). This means that all 8 system fans will react to changes in the temperature of the water flowing out of my CPU>GPU>GPU Next, the software allows you to go define on what cues and how you want the fans to react. By this I mean selecting from different modes that allow the fans to ramp up and down and by how much. In the manual this is called ‘Configuration of Operation Modes’. Of course, Manual is an option, and in a similar way to Speedfan, you can turn them up or down by rotating a dial with your mouse. However, the most useful mode here for watercoolers with a similar sensor setup to me (ie: inline sensors) is the Response Curve. This is the same one Wyx uses for his air cooled setup, except his sensors are placed in the CPU and GPU heatsinks. The Response Curve allows you to exactly define what speed you want the individual fan outputs to run at, at varying temperatures. The below picture (taken from the manual, not my setup) may help you visualise what I am describing In my case, I wanted silence at idle, and massive levels of cooling under load. As such I had to first find out what my idle temp with minimal noise was. I turned off all fans except the dual front 140MM intakes which I set to 33% speed to push air over the front 240mm rad. At this level, they are utterly silent and the only noise being emitted came from my pump running at full speed (more on that shortly) In this configuration, at room temperature, the idle temp measured by the analogue probe named ‘After’ is about 33C, by which I mean, the water in my loop is usually about 33C on average upon exiting my CPU>GPU>GPU. I then set all the fans at 75% and ran Prime 95 and Furmark in order to: A) Simulate a heavy load scenario B) Measure the effect of a CPU/GPU workload on the water temperature, and monitored the increase. C) Find a fan sound level that I would be happy with at load After 12 minutes of stress testing, and some adjustment to the speed of my fans (down to 70%) my water temperature had climbed to 44C. As an aside, my CPU climbed to around 56C and my GPU’s around 65C. From the above I now know: • My idle water temperature • The number of fans required to maintain this temperature and silence • The speed of fans required to maintain this temperature and silence • My load water temperature • The number of fans required to maintain this • The speed of fans required to maintain this Of course with the above there is capacity to go lower or higher. I could for example have lowered the fan speeds to 25%, but they were already silent so why bother compromise their cooling ability. Similarly I could have gone higher but having GTX 480’s at 65C under Furmark is already amazing so why bother adding extra noise. I then dialled in the required speeds and temperatures into the software to create my response curve (which, by the way, you can export and import). This is my current setup From this you can see that at temperatures below 35C (including idle), the only fans running are my front 140mm intakes. This allows me to run a silent system at idle, and allows a small amount (approximately 2C) of flexibility for light use loads such as watching a video or browsing the net, or for warmer days. Then, under loads such as playing a game, the fans will spin up as the temperature raises, with the 120mm radiator fans kicking in first (at 40C) and then the 140mm rear and bottom intakes kicking in if really needed (at 40C). I found that in games, my temps do not approach those that presented themselves in my stress testing, as they are not constantly under 100% load, and my GPU maxes out at about 50C in BF3. Finally, we now need to remove the one remaining source of noise in any watercooling setup – the pump. I’m using a reservoir/pump combo – the Swiftech MCP355 and an XSPC dual 5.25” bay reservoir for One Laing DDC. At its default setting of 12V this is by far the noisiest component in my system now. To control the pump, you need an 4 Pin Molex to 3 pin fan adaptor (not included with BigNG). I got my from Yoyotech for a little over £2. It’s worth reiterating at this point that the maximum output of the BigNG is 80w, so don’t go adding 15 fans to each output header and a huge 18W pump or you may just overheat it – It gets fairly hot even with my setup (maybe I should add it to my loop!) Controlling the pump is done in the exact same way as the fans. Specify the sensor you want the output to read (of course, I used my ‘After’sensor, and in this case, the output is the pump instead of fans), specify the temperature, then specify the speed. You can monitor the exact number of volts being sent to the pump in the ‘output channel details’ box I’ve labelled in the Response Curve picture above. Using manual control, I lowered mine to 70% output to begin with. At 70% the pump emitted less overall noise, but more of a high pitched whine, and I lowered it further, to 50% or around 5.5V. At this level, the pump was hardly audible and the change in idle temperature was undetectable. Using 50% as a baseline I set the pump to increase to 75% load at 38C and 100% load past 42C. My pump speed would react to increases in temperature and work in tandem with my fans to lower temperatures to acceptable levels again. Now everything is set up to your liking, you no longer have to do anything. Once the settings are saved the BigNG no longer needs any user interaction, and can even be disconnected from the motherboard (I’m leaving mine connected so I can use the software to monitor temps whenever I like). As Wyx previously highlighted, this is a fantastic product. There are many, many more features such as monitoring flow rate, LED/CCFL controls, overheat sensor alarms etc, that I haven’t even touched on. And despite the ropey looking software, for watercooling enthusiasts, the £55 asking price is a snip for real time and independent control of your entire PCs cooling system. Parge
fantastic review. edited so it's linked back from my thread as well isn't it amazing to see your computer do all the work? it's the ultimate set and forget solution. i did a windows reinstall, and actually has not launched the control program. how hot does it get? i guess you've got quite a few fans connected. where is yours situated? does it have airflow over it?
Wahey! Hope its useful for some of you. There really is a dearth of info on this brilliant piece of hardware. @Wyx. Mine runs hot to the touch, I don't have any airflow over it, but its facing outwards near the top of my case so doesn't get warmed up by anything else either.
Brilliant! I just bought a zalman ZM MFC2 off the market place, but only for it's looks as a display with the intention of controlling everything through something else. And i think i just found my something else Can it also control LEDs?
Yes it can indeed! Though I haven't used that function. As I understand it you wire up your lights to any of the 4 outputs then control them using the software.
Interesting but the figures don't seem to stack up. Assuming I've read the water temps correctly and making the assumption that your ambient is around 24ºC that means your load air/water delta is 20ºC (which is pretty poor). However your load temps on the overclocked CPU are 56ºC. That means if you were to add more rads and get your loaded water temps down to about 5ºC above ambient your loaded CPU temps would be around 40ºC. With a couple of 480's in the loop that looks unrealistic.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying the loaded CPU temp looks a bit low? If so, that's likely because before arriving at the CPU, the water travels through both rads.
It's not likely to make more than a couple of degrees difference. Providing you have sufficient rad then it will reach equilibrium after a short time. What are the temps like after a couple of hours of Prime and Furmark?
Is that right? I would have thought the temps after the rads would be significantly different to those going in. That might explain why I'm getting rather high idle temps on my CPU. I haven't actually measured them loaded for that period of time. I've got a few things to do this weekend so after I've completed them, I'll run a nice big load test.
When you do it I'd suggest you don't leave it unattended. I'll be interested in the results. I was thinking about a BigNG myself so your experience has persuaded me it might be worth looking at again. I tend to have my fans and pumps set to the slowest speed most of the time and have the pumps ramp up to higher speeds via PWM under load but use fan controllers for the fans and they tend to be either as slow as possible or full speed with nothing in between. However because I only see a 4ºC difference between slow and full they tend to stay on slow speed.
