Cooling Radiators without fans

[Telefonskaft]

Hello

I'm sketching on a build for my school project, and I'm wondering how many radiators (240) under 5 cm in height that's needed to cool one stock GTX680 and one 4GHz OC'ed 3770K, as the title says it's without fans, so if anyone knows the math for this or just know it's impossible could you please tell me?

Would really appreciate if someone could tell me this!

[Nexxo]

The total heat you are trying to get rid of is 195+77=272 Watts.

The problem with fan radiators is that they don't work so well as passive radiators --that is not how they are designed. You will get better performance with a passive setup like Alphacool's Cape Cora radiator modules. I recon you'll need about 15 of these.

[Telefonskaft]

Originally Posted by Nexxo

The total heat you are trying to get rid of is 195+77=272 Watts.

The problem with fan radiators is that they don't work so well as passive radiators --that is not how they are designed. You will get better performance with a passive setup like Alphacool's Cape Cora radiator modules. I recon you'll need about 15 of these.

Damn that's alot of pipes and space, the project I'm working on is quite small... So in your opinion do you think that if I use thinner rads and some really low RPM Schythe slim fans and run them in 800 RPM or hopefully lower and that would work with two Alphacool NexXxoS XT45 240mm?

Because when I look at it 12 mm extra thickness isn't really that much.

[Nexxo]

Tricky. It's more about how many CFM those fans displace. Would have to be at least 50-60CFM.

[Telefonskaft]

Originally Posted by Nexxo

Tricky. It's more about how many CFM those fans displace. Would have to be at least 50-60CFM.

For each fan or all the fans together?

[IvanIvanovich]

It depends most on what temps you can find acceptable. If you don't mind running hot and just want the quiet it's possible to run passive. I did on one of my old system with athlon x4 and hd4850. It ran warm, like bad air cooler temps, but still within operational limit. I only had one 240 black ice on there. Sure it would have been better with a larger rad, but I ended up adding fan when I rebuilt the system and dropped temp 20c. Makes a very big difference.

[ferret141]

I think each.

[Telefonskaft]

Originally Posted by ferret141

I think each.

Are you sure?

Because I read something about this radiator that said that it would work better than normal rads with low RPM fans.

[Nexxo]

For illustration: I cool 240 Watts on a single Black Ice Xtreme with a 69CFM fan which spins at about 1700RPM. The Black Ice SR1 does quite well with 800RPM fans. So thinking about it you could probably get away with a 240 radiator and two 800RPM fans.

[Telefonskaft]

Originally Posted by Nexxo

For illustration: I cool 240 Watts on a single Black Ice Xtreme with a 69CFM fan which spins at about 1700RPM. The Black Ice SR1 does quite well with 800RPM fans. So thinking about it you could probably get away with a 240 radiator and two 800RPM fans.

Great, now I can continue in Solid! Thank you for all your help and advise.