Hi all I've water cooling my PCs for 10 years and have been using the same Laing D5 pump and alloy tube type reservoir, two 240 double rads, 1 single 120 rad and MCT-5 coolant, and every new build has had new CPU and GPU blocks accordingly. My current setup is Core i5-3570K @5.0 without IHS and a GTX580 @ 951core - 2178mem I have always used one loop and while gaming with BF4 with ambient of 22d I get max coolant temps of 32d, CPU of 68,75,68,78 and GPU of 49, Im due for a service as the MCT-5 is much older than it should be and I would like to flush the rads! So I was planning to do the job but I had read a pc review with dual loops and the reviewer said the two separate reduce the temps over a single loop. Has anyone found this to be true is there a big benefit from running dual loops or are we talking 1 or 2 degrees Thanks for your help... P.s I'm aware that post could have been a lot shorter sorry
I think it would depend on a number of factors. Comparing the size of the reservoir for starters, it is likely the 2 reservoirs would hold more volume then a single reservoir system. Similarly with the power of the pump.
There's an overview here but the images are long gone. However it's all in the 'Dual Loop versus Single, the facts' white paper. Providing you have sufficient rad space and you're not folding then a single loop makes best use of the cooling components.
For a basic set up like yours a single loop is plenty. Adding a rad between the CPU and GPU would pretty much have the same affect as running dual loops
I build dual loops for aesthetic reasons or for two or more gpu's if there is more than just the CPU on the board, (I even built a quad-loop once), even then it's not necessary, as long as your pump is man-enough and you have sufficient rad real-estate you'll be good. Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
This. Single loop means you are getting best performance from the heat exchangers all of the time,dual loop is for Multi CPU with Multi GPU configs predominantly
