Cooling One pump for two loops, would it work?

I'm new to watercooling but I was curious about how it works (as far as I can tell it's a bit like an electric circuit. Anyway, my ponderingment was whether it was feasible to cool two loops with just one pump. I did a rough drawing in paint, green is the tubing with Y connectors where it splits and meets again.



So how would this affect performance, would it even work at all? Should different tube sizes be used?

 

You'd need an extremely powerful pump (by w/c standards) for it to work... and the tubes would have to halve in diameter for the CPU and GPU split (and double back up afterwards)

stick with 2 pumps and 2 rads, it makes life so much easier

 

I don't see why it shouldn't work... if your CPU and GPU blocks are similar in size and performance.

though to take the pressure off things, I'd place a res just before a split and have 1/2" where its single channel and 3/8" where it's two channel (if you get what I mean)

EDIT: and you need a powerful pump

 

You could do it, but I would personally say that just a single loop would work better. As modgodtanvir said above, you would need a powerful pump.

 

I wasn't going to attempt it, just wanted to know whether it was do-able.

Another thing I just thought of now is what would happen if you just had your GPU blocks in parallel rather than series?

 

Ehiem 1250 would cope fine with this. Its not that big a deal, just a split loop.

 

I think my worry would be that all the flow would go around the gpu side of the loop and leave the CPU side boiling in it's own juices or vice versa. Just like an electrical circuit the flow will take the route of least resistance, you just cannot guarantee that the two halves would be in perfect balance.

 

The water temperature throughout a single system should largely equalize over time no matter how complicated you make it. Splitting it all up will just create significant extra headaches for no advantage and if the disparity in flow between the two blocks got too big you could end up with one component getting too hot due to reduced flow through it's block.

You could stop that from being a problem with a powerfull enough pump, but it would only be a bandaid solution and not addressing the cause, not to mention that if you have a powerfull enough pump and good enough radiator, there shouldn't be any problem running them in serial anyway.

 

It's not really 2 loops if they meet


but yes it would work