Hey, I haven't posted here in a while as I moved countries a few times and I've been using a laptop. The laptop has good specs but it likes to bake TIM and kill fans. I will finally upgrade to a desktop once the 9800x3d comes out (November 7th), though I'm not sure if it will be on an AMD or Intel platform. I will be building in some form of the LianLi O11, probably either an evo RGB or evo XL. I will go air cooling unit the RXT 5080 drops a few months later and will switch to a full hardline multi-radiator build. I've heard that it's easy and affordable to hire someone build the loop at my home which will allow me to watch and ask questions (and save me a lot of trouble). I want to start doing research now so that I can plan my loop and pick the right case and fans. I will be using Barrow and/or Byski water cooling parts, as they are significantly cheaper than other brands. What are some good sources of information and are there any sites or tools for planning a loop with different cases and hardware? Who has the best link fan system currently, I've seen a lot of new products coming out, are LianLi uni fans still the best?. would 2x 360mm or 2x 420mm be enough for a 9800x3d and a 5080? I could go with 2x radiator and a distro plate or 3x radiator. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Hard to offer suggestions on cooling components that haven't been released yet, but two large rads should be enough to cool anything effectively. The 5080 rumoured specs make it a monster, regardless of generational power efficiency improvements and the rumour on the flipped 3D cache placement for the new X3D chips suggests cooling them should be easier.
True enough, hopefully we will get some 5080 leaks soon. I'm thinking a 420mm on the top and bottom with a distro plate in the back should look nice and cool well. The evo RGB would only fit 2x360 rads with a distro plate and I'm not sure if that would be sufficient. It's a bit complicated thinking about radiators and airflow at the same time. The distro plate will look nice but will block off the use of 3 fans.
I have never heard of a service where someone comes to you to build your loop. Sounds to me like a service to be willingly robbed. Be VERY careful. Depending on location there might be members here that could come help for a bacon butty and free tea/coffee refills. Case Any O11 would make a good choice. There's plenty of variety that don't come with any fans to cut cost if you're going to get fans separate. If you're planning on going the distro plate route there's plenty to choose from designed for the 011 series Rads 2 360's would be completely sufficient. If you wanted to go for the smaller O11 Fans By link fans do you mean just ones that clip together or ones like the Corsair link series where they can be clipped together and then 2 sets that daisy chain with a single cable? Do you want RGB fans or are you not bothered? Could get non RGB fans then some led strips for lighting instead. Be warned that the corsair link fans and Lian li equivalent are really expensive, you're looking at £200 for fans minimum, but are the best in terms of simplicity of connectivity. If you want RGB fans and you're going to have one rad on top and one on bottom, these Thermaltake SWAFAN EX12 fans would do the trick, as they come with another set of blades to reverse the direction of airflow, so both sets can have the pretty side facing into the case. Alternatives would be these NZXT ones that come as a solid 360mm unit. Or these seasonic magflow non-rgb ones that are currently massively reduced. If you're after a budget option these Thermalright TL-C12C-S X3 fans are £13 for a 3 pack, so £26 total, both the pwm and RGB wires are daisy chainable and genuinely really good fans. Used them in several builds, including a fully watercooled rig with 5800x and 3090 running on a 360 and a 240 with them barely breaking a sweat. Our very own @LennyRhys has an excellent series of videos comparing fan performance, showing them to be one of the best fans on test Watercooling Gear Nothing wrong with the barrow and bykski stuff. I've used the barrow fittings loads and really good value. block performance is pretty much on par with the more expensive brands, maybe up to 1-3C warmer in tests, but that's the kind of margin you can get from how well you've got them mounted and not something that you'd notice Planning The only king of software specifically for this is the pc building simulator , but will cost you £15. Alternatives would be something like SketchUp for 3d or just ms paint/paint.net. Paste in pics of all the gear and start drawing lines. I've even used word before: And there's always pen and paper. If you're going the O11 distro route, you can have a Google of pics for ideas too.
Oh... hey... That... err... that case looks familiar.... Nice to see what madness you originally had in store for it though .
I still have the one I'd started modding that's depicted in the SketchUp drawing. When I eventually get my old rig back off my brother in law, will hopefully get round to finishing it, but shrinking it somewhat.
I'm in Beijing, we have services for everything. There is an app, and you select what you want, install lights, AC, TV mounted etc. It has loads of options, and they belong to a company. Typically, hiring someone is much cheaper than the cost of the tools. I will ask a local friend to help me arrange it and they will perform the work in front of me. If I was still in London I would look for someone on the forum as you suggested. Radiator: You think with the trend of GPUs that 2x360 will be enough for the GPU and CPU without excessive fan noise? I hear d that the 5080 could be 400w. Fans: Yes, I mean the link fans, and I want RGB but don't need screens or holograms. I don't mind paying the higher cost to cut the cable mess as long as the fans perform well and the system can easily link and control at least 7 fans. I saw a video about the iCure QX120 saying that the surface area of the fan is restricted by poor design and as a result the performance is bad. I want to link all the fans on the case and the two radiators together. The NZXT fan is an interesting idea and I'm surprised nobody else has done this as selling 3-fan packs is so common. Thermaltake SWAFAN EX12 - these also look good. I want to invest in a good system that I can hopefully carry over to future builds. Good performance and decent looks. As I'm going with a custom hardline loop I'm not going to cut costs on the fans. Planning: I would pay for pc building simulator if it has all modern parts, otherwise it's not very useful for planning runs. I will look into SketchUp. Instead of using paint, I would recommend PowerPoint, I have a floor plan for my apartment and use PPT to make network diagrams as I can move and resize images and runs so it's much easier to make changes. Drawing... I'm really bad at drawing 3d. I ordered a custom trampoline, and the drawing looked terrible. I have a friend draw over a photo with his tablet instead.
Yeh I saw it said London in your profile, which caused the worry If it's a widely used service operator I'm sure you'll be fine. Back to the fanture part IV Checked out that fan review, I'm not doubting his results but his method of testing isn't realistic imho, as you'll never run the fans at max speeds. The thermaltake quadwhatever fans I have in my mod have horrifically thick frames, but still do a decent enough job despite them have to push through a rad that have louvres on the other side that will make their life even harder. Techpowerup do show them to be relatively poor performers when placed on a rad, but that's relatively. The reality is they're only a few CFM behind the leaders but then also one of the quietest. So then you think "well I guess it's a tradeoff between performance or noise", but it's not. When you plot noise Vs performance they all end up pretty much the same: And that's the ugly truth that no one in the review/tech journalism business would say, most fans/coolers/rads/whatever are absolutely fine. In day to day use you won't ever really see any real difference, especially when it comes to custom loops. The raijintek costume loop kit I reviewed had some of the nastiest cheapo fans I've ever seen, but they worked and worked really well. It's hard not to when you've a 360 rad and a litre of coolant to play with. Their are obviously exceptions when some products are just really really bad, or when people claim a product is crap, but they're using a 120mm aio on a 14900k which is obviously a mismatch of parts. But generally speaking whenever you decide on will undoubtedly be fine. I would decide what ecosystem you want to go with, from the look of the fans and the control software, other products you want to use and how they can connect into that system, and whatever choice you make will be absolutely fine. Rads Yeh 2x 360 will definitely be fine. I used to push 325w through my 970 to clock it at over 1500mhz and that was only on a 240 rad. I'd go for 40-45mm thick ones for both, or a 30mm in the floor and 60 in the roof depending whether you go vertical GPU mount and if vert which mount you go for. The official Lian li one can be set at 2 heights, one giving 50mm clearance at the bottom, the other 90mm, but the upper one might conflict with the CPU, which is where it's be worth checking out a few builds to see what others have done and what you can get away with. There are distros that replace or sit behind the front window, so you have the option to do that and have 3x 360 rads. Planning Things very rarely go exactly to plan, no matter how careful you measure, replace, or how fancy the software is, so keep that in mind. Especially with watercooling it's always a good idea to buy a few more angled adapters and some extra extensions and tube to overcome any unforeseen problems. It's incredibly annoying to get halfway through a build and find you need another fitting, or you cock up a bend and need more tubing and have to wait. There's a lot of watercooled builds in the video for pc building sim, so it should prove a useful tool. There should be a list somewhere of all the components it has in it, definitely saw a 011 in there.
O11 DYNAMIC EVO XL - (D) 522mm x (W) 304mm x (H) 531.9mm - Fits 420mm rads O11 DYNAMIC EVO RGB - (D) 478mm × (W) 290mm × (H) 471mm - Fits 360mm rads I have about 55cm of desk space if I put everything edge-to-edge. 1.6m desk with 32" monitor and Kali LP-UNF speakers. It would be a bit of work but I could replace the top of my desk with a 1.8m desk as the wall it's against is also 1.8m. I don't know how much of a difference 2x 420mm vs 2x 360mm is. @The_Crapman That's good to know about the fans, and I'm not too surprised if the top brands are neck and neck for performance. The engineering is so optimized that it's difficult to improve one area without losing in another. I want to know which system is better, easier to work with, easier to connect multiple groups of fans and has good software (if any). How much cooling performance would I lose if I went with 2x 360mm radiators vs 2x 420mm? Would I notice a difference between a distro plate DDC pump combo and a reservoir D5 combo?
Not worth changing your desk for. Oh something else that's key to watercooling that you'll need to confirm can be done in the fan software, is the fans should be controlled by the coolant temperature, not the CPU or GPU temps, so make sure you get a temp sensor fitting for somewhere in the loop and that the fan control software can be set by an external temp sensor. The fan controller might not have a temp sensor input, but most motherboards do. Once you have it built set the fans to about 1200rpm and run some heavy loads on GPU and CPU, like cinebench multi threaded (12 threads would be enough) and furmark (doesn't have to be loading the GPU completely, 95% is fine). That's gonna be a worse case scenario because you'll never be maxing both when gaming. Keep an eye on component temps to make sure that the block mounting is good, then watch the coolant temp rise, you want to keep the max coolant temp in this scenario to 40c. If it doesn't get to 40c drop the fan speeds till you get there, if it starts getting above 40c increase the fan speeds till it sticks to 40c and record that fan speed. When setting the fan curve, set the fan speed found above to 38c, then 40c to 100%. this will try and prevent any catastrophes for pumps dying or anything else really bad from causing any damage. The rest of the fan curve should tail off so you end up with an exponential looking curve down to their minimum fan speed.
If I had thought about it earlier I could have gotten speakers that are a bit larger and had more bass than the Kali LP-UNF. A new top for my desk is around 70 quid and would give me an extra 20cm in width.
It's a bit late, but here's an update! I left my computer at a shop for 2 days, and this is the result! I'm pretty happy with the bends and the lack of air bubbles for £50 plus the cost of fittings. I was searching for fittings and realised that one of the main sellers is located near me, and when asked, they said they do custom builds. This is my first custom loop, and I'm very happy with the aesthetics. I did notice that the CPU block is upside down, while annoying, I don't think it will affect performance. I've been a bit lazy/busy and haven't gotten the high flow 2 working; it's probably not connected properly because it's not detected by the Aquasuite software I swapped Corsair VENGEANCE RGB 2x32GB 6800 for G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 CL30 2x32GB as they weren't stable even at 600,0 and I was getting memory errors at boot. I've read that the high flow 2 is very restrictive. Will this have a noticeable negative impact on flow rate/performance?
Looks great! Just to give you a heads-up though, imgur is now blocking UK users, so anyone not using a VPN can’t see the image… IMG_6134 by Byron C posted 3 Oct 2025 at 10:13 I fired up a VPN to be able to see the imgur embed
[shrug] Still trying to figure that out myself. Other than the forum’s “albums”, I haven’t found anything that has the long-lived “staying power” and stability that imgur does.
You need to give permission for us to see it mate. I always find image posting more trouble that it really should be
Noice! Ooo I went for the alphacool core 1, but silver sans rgb. They're bloody hefty! I have used GPU block that didn't weigh as much! It being upside down might affect the performance a little, but not a tremendous deal, nothing worth tearing it down to fix. What you using for fan control? Ideally you want a temp sensor in the loop measuring coolant temp, and have the fan curves set against the coolant temp, not component temps.
