Which Watercooling Parts Should I Use?

[TheCookieGuru]

What's up folks?

 

I've always wanted to watercool my setup, but it has always been too expensive. I have dual EVGA GTX 970 FTWs and an i5 4690k. The CPU runs at 4.3GHz on a Thermaltake Water 3.0 240mm AIO, and gets pretty close to thermal throttling when under full load. My GPUs are both overclocked with +70MHz on both the cores and +400MHz on both the card's memory. I didn't see any artifacting at all, so I'd like to push it more, but I only have the stock cooler and I don't particularly want to go past 80 degrees Celsius on both the GPUs. Those are the temps I get in Heaven Valley. I can't run them both it seems as I was a retard and bought a motherboard that had one 16x PCIe slot and one 4x PCI slot, so my SLI runs at 16x/4x (at least that is what the BIOS tells me). Oh yes, and my RAM (Patriot Viper V3 1866) is running at 2000MHz. 

 

So now I have told you the clocks and the temps, and would like to know from YOU, the amazing LTT community, what is the best option for watercooling my PC? I want really low temps, and I would like to know how much radiator real estate I need, which fans I should go for, which reservoir, should I cool the motherboard, which GPU waterblock should I get, which CPU waterblock should I get?  I'd like to try to push my CPU and GPU further and get higher and higher clocks from them. 

 

The case will be made by me, with aluminium sheets, as well as nuts and bolts. The reason I'll do this is so I can make it perfectly tailored to my needs, as so it can fit the exact parts that I want in it.

 

I've done a bit of my own research, and found some things I like:

 

CPU Waterblock: XSPC Raystorm ($52.99 @ Amazon.com)

GPU Waterblock(s): EK-FC970 GTX ACX - Nickel ($254.98 for two of them @ EKWB)

Tubing: PremoChill PremoFlex Advanced LRT Crystal Clear ($25.95 @ Amazon.com)

Fittings: ???

Reservoir: Was looking at the Phobya Balancer 150/270 in Black Nickel ($33.99/$58.98 @ Amazon) Going with a pump/res combo

Pump: XSPC D5 Photon 170 Pump/Res Combo ($169.99 @ Amazon.com)

Rads: ??? Maybe triple 240s

 

This is already costing me a lot without even knowing the rad setup.

 

One last, very essential thing. I want this build to be as compact a possible, like the Parvum Veer. Well, as small as possible, that can fit my radiator setup, that will keep my CPU and GPUs very cool. In fact, I'd even sacrifice a few degrees in order to keep the form factor down. I'm going to be using the mATX form factor.

 

So in conclusion, I want to know: what watercooling components should I use? Should I wait for Skylake and get that? Will the price of these parts go down when Skylake is released? 

 

Thanks in advance to any replies and help.

[W-L]

-SNIP-

 

Everything looks pretty good as for the res/pump I would go with a D5 unit they are pretty much the gold standard in terms of watercooling pumps. Also note your using nickel blocks so silver kill coils have the possibility of causing issue if your going distilled so a biocide like PT nuke would be a good choice.

 

As for waiting for the next generation or going at it now I would say go now and water cool it since your doing soft tube you can do a motherboard and CPU swap during a maintenance run at that point or carefully upgrade without disassembling it all if your very careful.

[TheCookieGuru]

Everything looks pretty good as for the res/pump I would go with a D5 unit they are pretty much the gold standard in terms of watercooling pumps. Also note your using nickel blocks so silver kill coils have the possibility of causing issue if your going distilled so a biocide like PT nuke would be a good choice.

 

As for waiting for the next generation or going at it now I would say go now and water cool it since your doing soft tube you can do a motherboard and CPU swap during a maintenance run at that point or carefully upgrade without disassembling it all if your very careful.

Thanks, so you are saying that I should go with a separate pump an res? I guess it will be cheaper... 

 

What fittings should I use? I want a balance between price and reliability.

And would triple 240s be good for a system like this? Could the CPU take a 140 at this clock, or would that be pushing the limit?

[W-L]

Thanks, so you are saying that I should go with a separate pump an res? I guess it will be cheaper... 

 

It mainly depends on what you like and the amount of space you have, I personally have a pump res combo due to space and looks.

 

A separate pump with a short length of soft tube is good however for better vibration dampening from the pump and mounting, cost wise that really depends on your local pricing.