Triple build and upgrade with a whole lot of watercooling

[fabafaba]

This is less of a buildlog and more like an upgrade-log, covering upgrades to my own PC, my brothers PC and a build of a homeserver. I'm making this as one buildlog because all three systems will be related to each other with parts moving from one to another.

 

Step number the first: Planning an upgrade to my water loop.

 

The story so far, about as short as possible: Built a PC with an EK Fluid Gaming loop, upgraded to EK copper and then to even more copper. You can check it out here.

I am however not too happy with my DDC pump, as it doesn't move a whole lot of water. I have two water temperature sensors in my loop, one on the inlet of the radiator right behind the blocks and one one the outlet of the rad before the blocks, allowing me to measure the water temperature difference over the blocks/rads. While gaming on a 1080Ti and a i7 6850K I was seeing a rise in temperature of 5-6°C. At first I thought that was normal, but after hearing and reading that loop order supposedly doesn't matter, I started to wonder. If I'm looking at a 6°C delta, loop order really should matter, with a rad between the CPU and GPU allowing for a couple degree lower temps on the second component in the loop. So I reactivated my physics skills from school, fired up hwinfo64, prime95 and Furmark to load my system up and check the powerdraw of my CPU and GPU in order to calculate the flowrate. 300W GPU and 130W CPU with a 6.5°C delta.

In case you have a similar setup and would like to know your flowrate without a dedicated sensor, here's the math and science behind it:

Spoiler

 A Watt is also 1J/s, so by looking at how many Joules we pump into the water every second and how many Joules it takes to heat up the water by a certain amount, we can determine how much water is being heated up.

PC coolants usually use a water-glycol mixture, but beacause I couldn't be bothered to find out the glycol concentration in my coolant, I just went for the specific heat capacity water. Pure water has a higher specific heat capacity than water-glycol mixtures, and this can help to account for the heat that's dissipated into the surrounding air instead of the water loop, I guess.

The specific heat capacity for water is 4.19kJ/(kgK). This means that it takes 4.19kJ to heat up 1kg of water by 1Kelvin or 1°C. The energy that's put into my water is 430J/s or 0.43kJ/s, and the water heats up by 6.5K.

4.19kJ/(kg K) * 6.5K = 27.24(kJ K)/(kg K) =  27.24(kJ K)/(kg K) =  27.24kJ/kg

27.24kj/kg / 0.43kJ/s = 63.35(kJ s)/(kg kJ) = 63.35(kJ s)/(kg kJ) = 63.35s/kg

1 / 63.35s/kg = 0.016kg/s

0.016kg/s is technically what we were looking for, but in practical terms, it's useless.

0.016kg/s * 3600s/h * 1kg/l = 57.6l/h

 

Edit: I just checked the safety data sheet from Mayhem's, turns out my coolant has a 10% glycol concentration. From what I could find online, the specific heat capacity for a 10% mix is approximately 4.1 instead of the 4.19 for pure water, resulting in a flowrate of 58.1l/h instead. The actual flowrate is propably still different, but for lower errors we strive

I came to a flowrate of approximately 57.6l/h with the pump running at full oomph, the consensus online for a good flowrate seems to be 100-150l/h. Well, crap.

My first thought was to throw another DDC somewhere in the loop and started to do some work in CAD to figure out a fit. The only space I had to put it was within the footprint occupied by my current reservoir, and I came up with a quite half-assed solution. Stacking two DDC pumps, just putting them right above each other. It looked pretty interesting, but would be hard, if not impossible, to properly mount to the case, the fans or the radiators with commonly available mounting hardware.

 

 

But D5 pumps exist for a reason, so D5 it will be. Finding a D5 pump-reservoir combo that fits just perfectly without too much free room above and below that also isn't as horribly wide as the Eisbecher (80mm squared for the pump top with a 60mm tube, really not looking that nice)  was harder than I expected, but the Watecool Heatkiller Tube 150 D5 should fit just right. So, back into CAD, modelling up a new case model, with more accurate measurements this time, and voilá, looking much better. I'm digging the look of the cross-over on the in- and outlets of the pumptop with the 90° fittings.

 

 

All that's left to do now is figuring out a place for a fill port where it actually fits, I'm thinking about the back port of the top radiator, which would be the highest point in the loop when I turn the case on its front. I'm not sure however how well the air will bleed out of the reservoir. Maybe I'll dive a little into fluid dynamics simulations to see if I can find out what would happen.

 

 

For now all I can do is decide on some parts, order them and wait for them to arrive, but once they do, I'll update this buildlog. After that, there will be the watercooling of my brothers PC. Now that he left his XBox alone, it's time to get him into the expensive hobby of water cooling .

Edited October 16, 2019 by fabafaba
Added some info to the math and science section

[Cereal5]

I love custom work and this looks really cool! Side note - putting two DDC pumps in series will not increase the flow rate, only the max head pressure.

[fabafaba]

58 minutes ago, Cereal5 said:

I love custom work and this looks really cool! Side note - putting two DDC pumps in series will not increase the flow rate, only the max head pressure.

Thanks! Yeah, I learned that too when I asked about an off the shelf solution for what I tried with this. When I started work on a way to run the pumps in parallel in this stacked configuration, I found out that the in- and outlets for the pumptops I had in mind were to close together and I couldn't make it work in a simple way without the parts interfering, so I scrapped that idea. I still have the model from that try, so I just made a quick render of that.

I might have been able to make this work with 12mm tubing and fittings between the pumps for a parallel multi-GPU look, but finding 90° and T-fittings that share the same dimensions and also match the EKWB nickel-finish must be a nightmare.

[fabafaba]

Quick update: I'm either too stupid to read measurements of calipers or do simple maths, or some of the dimesnions/CAD models I found online were incorrect because the Heatkiller 150 is just a few mm too tall. So I had to return it and now I'm waiting for the Heatkiller 100. I'm also kind of a cheapass, I simplified the mess of 90° fittings and will replace them with more bends to save some money and to reduce the flow restrictions by making the turns a little smoother.

[fabafaba]

Let's get to replacing the DDC pump with a D5 in my rig. Quick spoiler in the beginning: my flowrate is even worse than what it was before, I guess dual loops exist for a reason. And that will be the next big thing to do next year. On the plus side, the D5 is quieter at 4500rpm than the DDC was at 3000, and the reservoir looks a whole lot better.

 

So let's start by draining the loop, trying to remember in which order I mounted everything around the pump so as to not wreck the seals in the fittings while removing it again.

 

And.... success, the pump is out without any problems. Also, the Watercool Heatkiller Tube has to be the pinnacle of German engineering and machining, this thing wheighs a ton, is built like a tank, all tolerances are neither tot loose nor too tight and everything fits perfectly. The surface finish is a dream, the threads are cut just right, I could go on and on about it. Just look at it! The pump in there is an Alphacool VPP755 Rev. 3.

 

After doing some testfitting and planning the tubeing runs, I realized that what I had in mind would be a giant paint in the ass to bend, especially with the 24, 8 and 6 pin cables being quite close to the res. Putting the tubes in would also be nearly impossible, so I decided to keep it close to my original layout.

The stack of fittings the between the pump and the lower radiator didn't quite fit and tended to leak when it was off by just a fraction of a millimeter and was replaced by a simple offset bend tube.

 

Some more preassure testing, in the mean time I made a quick Molex Cable for the pump, having ATX-connectors and crimps is always great if you need a specific cable. After a final preassure test while I was at university, I started filling the loop and was basically done.

 

Because I have reached the 20MB max and I still have to cover water cooling my brothers PC, this post ends here.

[fabafaba]

My brother and I built his PC like three months ago, here's the specs:

Gigabyte Aorus B450I

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X

EVGA RTX 2070 Gaming Black

16GB G-Skill TridentZ RGB

1TB Intel 660p NVMe SSD

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo Black Edition

Corsair ML120 and 140 Fans

Seasonic M12II Evo 520W PSU

Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ITX TG

 

Because the 2600X really doesn't need all that much cooling and the 212 was more than sufficient,custom water cooling was really unnecessary. But I already had all of the parts lying around and building a loop is always fun, we decided to take his PC to the next level.

 

Here it is in its air cooled before state. While being a pretty clean build, the RAM makes it impossible to mount the CPU fan to the front of the cooler, which in turn makes it really hard to put in an exhaust fan resulting in an suboptimal airflow. After replacing the aircooler with a water block, things are looking much better.

 

 

Unfortunately the reservoir didn't quite fit in between the GPU and the front intake fans, so we had to mout it horizontally to a fan bracket. After that, it was just a matter of cutting the tubes to length, testing and filling the loop, and making the cable management even neater.

 

Temperatures didn't improve, but that's because we could now turn down the fans to the absolute minimum, making the system inaudible from more than a foot away for everything that's not loading up the GPU. GPU clock speeds also improved because there's  just more airflow now and the GPU can boost higher before reaching 75-80°C.

And please excuse the horrible image quality, all pictures were taken with my phone and usually with either bad lighting in my room or the sun coming in from the front. The next post will have some nice shots of both PCs.

[fabafaba]

So here's the good pictures, little PC for the little brother, bigger PC for me . My favourite thing about the two is how close the cases match in color and the fans are identical, making kind of a theme for systems in our house.

 

 

And here's a little peak at what's about to become my server. Right now it's just a Define R5 with casters instead of the regular feet, four hard drives and a CPU cooler, but it will get my current CPU and motherboard once I upgrade them later this or early next year. It will become a NAS, a Jupyter Notebook host and maybe a game and TeamSpeak or Mattermost server.

 

[fabafaba]

On 10/25/2019 at 5:30 PM, fabafaba said:

I guess dual loops exist for a reason. And that will be the next big thing to do next year.

I've been thinking about how to do a dual loop in an O11 with three radiators and tinkered around in CAD. I came up with these loops, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions on how I could improve it.

 

 

The GPU loop isn't planned fully yet, but the bottom radiator will be connected to the pump and the side radiator once I get around to modelling the tubes for that. Oh, and here's a revolving view of the whole thing:

 

[fabafaba]

So, after months of not a lot happening, things are starting to move again. Yesterday I received some stuff from EKWB and over the next couple days I should get the rest of my hardware. What hardware?

I was thinking about going TRX40 when there was nothing but rumors about the 3000 series Threadripper chips, and when they finally arrived and the prices where final, I quickly noped outta' there. Instead I'll replace my long suffering 6850K with a 3900X and my 1080Ti will get a twin for that sweet, sweet CUDA performance. To top things off, I 3D printed a custom replacement for my O11 dynamics front glass panel and will use that to finally stuff two sepeprate water loops in the case, finally putting an end to my journey of trying to fill every last qubic inch with hardware. Keep your eyes peeled, because I will actually try to document my build this time, instead of just taking some before and after pics and calling it a day.

[fabafaba]

Alrighty, today I built the CPU loop as I'm still waiting for the second 1080Ti to arrive. Let's start of with all the hardare and what's new:

• CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X (new, superceeds an i7 6850K)
• MoBo: AsRoch X470 Taichi (new superceeds a MSI X99A SLI Plus)
• RAM: 4x8GB HyperX Fury (old)
• GPU: 2x GTX 1080Ti (one old, one new)
• PSU: Corsair RM100x (new, superceeds a Seasonic M12II 850W)
• Drives: Samsung 970 Evo M.2, Crucial MX300, Kingston A400, 4x2TB SSeagate IronWolf (all old)

The watercooling is mostly stuff I already had, except for a second pump-res-combo, a second GPU block and a monoblock for the Taichi.

And oh boy do these chips look sexy

Time for a quick test, and everything seems to work just fine:

After confirming that everything works I started by tidying up my fan wireing and mounted the components in the case.

To mount the two reservoirs in the front, I 3d printed a new frontplate that's mounted to the case with the same mounting points as the glass one, as well as some duble sided tape to take out the sag caused by the Heatkillers heavy glass tubes. I also printed some plates to cover up the radiator mount on the side and some brackets to mount up to 8 2.5" drives in the back of the case.

The CPU loop uses the top mounted 360x60mm radiator and the front reservoir and is connected by tubes with two bends each and a short straight tube, making for a clean loop. The coolant is just over 1L of EKs CryoFuel Solid in Cloud White. 

With the CPU and RAM at stock and about 30°C for the water the 3900X reached a maximum of 77°C in a CinebenchR20 run and absolutely smoked my 6850K with 6888 vs 2888 points. Once I've installed the second GPU and did some overclocking I'll post again, see you next time!

 

[cluelessgenius]

sorry i didnt read the whole log yet but did you not end up up using  3 rads or did you just hide the rear one very well?

anyway i wanted to welcome you to the "Full O11" club  nicely done. myself i went i tiny bit thicker on the rads but then again my build quality is a bit nmore messy  

[fabafaba]

On 2/3/2020 at 10:41 AM, cluelessgenius said:

sorry i didnt read the whole log yet but did you not end up up using  3 rads or did you just hide the rear one very well?

Well, I kinda ran out of space for my second 60mm radiator, so I had to mount it externally under my desk. The sode mount still has space for a 45, but since I don't already have one, i just covered the hole with the printed plates. And a quick update on the OC'ing: Holy friggin' crap! On X99 the fastest I got out of my HyperX Fury (2133 stock, the cheapest 32GB kit at the time) was 2800 at 1.2V and nothing more, not even hat higher volateges. On X470 I pushed that kit to 3200-16-18-18-35 at 1.35. My new TimeSpy score is 11190, an almost 1300 point difference. 

[cluelessgenius]

14 hours ago, fabafaba said:

Well, I kinda ran out of space for my second 60mm radiator, so I had to mount it externally under my desk. The sode mount still has space for a 45, but since I don't already have one, i just covered the hole with the printed plates. 

Well i managed to do it so...

 

[fabafaba]

5 hours ago, cluelessgenius said:

Well i managed to do it so...

Well I'll run SLI, so... 

With two GPUs and triple slot spacing there's just barely enough room for a 30mm radiator in the bottom. With two slot spacing and a motherboard that has a pcie slot at the absolute top I could have fit the 60mm in the bottom, but the only X470/X570 board with that slot arrangement is the MSI MEG X570 Godlike and that one was too expensive.

[cluelessgenius]

3 minutes ago, fabafaba said:

Well I'll run SLI, so... 

With two GPUs and triple slot spacing there's just barely enough room for a 30mm radiator in the bottom. With two slot spacing and a motherboard that has a pcie slot at the absolute top I could have fit the 60mm in the bottom, but the only X470/X570 board with that slot arrangement is the MSI MEG X570 Godlike and that one was too expensive.

 

ohhh ok i get it...well thats different then. alright still very nice though