Troubleshooting hot liquid temps?

[reniat]

So I recently made my first custom loop, and while it looks AMAZING, I'm having a bit of trouble with temperatures. My 7700k is hitting mid 70s, and my 1080ti is hitting low-mid 50s, and my water temp is plateauing at around 40C (which is close to 20C above ambient!). This all feels incredibly hot, considering I have a 420mm radiator on top and a 360mm radiator on front, all with appropriately sized be quiet! silent wings 3 fans.

 

The only thing I can think of is maybe it's my be quiet! dark base pro 900 case, since it uses side vents instead of direct fan airflow? Though I haven't been able to find anyone talking about bad watercooling performance with this case. 

 

my loops specs:

EK-FB z270E monoblock

EK 1080ti Strix gpu waterblock + backplate

XSPC AX420 radiator (420mm)

EK coolstream-PE 360mm radiator

XSPC photon 270 V2 reservoir (no pump)

Primochill Laing pwm D5 pump

again, all with silent wings 3 fans.

 

I know the non-high RPM fans are not super great radiator fans, but any higher than their current RPM (I have them set at about 800-900) and they start to be more noise than i'd expect from a water loop with this much radiator space, especially without SLI gpus.

 

Could it be my airflow? I do notice some improvement when I open the front door of the case. If so, what can I do without buying a case like the corsair 900D? (I really like this case, so i'd like to make it work)

 

[W-L]

12 minutes ago, reniat said:

-SNIP-

 

Is the CPU overclocked heavily, if so that is not bad under load. If you want to check to see if it's due to case remove all the panels and filters to see what difference you get in terms of temps. 

[reniat]

13 minutes ago, W-L said:

Is the CPU overclocked heavily, if so that is not bad under load. If you want to check to see if it's due to case remove all the panels and filters to see what difference you get in terms of temps. 

It's not even overclocked
I originally had it at 5.0ghz and 1.34v, but it was touching 90C so i removed the OC entirely. Now, I do think my CPU temps specifically are due to a bad delid job. EVENTUALLY I might go back in and try again, but for now I don't want to toy with it. I'm more concerned with the gpu/water temps. I had read that a temperature delta of over 10C was kind of high, and since I thought that my loop was a bit overkill for 1 cpu 1 gpu a delta of 20C was something to be concerned about. 

[W-L]

25 minutes ago, reniat said:

It's not even overclocked
I originally had it at 5.0ghz and 1.34v, but it was touching 90C so i removed the OC entirely. Now, I do think my CPU temps specifically are due to a bad delid job. EVENTUALLY I might go back in and try again, but for now I don't want to toy with it. I'm more concerned with the gpu/water temps. I had read that a temperature delta of over 10C was kind of high, and since I thought that my loop was a bit overkill for 1 cpu 1 gpu a delta of 20C was something to be concerned about. 

Try seeing if it's an airflow problem first as that would be easiest to diagnose, for the CPU that is on the high side if it's not overclocked. Try remounting the CPU block afterwards to see if that solves the problem. 

[reniat]

6 minutes ago, W-L said:

Try seeing if it's an airflow problem first as that would be easiest to diagnose, for the CPU that is on the high side if it's not overclocked. Try remounting the CPU block afterwards to see if that solves the problem. 

I've remounted the cpu block a few times. I have noticed that it's never very well spread, so im wondering if maybe this monoblock doesn't QUITE reach where it should relative to the top of the IHS now that i've delidded (and removed the teeny tiny layer of silicon between the IHS and the pcb)

[W-L]

10 minutes ago, reniat said:

I've remounted the cpu block a few times. I have noticed that it's never very well spread, so im wondering if maybe this monoblock doesn't QUITE reach where it should relative to the top of the IHS now that i've delidded (and removed the teeny tiny layer of silicon between the IHS and the pcb)

Do you have a photo after you take the block off if it's not spreading or applying enough pressure. It might be good to look and see if anything is obstructing it and ensure it's bottoming out. 

[reniat]

44 minutes ago, W-L said:

Do you have a photo after you take the block off if it's not spreading or applying enough pressure. It might be good to look and see if anything is obstructing it and ensure it's bottoming out. 

TBH if i'm going to go through the effort of removing the monoblock (which involves completely removing the motherboard from the system) I'd just try to re-delid. I'm willing to write that chip off as ruined frankly, as long as that's the only thing going wrong in my system. I'm mostly concerned with the loop performance specifically, Is 40C terrible for water temps? Is ~50C high for a single 1080ti at ~2ghz? Ambient is anywhere from 21-23C. Price isn't really a concern, I just want to make sure i'm getting the most out of my water loop. 

 

EDIT: i just tried a test for case door open vs closed, and it seems to make a 7C difference in water temps to open up the front of the case. Does that indicate my intake fans aren't strong enough? this is in the worst game for temps i've tried so far: pubg. For some reason it brings my temps higher than even prime95 26.6. Games like overwatch don't have this issue.

[W-L]

8 minutes ago, reniat said:

TBH if i'm going to go through the effort of removing the monoblock (which involves completely removing the motherboard from the system) I'd just try to re-delid. I'm willing to write that chip off as ruined frankly, as long as that's the only thing going wrong in my system. I'm mostly concerned with the loop performance specifically, Is 40C terrible for water temps? Is ~50C high for a single 1080ti at ~2ghz? Ambient is anywhere from 21-23C. Price isn't really a concern, I just want to make sure i'm getting the most out of my water loop. 

EDIT: i just tired a test, and it seems to make a 7C difference in water temps to open up the front of the case. Does that indicate my intake fans aren't strong enough?

50C underload isn't terrible for the GPU a bit warm but nothing major as for the CPU that is a bit of a different story if it's stock. If your seeing that big of a temp drop then your case is just restrictive, the silent wings 3 are good pressure fans but just due to the side venting design of the Bequiet 900 that seems to be your limiting factor currently. 

[reniat]

 

 

1 hour ago, W-L said:

50C underload isn't terrible for the GPU a bit warm but nothing major as for the CPU that is a bit of a different story if it's stock. If your seeing that big of a temp drop then your case is just restrictive, the silent wings 3 are good pressure fans but just due to the side venting design of the Bequiet 900 that seems to be your limiting factor currently. 

Well that's kind of disappointing, considering how expensive this case is
if that is the limiting factor, would it be worth removing the front radiator and just using the 420mm? could a single 420mm give better performance than my current setup if that solved the air intake problem?

[W-L]

22 minutes ago, reniat said:

Well that's kind of disappointing, considering how expensive this case is
if that is the limiting factor, would it be worth removing the front radiator and just using the 420mm? could a single 420mm give better performance than my current setup if that solved the air intake problem?

You would be losing cooling potential by reducing the rad space, but that case does have bottom intakes I would populate those to see if it helps with airflow through the case. 

[For Science!]

10 hours ago, reniat said:

-snip-

Which motherboard are you using? Also what TIM did you use for delidding?

 

I have a fairly comparable system using Asus z270 prime board with the same monoblock and 2 gtx1080s. Radiator wise I use 240 + 360 mm from HWlabs and my temperatures are similar for GPU but better for CPU (4.8 GHz at 1.3 V) in the mid 60s typically.

 

I am using Noctua fans in a fractal define C, a very compact case. My water can be also close to 40 sometimes but this is becaus3 I prefer low RPM.

 

I think your GPU temps are fine but your CPU temps can probably be better.

[reniat]

6 hours ago, For Science! said:

Which motherboard are you using? Also what TIM did you use for delidding?

prime-ar, and coolaboratory liquid ultra. I do think I put too thin of a layer though. Here's how the delidding process went:

 

attempt 1:
Didn't put the glue on well enough and it didn't actually hold the IHS down

 

attempt 2:

put too much glue on and it got dangerously close to gluing the chip into the re-lidding tool, so I scrambled and undid that

 

attempt 3:

got the IHS re-attached correctly (finally), but wouldn't post.

 

attempt 3: 

After some troubleshooting, I opened it back and found out that the single layer of TIM i put on the dye was not making contact with the bottom of the IHS (I guess the 7700k has a larger gap between the die and ihs?), so I put a layer on both the bottom of the IHS and the top of the die, and that gets me to the temperatures I have now. I didn't keep going at the time because I had a working CPU again, and the amount of glue residue was getting a bit out of hand due to the multiple botched attempts.

 

conclusion:

I think I need to try delidding with a bit more TIM on both the IHS and the die, as the gap between the IHS seems to be an issue in my chip.

 

edit: this is also kind of why i'm willing to write this chip off. Multiple attemps to make it post while not knowing it was burning itself to death, accidentally setting the voltage to 1.6v (I swear this one was an LLC bug though. It went from 1.4 to 1.6 with very little difference in voltage offset), etc. If this chip does end up getting retired early though, i'll give it a warriors funeral. It certainly didn't win the silicon lottery, but it won my heart just because it's still kicking after all i've put it through.

[ChristianChalliner]

If you've got lots of glue residue that could be part of the problem. When i delided my 7700k all went well until i went to glue the IHS on, i followed the instructions that came with the rockit88 kit but after about 30 minutes i noticed there was substantial fogging due to the glue vapours.

 

If the glue fogged over the top of the IHS as mine did that could be stopping you getting a good application of your thermal compound. Something slightly abrasive works good (like the cloth that comes with the coolaboratory stuff) or you can use nail polish remover to dissolve the glue just be careful with this method as i don't know what if any impact it might have on the pcb if you go nuts with it.

[reniat]

7 hours ago, ChristianChalliner said:

If you've got lots of glue residue that could be part of the problem. When i delided my 7700k all went well until i went to glue the IHS on, i followed the instructions that came with the rockit88 kit but after about 30 minutes i noticed there was substantial fogging due to the glue vapours.

 

If the glue fogged over the top of the IHS as mine did that could be stopping you getting a good application of your thermal compound. Something slightly abrasive works good (like the cloth that comes with the coolaboratory stuff) or you can use nail polish remover to dissolve the glue just be careful with this method as i don't know what if any impact it might have on the pcb if you go nuts with it.

appreciated, but again my concern is that im reaching a liquid temp of 40C. I'll deal with re-de-lidding the cpu later. If anything, fixing the cpu will make my liquid temps worse lol

[raducosma]

@reniat Sorry to hijack your topic, but I was wondering, have you made any progress with your temps?

I have similar hardware running on much, much less cooling capacity, and after switching to the EK Z270E monoblock my temps went through the roof.

 

MB: Asus Z270G

CPU: 7700K stock

GPU: Asus 1080 Ti Poseidon

Cooling: Swiftech H220-X

With the original Apogee XL waterblock, the CPU was reaching 77 under Prime. With the EK monoblock it will reach 97.

CPU idle temps are exactly the same so I believe the monoblock is mounted properly.

GPU temps are exactly the same, so I do not think there is an issue with the loop.

All tested in the same setup/environment of course, except the fans+pump spin faster on the EK due to the high temps.

 

Perhaps the problem is with the monoblock design, adding heat from the VRM?

[reniat]

30 minutes ago, Chipicao said:

@reniat Sorry to hijack your topic, but I was wondering, have you made any progress with your temps?

I have similar hardware running on much, much less cooling capacity, and after switching to the EK Z270E monoblock my temps went through the roof.

 

MB: Asus Z270G

CPU: 7700K stock

GPU: Asus 1080 Ti Poseidon

Cooling: Swiftech H220-X

With the original Apogee XL waterblock, the CPU was reaching 77 under Prime. With the EK monoblock it will reach 97.

CPU idle temps are exactly the same so I believe the monoblock is mounted properly.

GPU temps are exactly the same, so I do not think there is an issue with the loop.

All tested in the same setup/environment of course, except the fans+pump spin faster on the EK due to the high temps.

 

Perhaps the problem is with the monoblock design, adding heat from the VRM?

Is your cpu delidded at all? I eventually gave on up the monoblock and went with a more standard waterblock, the supremacy EVO. I saw an instant drop of about 20C (very similar to you), and I'm pretty sure the reason is because of the extra gap between the fixed-height monoblock (which has to be fixed to fit with the VRM) and the delidded IHS.

 

Once I switched to a "normal" block that simply screws until tight it fixed my cpu temps it solved my issue, though i'm pretty sure this is due to delidding changing the height of the IHS relative to the VRM, and I don't blame EK for that at all, since they shouldn't design a monoblock that can flexibly fit difference IHS heights AND maintain the same position on the VRM, as that would increase production difficulty and cost and only benefit a very small % of consumers. 

[raducosma]

Thanks you for the reply.

 

My CPU is not delidded, all stock.

I was careful to apply about 2 grains of thermal compound, but I did not exaggerate when tightening the monoblock because of past experiences with RAM issues due to MB bending.

I found someone having the same problem with this block and he was able to fix it by adding more washers at the back of the motherboard. Perhaps I will try this later.

 

I also contacted EK support to ask for their opinion.

1 minute ago, reniat said:

Is your cpu delidded at all? I eventually gave on up the monoblock and went with a more standard waterblock, the supremacy EVO. I saw an instant drop of about 20C (very similar to you), and I'm pretty sure the reason is because of the extra gap between the fixed-height monoblock (which has to be fixed to fit with the VRM) and the delidded IHS.

 

Once I switched to a "normal" block that simply screws until tight it fixed my cpu temps, though i'm pretty sure this is due to delidding changing the height of the IHS relative to the VRM, and I don't blame EK for that at all, since they shouldn't design a monoblock that can flexibly fit difference IHS heights AND maintain the same position on the VRM, as that would increase production difficulty and cost and only benefit a very small % of consumers.