PrimeSonic

Just throwing this out there since I've delved into the high end for so long I may have forgotten how to budget build. A friend needs a new PC. Budget is around $400 with a hard-cap at $500 (shipped). Thankfully, the hardware requirements aren't too crazy. Expected use cases are: GIMP and Photoshop for artwork Streaming said artwork Emulation of retro titles Streaming of said retro games HDDs are already available from an older machine for re-use (though if budget can allow for an SSD that would be awesome). All accessories a

TL:DR - The impact that loop order has on temperatures is basically a rounding error. Don't worry about loop order. My advice from personal experience: Spend more time making sure your loop is easy to fill and drain, before you worry about inconsequential things like loop order.

My 2080 Ti has been working nicely since day 1. It's a Founders Edition. No, I'm not worried.

Oh yeah. I sent my 1440p away for repair. In the meantime, I had an equally sized 1080p monitor as a replacement. I tell you, I really missed having the extra pixels.

That's some crazy voltage. No wonder you were seeing those temps. Maybe it's time to pop the lid and get liquid metal in there. My old custom loop was pretty big for a CPU+GPU loop, having 120+240+360 radiators in there. The GPU was fine, but the CPU could always jump over 85C on stress tests. I knew the "thermal bottleneck" with the thermal compound between the CPU die and the IHS, but I never realized I would be getting over a 20 degree delta until I did it for myself. If you're going to push that much voltage in your CPU just to get to 4.6Ghz, s

If your FE 2080 Ti is only reach 65C, you're probably not pushing it at all. Even with the fans cranked to 100% (which will be uncomfortably loud) it will go over that much. At reasonable audible levels, you can expect the card to hit 80C easily if you're actually pushing it.

To me, that question is irrelevant since doing maintenance of a liquid metal application is a lot simplier and easier than doing maintenance on a custom water cooling loop. Even if the stuff needs to be replaced every other year, that's still a huge win. Heck, it might be even more irrelevant since by the time the stuff starts drying out and going bad, I could be ready upgrade the CPU anyways.

So for the time being, I've shelved my custom water cooling loop while I go air-cooled for a while. Since I was going from lots of radiator space for my CPU to just a Noctua NH-D15S, I wanted to give my CPU the best fighting chance it had to keep cool under my fairly aggressive overclock. It's an i7-6700K clocking at 4.6Ghz with voltage hovering around 1.375v. With the liquid metal, I never saw the CPU hit 60C even under load! I never got load temps like that even when I was pumping that heat through three separate radiators. I knew the cheap Intel TIM wa

That's why I picked a FE one. I intend on water cooling it later. Why bother with the fancy air cooler when I'll just be taking it off in favor of water cooling?

I totally understand. I had to be very picky about my settings since I was trying to maintain 100fps+ at 3440x1440 on a 980 Ti. It was doable, but there were settings that I had to tone down since it was a huge FPS drop for some barely noticeable visual flare. And in a game like this, getting fluid movement with high FPS is worth a lot more than pure visual spectacle. Hope you find the right balance soon.

I hate to say it, but this is normal. Heck, some scenes with water will tank FPS. My honest recommendation is to start dialing back some of the settings until you see at least 50% higher FPS than you want to target. WoW has huge fluctuations in the amount of stuff on screen and will see large FPS drops. In my back, I also made use of the separate graphics settings for raiding so that the extra visual noise didn't tank my FPS to unplayable numbers.

What graphics settings are you using on WoW? I know with certainty that there's lots of bells and whistles in those options that will absolutely tank FPS in certain scenes. While the usage graphs don't look like anything is bottle-necking anything else, if you're just cranking all settings to max and expecting 60fps in WoW, let me tell you, it's not going to happen.

For a GPU, no need for liquid metal. The temps I get with plain Arctic Silver are so good already that I see no need to go with anything else. So some Kryonaut for the GPU die will be plenty more than enough.

Keeping my 2080 Ti pre-order. Price, as high as it was, wasn't really that big of a concern. That, and I wanted the highest jump in performance I could get coming from my 980 Ti that I bought way too near the end of that generation's life. Sadly, I do have to admit that a 2080 right now just doens't make a lot of sense. But if you want the best performance in a consumer card, then you know that always comes at a premium.

Also, running 2 sticks takes less voltage than running 4 sticks. If you're overclocking, more sticks of RAM will demand more voltage to maintain stability.