Can I get away with one rad

[Ravendarat]

Ok so my system I want to cool is a 2700x and a 2080 ti. When I used the ekwb site it suggested that I need two rads but I really wanna try to avoid using two as I wanna hardline but keep things as simple as possible for now. I WILL be over clocking but I’m not trying to break records here. If I can use one what size/thickness would you suggest. 

[Enderman]

You can use one rad if it's a 240 or 280 or 360mm one.

[Ravendarat]

I was gonna use a single 360 mounted in the front, and suggestions on thickness?

[wildgg]

3 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

I was gonna use a single 360 mounted in the front, and suggestions on thickness?

if you want to go with a single raditor only i would go with the biggest one you can fit.

[Ravendarat]

Ya i think a 60 mm shouldn’t be an issue to fit even with the fans and pump bracket

[Shadow_Storm56]

2 hours ago, Ravendarat said:

Ok so my system I want to cool is a 2700x and a 2080 ti. When I used the ekwb site it suggested that I need two rads but I really wanna try to avoid using two as I wanna hardline but keep things as simple as possible for now. I WILL be over clocking but I’m not trying to break records here. If I can use one what size/thickness would you suggest. 

It all depends on the temps you want, how good ur fans are, you will for sure get a pretty hot loop but it may be ok. 

[Ravendarat]

Hmm, I definitely wanna avoid that as my apartment can get pretty hot in the summer, I guess when I do liquid I’ll just buy 2 rads and extra tube so I can mess up more lol

[nick name]

How big is your case?

[Ravendarat]

Define r6, so pretty big. I have 180mm from the front to the start of the psu shroud. It’s at the top where it gets a bit tight, I can do another 360 mm rad up there, it just clutters the case a bit

[Kalm_Traveler]

1 hour ago, Ravendarat said:

Hmm, I definitely wanna avoid that as my apartment can get pretty hot in the summer, I guess when I do liquid I’ll just buy 2 rads and extra tube so I can mess up more lol

I think you're confused about how heat works. The cpu and graphics card generate heat. That heat is dissipated into your house air via the water cooling system. 

 

The amount of heat that goes into your home won't change with a warm loop vs cool loop, as the heat source itself remains the same. 

 

Example, say CPU is 100 watts of heat, graphics card is 100 watts also turning into heat. 

 

Regardless of how you're removing that 200w worth of heat from the chips and into your room, the same 200w of heat ends up heating your room up. Doesn't matter if you're using an air cooler or two 480mm long 60mm thick radiators in a loop. 

 

What will change is the average temp of the parts being cooled since a big custom loop will take a long time to heat up in the first place, and will probably be more efficient at dumping that heat into your room. 

[Ravendarat]

I’m not worried about my computer hearing my house, I’m worried that since my place is so hot that it will be more detrimental to the cooling ability of the pc. I assume room temp factors in somewhat considering people seem to talk about the ambient temp of their room when discussing cooling solutions but I could be wrong?

[For Science!]

50 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

-

Room temperature will always have an effect on how efficiently you can cool your system, air or liquid, nothing changes. (Because watercooled components are not actually cooled by water, its cooled by water that's being cooled by air).

 

Watercooling lets you increase the surface area for dissipation by utilizing water as a medium to transfer the heat from one location to another. Doing watercooling with a small radiator will perform worse than a large aircooler.

[MaratM]

If you planning to put a fat 360 rad at the front of the case into R6 you will end up having the front door open all the time at load. it will work but the water temp might get a bit hot, around +12-15C over ambient. And do not forget to exhaust all the hot air out of the case. Thus you also need the top panel in the open mode with 3 120 fans exhausting hot air out of the case. If you using fat 360 rad you need high static pressure fans on the rad. The fans with highest static pressure numbers are getting very loud at full speed.

[Ravendarat]

So if I use the config program on EKs website, which is the product I'm planning on using, they are suggesting using 2 360mm rads (I don't recall if it said 28 or 38 mm), 3 fans on each and than a 140mm exhaust fan at the back, would you think thats the way to go? Im far more concerned with proper performance over all else, so if I need to do two rads for best performance than Ill deal with running the extra lines

[EKJake]

7 hours ago, Ravendarat said:

So if I use the config program on EKs website, which is the product I'm planning on using, they are suggesting using 2 360mm rads (I don't recall if it said 28 or 38 mm), 3 fans on each and than a 140mm exhaust fan at the back, would you think thats the way to go? Im far more concerned with proper performance over all else, so if I need to do two rads for best performance than Ill deal with running the extra lines

If you run with the 60mm XE 360 and use push/pull, you should be able to skate by with a single rad. Temps may be a little higher, but you won't have any throttling or performance loss. Just a louder setup from needing to run the fans at a high RPM.

 

2x 360mm rads are generally recommended so that you can max out the cooling ability while keeping noise down. You get the best of both worlds that way.