GTX 1080 TI Fe: worth trying a Water Cooling rig?

Harry Voyager · September 19, 2019

In the process of planning a computer rebuild, and got to wondering if it would be worth water cooling my 1080 ti? My primary use-case is VR Flight sims, which both, really need good frame rates and tend to be rather old, unoptimized code.

I've been running into reports of the existing coolers sagging and causing thermal issues,and while I haven't had a chance to test it on my system yet, since I'm already looking at replacing the CPU watercooler, and my case has a three fan bay for it, I'm wondering if there would be value in going full nut and doing a water cooling setup for both the CPU and GPU and seeing how much I can OC the graphics card?

I'm not expecting to see a significant enough improvement in no-raytraced titles to justify replacing it for another couple of years, and thinking, if I could get a solid OC going, that might help my VR frames, once I've rebuilt the system around a current generation CPU.

Thoughts?

TheGlenlivet · September 19, 2019

I had a custom loop 1950X and FTW3 set up that worked OK for Xplane 11.

You know how it is, that game never runs over 30-40 FPS.

The GPU would run at 2050MHZ all day, rock solid. Quiet as a mouse with 2 480mm rads. But the FPS still kinda sucks.

Xplane seems to like a faster CPU that the 1950X and doesn't spread the load over multicore very well.

I don't think you'll see an FPS boost by watercooling. At least not one that is worth the time, effort and $$$.

Harry Voyager · September 19, 2019

That's kind of what I was afraid of, though I'm mostly playing DCS and Il-2 Battle of Bodenplatte right now and I'm given to understand those are a good bit more graphics heavy, though at the moment I'm completely CPU bound (I7-4770), so it's hard to test before I replace the backbone.

What I'm trying to figure out there is why, if the I9-9900k is single thread king, the R7-3700X seems to be beating it in multi-threaded performance, even though they have the same core and thread count, but that's a question for a different sub-forum.