Custom Water Cooling Advice?

[LordHiler]

I'm in the VERY early stages of considering a custom loop. When I say very early, I mean it's intriguing but I've never had so much as an AIO, so total extreme newbie. I've seen stuff from Jayz2Cents, Linus, etc. but that's as far as it goes. 

 

My current setup:

 

-Corsair 4000D Airflow Black case

-6x Corsair LL120 fans - 3x front intake 2x top exhaust 1x rear exhaust

-Gigabyte Aorus Elite B550 AX V2 mobo

-AMD Ryzen 7 5800x 

-Noctua NHD15s Chromax Black cooler 

-4x8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB 3200mhz CL16 RAM

-ASUS Rog Strix RTX 3080 OC edition GPU

-1x 500GB Samsung 970 Evo+ nVME for Boot

-1x 1TV Samsung 980 Pro nVME for games

-Corsair RM850x PSU

 

 

To be clear I am not at all sure I'm going to do this. But if I did I would water cool the CPU and GPU and do a custom loop. I would be throwing away the ROG Strix cooler which is a thought that almost makes me ill... so there's a high burden here. 

 

Considerations - I'm leaning towards a 360mm front rad if I did do this. Is that enough for CPU and GPU on the same loop?

 

If so, can the LL120 fans stay in the front because I want the RGB. That's actually import to me. Lights are pretty. 

 

Is there a MEANINGFUL performance improvement to be had? I'm already running both the CPU and GPU on a slight overclock and getting great performance. 

 

Am I crazy? Thoughts?

 

And if so any resources you recommend for planning for a total newbie?

Edited February 16, 2021 by LordHiler
Forgot PSU

[LordHiler]

I feel like I should clarify that the top can only support a 240 or a 280 rad and I'm worried about clearance, and even more worried about RGB in that scenario. Best cooking seems like intake fresh air through the front rad and exhaust from top and back. 

[Letgomyleghoe]

7 minutes ago, LordHiler said:

I would be throwing away the ROG Strix cooler which is a thought that almost makes me ill... so there's a high burden here. 

wait do you have a nh-d15s or a an ROG strix cooler, if it's the strix, which one.

[LordHiler]

Totally should have clarified:

 

Noctua NHD15s Chromax.black on the CPU

ASUS ROG Strix 3080 GPU

 

I was talking about putting a water block on the GPU and throwing away the ROG Strix cooler that is on the GPU. 

 

[LordHiler]

And given the market and climate I feel line I should clarify that I got all of this hardware for retail from either Best Buy or B&H. It took months of obsessing day after day to do that - basically my entire hobby has been buying hardware lol. 

[Letgomyleghoe]

6 minutes ago, LordHiler said:

Totally should have clarified:

 

Noctua NHD15s Chromax.black on the CPU

ASUS ROG Strix 3080 GPU

 

I was talking about putting a water block on the GPU and throwing away the ROG Strix cooler that is on the GPU. 

 

I wouldn't watercool then, your cpu cooler is more than sufficient, same with your gpu cooler. You wouldn't really see any significant gains and the difference would be mostly visual.

[LordHiler]

6 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

I wouldn't watercool then, your cpu cooler is more than sufficient, same with your gpu cooler. You wouldn't really see any significant gains and the difference would be mostly visual.

Thank you! That's good to know, and reassuring. 

[bowrilla]

16 hours ago, LordHiler said:

To be clear I am not at all sure I'm going to do this. But if I did I would water cool the CPU and GPU and do a custom loop. I would be throwing away the ROG Strix cooler which is a thought that almost makes me ill... so there's a high burden here. 

You don't throw it away, you just replace it and put the old one in a box in case you sell it at some point.

16 hours ago, LordHiler said:

Considerations - I'm leaning towards a 360mm front rad if I did do this. Is that enough for CPU and GPU on the same loop?

Enough? Yes. But more is better (to some extent at least). 

 

17 hours ago, LordHiler said:

If so, can the LL120 fans stay in the front because I want the RGB. That's actually import to me. Lights are pretty. 

Well, you can but they are pretty noisy and overall not that great. They have good static pressure at max RPM but their max RPM is 2200min^-1.

 

17 hours ago, LordHiler said:

Is there a MEANINGFUL performance improvement to be had? I'm already running both the CPU and GPU on a slight overclock and getting great performance. 

Well, certainly you will reduce temperatures which can give you a bit more OC headroom but how much and whether it is significant or not cannot be answered upfront. GPUs usually scale well temperature-wise in terms of their boost but that's lmostly low single digit percentages to be gained. AMD's PBO is also good in scaling with temperatures but again there are not huge gains to be acchieved. Manual OC headroom, well that depends on the silicon you have.

17 hours ago, LordHiler said:

Am I crazy? Thoughts?

Probably not more crazy than the rest of us.

 

17 hours ago, LordHiler said:

And if so any resources you recommend for planning for a total newbie?

Well, Jay's builds are a decent starting point. The EK Configurator can help you find compatible products.