Watercooling a Intel Xeon E5-2697v2

bigjme · June 15, 2014

Hey everyone, so i have been skulking around for a while and have finally decided that this year i may retired my Intel Xeon E3-1230v2 thats in my gaming rig.

But with the current state of CPU's and how slowly they are advancing, i have decided that if i am going to upgrade, why not spend the extra money and go enterprise class.

So if any of you are over at bitcointalk with your NVidia kit you will know me from the mining thread, and may know that my home gaming pc isnt just a normal gaming pc, its used for a huge range of different things, some being;

Virtualization

Webservers (Database, Apache)

AltCoin Mining

Gaming

So my cpu is pretty much a place holder for me, especially when gaming with everything else running, (Altcoin mining can use 10% or more of my xeon), and vmware is using a bit, with 2 VM's running

So i have noticed that when gaming my cpu usage shoots up and starts limiting my miners, which i dislike a lot as they start to impact on each other. But i am not willing to stop one for the other

So back to the main question, watercooling a monster E5-2697v2

Right now my watercooling loop consists of;

Xeon E3-1230V2 with a koolance 380I, using MX-4 compound

EVGA GTX 780 Hydro Copper

Alphacool VPP655 on setting 1 (1800rpm / 4800rpm)

Alphacool NexXxus UT60 480mm Rad

Using 1/2" tubing

4 x Gentle Typhoon 1850rpm on full

So my watercooling loop isnt small, and the Gentle Typhoons are only on full when mining with my 780

But as it is now, my rooms gets so hot from mining (30+ at night) that my Xeon can get to 77'C even using this loop!

Right now the order of the loop is

Rad - Pump/Res - CPU - GPU

my 780 never gets above 48'C so i think my xeon has a huge thermal issue from new, But back to the question.

Originally when i looked up the loop i had it created so that it theoretically should be able to take away around 400W of power, right now my loop only has 330W maximum to cool. But going up to the E5-2697v2 i will be going to a total load of 380W. With my current xeon being so warm it is starting to cause some concerns for myself, the air coming out the case is around 43'C in a 28'C which is about right following the GPU temps, and when the room is 24'C the temps of the air is about 39'C so the temp range is stable.

So my question is, do we think my loop is capable of cooling the 12 core monster?

And if anyone has one that's watercooled i would love to hear about your experiences and any issues you have faced. My waterblock will fit the new socket so i don't need to change the loop at all as i only intent to use one of the chips, which i have read you can do? Again anyone with them this would be great to hear about

Sorry about my going way off topic at times but i am trying to cover everything you may want or need to ask,

Regards,

Jamie

imdavidh96 · June 16, 2014

You should be fine as long as your flow rate is high enough,
im cooling i7 3770k duel 680's and im using the tiny pump in the world and im using 2 x 240mm rads andf im fine i can run everytging at max load low rpm fans and still be fine

bigjme · June 16, 2014

I noticed with my current loop that changing the flow rate up atall has no effect on temps even with my cpu and gpu maxed out which seemed a little weird.

At one point i had 2 different pwm pumps, not together but i did have 2, and adjustments just added extra noise.

I know in their it should effect it so i will have to mess about with it when the new stuff comes. How thick are your rads?

I got everything that was high flow just in case it was needed, i just hate setting the higher speed because paranoia