New TOTALLY Overkill project...

[Mindtrick]

I own the HAF XB, running my old system in it. P8Z77-V Deluxe, GTX 680, and an H100i running push/pull. When I started my newest build (X99), the first thing I got were two 780ti Classifieds. I immediately put those in my old system as the X99, at the time, was still months away. Had to dump the two pull fans, as there was not enough room. Long story short: you'll be limited to a thin 240mm rad, and only two fans. That case is cool, but absolutely no room to grow, and a nightmare for cable management.

[ChadMcCune]

@ChadMcCune I'm really sorry about some of the other immature and unfriendly members on this forum

 

As far as where to get your cooling components from, you can use ek' cooling configurator in order to see if your specific graphics card is of reference design or if it is a non-reference design. once you find out if it is or is not, then you can check other gpu blocks that fit reference cards. If you are in the US, Performance PCs is usually the cheapest place for components, but they may not have the best customer support. FrozenCPU is also another great online retailer which has almost every possible cooling part you could imagine, but it comes at a higher cost. I've heard that FrozenCPU has very good customer service though, and can ship internationally pretty easily. What country are you located in?

 

In case you are not familiar with the whole reference/non-reference thing, I'll give a short explanation.

 

nVidia and AMD release their gpus with a standard "reference" design, such as how much memory there should be, and where each of the components should be located on the card. GPU manufactueres can choose to either follow this reference design, or decide to make their own. If they decide to make their own, then the graphics card will have a physically different layout, and so you would need to get a special waterblock that will perfectly fit the non-reference design

 

Usually, cards which are of higher performance have non-reference designs, like some of gigabytes high end windforce 3 cards, are non-reference.

 

From what I have noticed, most other gpu waterblock manufactures only make reference designs. The only people who make non-reference blocks are EK

 

For the maintenance of your loop, I usually upgrade my system every year, and during that time I change out the water. During the other times, I occasionally check my reservoir just to make sure that it is full. If it is not, then i shoot a little bit of distilled water into it.

If you set it up correctly, you shouldn't have to do much maintenance at all. Make sure you include some sort of biocide in your loop. a Silver kill coil works pretty well with distilled water, but if you want, you could get a premixed coolant. I think Mayhems makes good coolants and dyes. If you do decide on coolants, do not get the aurora/swirly coolant. It looks beautiful for a few months, but then it turns really ugly, and can clog your system. That coolant is meant for conventions and showing off systems.

 

If you want you computer to be silent, it depends on your radiators. If you are going to stick with your case, and it only supports 240 +120mm radiators, you might be a little short on cooling for two gpus and 1 cpu. You could still get away with using that much radiator space for those components, but your temperatures will suffer if you want to keep your system completely quiet. If you wanted to have good temperatures with only 360mm of radiator space , you would probably need loud, high performance fans.

 

Also, you should consider your radiator type. There are some radiators which are thicker than other, and they offer high cooling performance, and can be paired with different types of fans. But if you get too thick of a radiator, then you may run into clearance issues inside your case. 

 

Since you want to keep your pc quiet, you should stick with lower rpm fans. probably around 1000rpm or less is in the quiet range. I'm not too familiar with all the fan brands, but if you have enough money, you could go with the noctua fans that linus loves. the noctua fans come with Low noise adapter, which are just resistors in order to lower the voltage of the fans, slowing them down, making them more quiet. If you could get a bigger case, itll be easier to build your loop in, and you could have more radiator space to cool all of your components. I would say you should try to get a 360mm rad plus a 240mm rad. You should also consider that 2011 chips run much hotter than 1150 chips, so that why I think you need that much radiator space. But the more radiator space you can get, the cooler and more quieter your system can become.

 

If you want to try watercooling the ram, then you should do it for the looks of it, rather than the performance. So I would say you should be able to have a good look at how cool your ram will be. Also, I don't know if they have ddr4 ram waterblocks available yet.

 

For the pump/res, you should defineately go with a variable speed D5 pump. many companies rebrand the Laing D5 pump, such as swiftechs MCP-655, but as long as it looks like that, or says D5 in it, you should be good. Do not get the DDC type pumps though. They are smaller and could be more convienaint than the D5, but they have this high pitched whine that got really annoying after a couple years.

For the reservoir, get one that you think looks cool. I like the reservoirs that double as a pump top so that I can use fittings on the pump and that the pump is always feed straight from the reservoir. the only reservoirs that could give you trouble are the extremely small ones because they are a little hard to fill up your loop with.

 

another user suggested that you get the 5930k rather than the 5960x, and I would want to agree with them, based off of your usage scenario, but I don't think you will really see that big of a performance difference between the two on single threaded performances.

 

I hope this helps!

 

You should create a build log when you start creating your system

 

Thank you!  Some very helpful information here.  To answer your question, I'm in the US, specifically the Dallas area.

 

 

I work from home part of the day ever day (after I pick the kiddo up from school), and work on a solution with about 56 projects in it, so, I'll actually benefit from the additional 2 cores/4 threads compiling in parallel.

[ChadMcCune]

Welcome to the forum.

Using the above info, Gotta ask WHY?

Surely there is a Car/Trinket/Other thing your interested in you could put that money into for better personal benefit.

I'm only saying give it a think on what you COULD spend that 6G on before dropping in into a PC you'll never use much, esp when your current build is powerful enough.

 

I'm all for E-peen and the lovely jubbly Epicness, but priorities are just as important.

I'm not taking anything away from your inquiry, go for it ifthats what you wanna do. I was just curious.

 

For no other reason than it's what I want to do.  I leased a new vehicle last year and technology is the type of "trinket" that I like to mess around with.  It's not that I never use it, I just use it considerably less than I used to.  I used to be on my computer from the time I got home till the time I went to bed, but now, I use it every afternoon for work, and some occasional gaming.  It will also free up my current rig for my girlfriend to use and we can game together, since all she has right now is a crummy laptop.

[ChadMcCune]

I own the HAF XB, running my old system in it. P8Z77-V Deluxe, GTX 680, and an H100i running push/pull. When I started my newest build (X99), the first thing I got were two 780ti Classifieds. I immediately put those in my old system as the X99, at the time, was still months away. Had to dump the two pull fans, as there was not enough room. Long story short: you'll be limited to a thin 240mm rad, and only two fans. That case is cool, but absolutely no room to grow, and a nightmare for cable management.

 

Excellent information to have, and you probably just sold me on the Air540 or the S8.

[elvper]

To the op,

 

I have no clue why ppl are b***ching but to answer you.

 

To be Silent, fan must be spinning as slow as possible and constantly.  140mm will be better than 120mm running at same speed.  So you want to choose good 140/280mm static pressure fans  at about 1200rpm or lower.  Low to medium fpi (probably gonna be a thin rad under 40mm thickness) 20~40 fpi is what I would go for.

 

Maintenance is very important.  Depends on your usage but highly recommend to disassemble your loop every 6 month.  Open your block, leak test fittings, clean rad entirely etc...

 

Depends on how big your res is, check how much coolant left as often as possible.

 

Koolance, Alphacool, Bitspower are brands I received great customer support.  EK fks me off more than once so I lost faith in them.

140mm would be better than 120mm cuz bigger. But more silent? Depends, but equal fan of 120mm will me more silent at same rpm compared to 140mm.

Why?

Simple, the end of the 140mm has to travel further to complete an entire spin = it will spin at a higher speed when at the same rpm.

 

2x 140mm would be more silent than 2x 120mm if set to give the same performance, same amount of air it moves each second. Because you can put the 140mm at a lower rpm to move the same amount of air.

[hmminteresting]

First post here...

 

Basically, I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to WASTE a ton of $$ and build a computer that I totally don't need.  On top of that, I decided that I would water cool this bad boy just for shits and giggles.  

 

I'm probably looking at over 6 grand by time I'm finished, and considering I'm hardly even ever on my computer anymore, and hardly game at all, I know it's a complete waste, but I'm going to do it anyway.

 

This is basically my parts list, but with the announcement of the GTX 980's being available next month, I'll probably wait a couple of weeks and get those instead.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/chadmccune/saved/XXRwrH

 

Like I said before, I've never built a water cooled rig before, always have just air cooled them, so I have some questions.  I see lots of contradicting information online, so looking for some clarification.

 

In the parts list, I have some basic parts picked for the cooling system, cpu block, gpu blocks, but I'm totally at a loss on what pump/res I should pick.  I believe the case I'm using supports a 240mm rad and a 120mm, should I use both?  I may water cool the ram too, may not..I don't know...Depends on what parts I can find.

 

Is there a better place to get the parts than ekwb?  I really don't like ordering from overseas, but I couldn't find another site that had a tool like their configurator that takes me to exactly the right block for the gpus.

 

My main goal is for the final product to be SILENT, with a room to overclock some.

 

But other than the pump/res question, I have a couple of other questions...What kind of maintenance is involved with water cooling?  Do I need to occasionally drain/flush and put new coolant in? Do I just need to top it off occasionally?  

if you're doing a custom loop why is there an air cooler?

[Linux User]

It's not something that I can not afford, I wouldn't do it if it were...and I don't like ATI cards...I never have...Last time I used one was like 10 years ago and their drivers were buggy as hell.

Times have changed. AMD cards are right up there with nvidia.

[ChadMcCune]

if you're doing a custom loop why is there an air cooler?

 

For testing before I put in the liquid cooling

[MightyFriday]

IMO you should tone it down a little on all the overkill parts and get a few terabytes of SSD' s... That would be pretty cool

[ChadMcCune]

IMO you should tone it down a little on all the overkill parts and get a few terabytes of SSD' s... That would be pretty cool

 

My old machine acts as a media server in the house now with 5x4TB drives in a raid array...I might up it to 512GB ssd, but that will easily last me until my next upgrade.

 

Another cooling question for everyone though...I've read many times that color'd coolants gunk up and clog stuff up...is this still the case?  I had planned on just using distilled water, but I just saw the picture of the new evga 980 with factory applied water block, and I think it would look cool as hell (pardon the pun) to have green cooling flowing through it 

 

http://static.evga.com/products/images/gallery/04G-P4-2989-KR_XL_4.jpg

[Peopie]

Another cooling question for everyone though...I've read many times that color'd coolants gunk up and clog stuff up...is this still the case?  I had planned on just using distilled water, but I just saw the picture of the new evga 980 with factory applied water block, and I think it would look cool as hell (pardon the pun) to have green cooling flowing through it 

 

http://static.evga.com/products/images/gallery/04G-P4-2989-KR_XL_4.jpg

 

I am not 100% sure, but I believe Mayhem's dyes and coolants work well, and do not gunk things up. Usually the gunking isnt due to the dye itself, but the dye reacting with the tubing, causing plasticizer stuff to gunk things up

[TheMuskr]

If you are going to blow all of this money then do it right. That coolermaster case is a horrible case for watercooling, You need sotmthing more like a caselabs case, I recommend the SM8 http://www.caselabs-store.com/merlin-sm8-case/

[Prokart2000]

780 PAH! maxwell masterrace

[ChadMcCune]

If you are going to blow all of this money then do it right. That coolermaster case is a horrible case for watercooling, You need sotmthing more like a caselabs case, I recommend the SM8 http://www.caselabs-store.com/merlin-sm8-case/

 

I did end up going with the mercury s8

[TheMuskr]

I did end up going with the mercury s8

Geat! I would have had a stroke with a beast build in a cheap case. 

[GhostHitWall]

140mm would be better than 120mm cuz bigger. But more silent? Depends, but equal fan of 120mm will me more silent at same rpm compared to 140mm.

Why?

Simple, the end of the 140mm has to travel further to complete an entire spin = it will spin at a higher speed when at the same rpm.

 

2x 140mm would be more silent than 2x 120mm if set to give the same performance, same amount of air it moves each second. Because you can put the 140mm at a lower rpm to move the same amount of air.

You are totally right.  What I meant by was based on same static pressure and CFM generated.  Not speed rpm.

[Recon97]

Overkill? Even my build is so much better than yours.

[monjanger]

Overkill, your dropping to much money, you can get the same parts of not better for a lower price. But looks good.