Custom water cooling loop

[Giannhs]

I am working on a project for a wall mounted pc case and I have questions about a custom water cooled loop, I've never done any watercooling before, but I did some research and I have some questions regarding the parts.

i) Is it better temperature wise to cool each PC part separately E.g. cpu-rad-gpu1-rad-gpu2-rad-pump or not?

ii) How many rads do you need and how thick should they be for the best cooling possible without over cooling it and creating moisture on the case

iii) Is it worth, performance wise, to water cool the motherboard and RAM?

If anyone has feedback feel free to share

thanks in advance

[Hirad123]

i) No the water moves so fast it doesn't make a difference.

ii) Depends, I have a cpu afnd 2 gpu's and I use 1 3x120 and 1 extra super thick 2x120 rad, I could porbably throw in vrm and chipset without needing more rads.

iii) It can be depending on how much voltage you'll need to overclock your chip and how much heat it ends up out putting, no way to really know whether it'll be worth or not before hand.

[Tagiau]

1: The order of the loop does not matter, as long as your put your res above the pump. For radiators, it depends on your parts, I usually do single 120 radiator per 100w. You can do the math on that. And to watercool your ram and motherboard, it is useless, unless you are doing it just for looks. 

[samcool55]

1) doesn't really matter, most of the time is the water that goes in the rad only 1°C warmer than the water that goes out of it.

2) Most of the time it's 1 120mm spot per heat component, so for 1 cpu and 2 gpu's you will need a 360 rad. You can of course go for more so you can make the system quieter because the fans can turn slower, less noise. Also you get more overclock headroom because you can get more easily rid of the extra heat. And how thicker the rad, how more effective they are, also thick rad that have a low density work fine with slow fans, thin rads with a high density will only work fine with fast fans, performance will be sort-of the same but the thin dense rad will need noisier fans.

3) Not really, maybe the motherboard if you are going to overclock quite a lot, which you can maybe do but tbh it's really not necessary.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1. No. It makes no difference to the temperatures. There are people that can explain it through laws of thermodynamics and such, but you get the point

2. I think the general rule is pretty much 240mm + 120mm for each additional component. So 360mm is good for a normal system with a CPU and 1 GPU, and 480mm is good for 2 GPUS. This will change depending on thickness, FPI and such. I personally prefer dense, split fin rads that aren't too thick. You get the cooling of a normal dense rad, but without the airflow restriction and they're thinner than thick, low density rads. 

3. Basically never. Unless you need it for specific reasons (you'd probably know if you did), it's pretty much only for looks. 

[Giannhs]

I plan on overclocking the gpu and CPU so I will think of the motherboard water blocks. Thanks for the feedback guys much appreciated

[Fighting falcon]

to answer the last part of your second question, you don't have to worry obout condensation in the case because it is not possible to cool the watter below the ambient temperature.