Recommendations for Water Cooling

Renegade Paradox · March 27, 2013

Hello forum,

I am helping my roommate build a gaming PC and will likely sell/give him my 212 Evo in favor of buying a new cooler for my rig now that I have saved some money. I am mostly interested in the all-in-one closed loop systems, but would consider a custom set up if the price/ performance is significantly higher. I probably will not expand my water cooling to my GPU as it does very well with the Gigabyte Tri-force Air Cooling on it and would rather not spend over $150 ish on this new upgrade.

My specs are:

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Define R4 (Windowed)

i5 3750k (I plan on overclocking moderatly...one of these days)

Gigabyte Z77-UD3H

Gigabyte HD 7970 OC edition

8GB G.Skill Sniper 1866

Seasonic 650W

840 120GB SSD

Barracuda 1TB

Personally I can not decide if I should wait for a densely packed 280mm radiator or if the current ones out now are good enough. I would preferably like something I can utilize in top of the R4 as it has two 140mm fan mounts. Also Noise isn't a crazy concern but I would prefer it to be quite as that's why I got the R4 to begin with.

Any Tips or advice would really be appreciated.

Crion · March 27, 2013

The R4 also supports 240mm rads. Personally, get yourself either a Swiftech H220 or Corsair H100i. They're both better coolers than the 140mm stuff right now.

TheCanadianGamer16 · March 28, 2013

The R4 also supports 240mm rads. Personally, get yourself either a Swiftech H220 or Corsair H100i. They're both better coolers than the 140mm stuff right now.

the x60 beats the h100, but the H110 beats everything except the h220, and anyways, if you get the H220, you can always add in 1 or 2 120mm rads and turn the h220 into a custom loop and cool the gpu, and it's designed for it

Whaler_99 · March 28, 2013

Guys - please be careful when recommending AiO - as there are some technical difference between then. The Define R4 has a 15mm fan spacing on the top. So, the Kraken x60 will fit, but the H110 will not as it uses 20mm fan spacing. At least, not without drilling some holes.

To the OP:

If you have zero plans to expand, go the x60 - otherwise, look at the H220....

Renegade Paradox · March 28, 2013

Thanks, I would like to expand some day down the road but I would really rather get a 280mm Rad. If Swift tech made a H280 I would be all over it. I suppose its get the x60 or wait till something else comes out for 140mm, or save up more for a full custom set up.