GPU Watercooling: Yes or No?

[Austin Borg]

Hey, Y'all!

 

Should I do water cooling on my graphics cards? I understand that this may be a big leap and could be FATAL to my system, so I'm hesitating. I have 1 GTX 1080 Ti hoping to run pretty much any game in 144 Hz at 1440p on Ultrawide. I have two questions

 

1) (Besides looks) How much more of a performance boost am I looking at with water cooling?

2) If I were to do a SLI system, would water cooling be necessary even then? 

[d0ge]

you have a 4k 144hz ultrawide display???

[Austin Borg]

3 minutes ago, d0ge said:

you have a 4k 144hz ultrawide display???

I said 1440p. I might be going 4k but for now 144Hz @ 1440p

[TSL]

7 minutes ago, Austin Borg said:

Hey, Y'all!

 

Should I do water cooling on my graphics cards? I understand that this may be a big leap and could be FATAL to my system, so I'm hesitating. I have 1 GTX 1080 Ti hoping to run pretty much any game in 144 Hz at 1440p on Ultrawide. I have two questions

 

1) (Besides looks) How much more of a performance boost am I looking at with water cooling?

2) If I were to do a SLI system, would water cooling be necessary even then? 

You would get higher clock speeds and would see maybe around 5-15% more performance that a factory OC'ed one. The big draw with water cooling is the significantly lower temperatures. Looking at going from 80°C to 60°C under full load, potentially even more. On top of this you get a quieter system. So more performance, quieter and cooler. But it is expensive and risky as you've pointed out. You will see better performance, but the price ratio just won't be fantastic. Another reason for doing it is looks (as stated). If you have the money and are interested in going into this field. I'd say go for it. There are so many reviews and guides on the net to help you and keep it safe. 

[descrom93]

Water cooling is great because you can get a stable overclock. You can manually set your fans to 100% and run some benchmarks, it should keep temps pretty low. Run the same benches with a normal fan curve and see if theres a difference. Nvidias GPU Boost is really sensitive to temps. In an SLI system you might want it more, so that the top card isnt recycling the bottom cards heat, they both move heat to the rad. I have a watercooled 1080, and it sticks to 2025 MHz gaming since the temp rarely touches 40 C. O/w is would drop to 1950ish.

[TSL]

14 minutes ago, Austin Borg said:

2) If I were to do a SLI system, would water cooling be necessary even then? 

SLI performance scaling is very minimal in many cases. And with GPU prices as they are, it would be cheaper to water cool and get a similar performance bump in many scenarios. SLI will likely be phased out with the next gen GPU's perhaps with a replacement similar to NVlink

[HayHay]

Even though it won't be as loud and will have slight performance over regular, like what @TSLmentioned, the tl;dr here is yes if you know what you're doing. No if you're literally anyone else, unless you want to risk breaking something and having a 1000$+ paper weight lying around..

[Mick Naughty]

Always worth it. Even more so if cards keep the horrible trend of boosting like the 10 series NVidia cards do.

Sli need for watercooling is even greater.

 

Cpu would need it to keep up with a pair of cards too. Run faster in every way and potentially quieter.

[Frankenburger]

If you have the money, don't care about price to performance, and plan on overclocking, then yes, watercooling is worth it. But if you don't plan on overclocking, then no. Undervolting will probably suit you much better. Also, no, watercooling is not necessary for SLI. It will help your temps, which will in turn help your GPUs boost higher (especially the top GPU), but I've been running air cooled multi-GPU systems for almost a decade with no regrets.

 

3 hours ago, TSL said:

SLI performance scaling is very minimal in many cases. SLI will likely be phased out with the next gen GPU's

Not really. SLI on average nets a 50% increase. If you rule out non-scaling games, you'll generally see SLI scaling around 70% on average as long as the GPUs aren't bottlenecked. Also, statistically speaking, SLI will work with about 4 out of every 5 games out there.

 

https://babeltechreviews.com/the-50-game-gtx-1070-ti-sli-review/3/

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_SLI/20.html

 

So, no, it's not likely to be "phased out" with Volta. If it does get "phased it", then it'll probably be Nvidia simply rebranding SLI in an attempt to renew interest in multi GPU systems. After all, SLI is highly stigmatized at this point, which is unfortunate because most of the people stigmatizing it are simply parroting false information.