The Neophyte's Custom Liquid Cooling Guide: How To, Why To, What To Expect
by Dustin Sklavos on September 30, 2013 12:01 AM ESTObviously there's a tremendous amount of information to sift through. This is without a doubt the longest article I've ever personally written; normally I leave the comprehensive works to my more gifted colleagues. I couldn't resist the challenge or the opportunities that presented themselves, though. Even as I write this, I'm testing an engineering sample i7-4770K donated by iBuyPower and finding it to be an infinitely more capable performer than the original retail chip I used. That's not a black mark on CyberPowerPC; it's not like they deliberately sent me a bad chip. It's more a reflection of the chip lottery that is a fact of life for enthusiasts.
Whether or not a custom liquid cooling loop is worth the time, effort, and expense is really going to be a matter of opinion for each individual. As someone who likes working with his hands in general, there was a lot of appeal in just building something, and a tremendous amount of satisfaction when, performance metrics be damned, the thing worked. When that pump fires up and you hear that coolant start circulating, and then after you've filled up the system just seeing the coolant cycle...that's rewarding. This is something that a lot of people have accomplished, sure, but it's much more work than just assembling a computer and sticking a CLC on the processor.
Performance wise, if you're trying to get a better overclock on the CPU, I think we're at the point where a good closed loop cooler is probably going to be enough. Dumping boatloads of voltage into it just to get incrementally higher performance past the chip's inflection point doesn't really do you any favors long term, so any increased thermal headroom a loop can offer you is somewhat negated.
Where I think watercooling really shines is when you apply it to graphics cards. High end graphics cards are ripe for it, with air coolers that are already being pushed fairly hard. Watercooling tanks the temperatures on those, and if you're feeling adventurous, can theoretically allow you some room to play with voltage and get a healthier bump in performance. I think it's worth it just for the low thermals and substantially reduced noise, personally, but if you're looking to sandwich two or more cards together, it's also nice not to have to worry about suffocating air coolers.
Finally, it's important to accept the limitations on the hardware you have. Chip lottery means that watercooling may just not give up the performance you were hoping for. It's often said that there are no guarantees when it comes to overclocking, but in the backs of all of our minds, with each generation of hardware, what we really want to know is "what's the typical overclock." What we really think is that we can count on the "typical overclock," but that's not true, and hopefully my experience here demonstrates that. Ian has an i7-4770K in his lab that won't go any higher than 4.2GHz for love or money. Overclocking is always going to be a gamble.
There are no clear recommendations that I can offer at the end of this experience; the best I can do is present you with the information and my experience and let you decide for yourself. I will say that Swiftech in particular has been tremendously helpful, overnighting me parts when I made mistakes and being exceptionally patient in answering any questions I had so that I could pass that information along to you. With a system like this on hand, it's difficult not to want to experiment and play in this new space, so expect at least an update or two with what I've done and tried and with more information in the future.
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meacupla - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
The only thing this article proves is...1: corsair cube case can't mount enough radiators
2: poor radiator choices
ShieTar - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Yeah, despite the description by Corsair, this case is most certainly not designed to work well with water cooling. I mean, it has a 330mmx460mm foot print, that should be enough for 6x120mm or even 6x140mm radiators on top. Set it up like that, add 360mm worth of intake fans to the bottom front, and you will look at much more cooling power than the current solution.On the other hand, the air flow looks great for the air cooled solution, with the drive cages nicely out of the way. Thats probably hurting the comparison number in the above review, the fact that we compare a great air cooling case with a mediocre water cooling case.
HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
"The last problem I ran into had to do with Swiftech's PWM splitter. While it's supposed to take the PWM signal from the motherboard and split it among all of the fans connected to it, the fans all wound up just running at full speed. It's tough to figure out exactly where the blame lies or if it's just an incompatibility. Honestly, I think a rig like this is pretty much the ideal situation for a Corsair Link kit, where extremely tight and flexible software control of multiple PWM channels is vital. Gigabyte has made a fantastic motherboard here in the G1.Sniper 5, but their fan control is still woefully lackluster."Sounds like you were trying to split a (supposed) PWM fan port other than your main CPU PWM port. On my P8Z77-V I had this brilliant idea to split the PWM fan ports I needed and let the motherboard run the rest, including the CPU separately. To let some fans go up and down more frequently than others.
Asus and other motherboard makers will tell you that all their 4 pin fan ports are PWM, but that's only half-true. Because they want them to be compatible with 3 pin fan control mechanisms, they are not true PWM controlled, so when you try to use a PWM splitter with them (all but that single 4 pin PWM fan port they have dedicated to CPU (and not the extra one either)), then they go full speed.
I had to wind up splitting all my fans off of just the main CPU 4 pin. This works, but it's not ideal because ALL my fans go up and down with what my CPU fan is doing. That's more noise than I'd like, but it's still less than the alternative.
All this to say, it's the motherboard maker's fault and you guys have been letting them get a free pass for years now on this. Perhaps you should start testing it and take them to task over it. I wouldn't blame the 8 pin splitter as I have it and it works fine.
The Von Matrices - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
That's exactly what was true with my previous ASUS P6X58D Premium board. My new ASRock Z87-Extreme6 has only two PWM fam connectors, but both are wired correctly and are independently controlled. I agree that reviewers should test for this issue, but it seems that people who specifically want PWM fans are a minor component of the fan buying market and most will settle for 3-pin voltage controlled fans.mohamed Siran - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
pls can you tel first photo corsair Case model ?Kathrine647 - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
like Gregory said I am alarmed that a stay at home mom able to earn $5886 in 1 month on the internet. visit their website............B u z z 5 5 . com open the link without spacesdon_k - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
"The reason is that watercooling necessitates using a water pump, and while they can be tuned down for efficiency, they're never going to be dead silent. An air cooler will always be a fan plus heatsink; watercooling adds a pump."Excellent article, very thorough, one thing though, I would beg to differ on this point. Pump noise rather obviously depends on the pump. The MCP35X that you chose, while a very good pump, is not the most silent. A D5 on the other hand can be completely, note not relatively but completely, silent when decoupled meaning not sitting or attached directly to the case so it does not cause vibrations on the case, even on its highest setting.
Similarly, how much fan noise you have depends on the fans you get and how fast you run them. The benefit with watercooling is you have a much larger surface area from which to dissipate heat, which gives you the option of several slow fans without sacrificing cooling capability.
Sure, you would get an few less points Celcius with higher RPMs but why bother when you're already at such a cool temperature and you need to double your fan speed and go from silent to noisy to do it.
To give you some concrete numbers from my own testing, a 3x120/140 radiator with a low FPI that is designed for low speed fans and 3 good quality fans at 700RPM is near silent. At 500RPM or less, completely silent. Pump noise is a non-issue, a D5 can be completely silent as I mentioned earlier.
Going from 500RPM to 1300RPM, the max on my fans, gives me a max of 5-7C decrease in water temperature under continuous load on both CPU and GPU, meaning running at 100% load for as long as necessary until temperatures stabilise at their maximum point.
Some watercoolers like to run high RPM fans and high FPI radiators so they can get really good temperatures at the expense of noise. Others do the opposite to get a silent system and still get better temps than on air. The choice is yours.
Shelbino - Monday, October 7, 2013 - link
Dustin, thanks very much for this article. I'm glad you supplied so much detail. My only big problem with the specific design here is the cost. I did a tally of the liquid cooling parts you used, and came up with a total of nearly one thousand dollars! IMHO, that's w-a-y too much for the relatively modest performance gains. Despite that, thanks for this detailed piece on liquid cooling.Volnaiskra - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link
So.......three days of work and hundreds of dollars for more noise, more power consumption, more maintenance, and about a 2% performance increase?I was seriously considering watercooling before, but you have thoroughly talked me out of it!!
expatswe - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link
hmm, I liked the article and how the system was put together. Except I can not understand why it was so important to put the pump in the crammed space behind the powersupply when half the case was empty anyway.I was though really disappointed on how the over clocking was done and the results being shown. To me it looks like the writer ran out of steam and thus simply settled on the basic results on overclocking with liquid compared to air. It would be easy to get the system up to atleast 4.7GHz in that setup. I doubt it was the processor (which was given the blame)
30 db is the "noise" level in a quiet bedroom at night. 40db is a quiet library. Thus in the test it would be more interesting to know what the temperature levels seen on for example the water with CPU over clocked at different speeds without the GPU's being overclocked and then with one overclocked vs 2 overclocked to max level. Since the system was in series the water was effectively pre-heated before going into the GPU's. This is a common solution and since the article is written for beginners that is what would be interesting. Temperatures then also shown at no load vs full load at the relevant speeds would have been relevant.
This was not really a test of game speeds and software speeds as such but that of a build of cooling systems.