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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cbgoding - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
It's a PWM controlled pump that's advertised to be able to scale speeds with temperature. I'd say at least a few people do it. "Absolutely useless" is a bit of a stretch, you can have it barely spinning along at 1200 rpm at idle, and be able to really crank the pressure when it counts. Some blocks, notably all of Swiftech's CPU blocks, respond well to increased pressure due to their absurd internal pressure drop. Now if you were using a Raystorm or HF or something similar, no, just leave it at the lowest setting and forget it.mum1989 - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
sorry, but i'ts a big fail ! :http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7363/58372...
Noise levels are worse with Liquid Cooling.
ShieTar - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Yes. As anybody who ever built a liquid cooling system can explain to you, and as is clearly described in the article itself, the pump operation means that you always have a higher idle noise with a Liquid Cooling system.Not saying it can't be improved upon by picking a different pump, actively controlling it so it won't run at full speed all the time, and maybe placing it in a sound-damped compartment within your case.
Of course, the air flow setup looks excellent for the air cooling case, but far less than optimal for the liquid case. I mean, first off you have the two radiators basically in series, the top radiator will have to handle the air which has been already heated by the front radiator and additionally by the components within the case. That will be much less efficient than having 2 radiators in parallel, each with his own supply of fresh air. On top of that, there seems to be a rear exhaust fan installed which pulls out the same air pocket which the top radiator is trying to feed off. Given that the rear fan has no added resistance of a radiator, it will probably completely starve off the top radiator.
So yeah, I think a lot of steps could be improved about the setup described above, but calling it a "big fail" is just excessive. And most certainly, even the perfect water cooling setup will not show lower idle noises than the equally perfected air cooling system. Load: sure, Idle: never.
malkolm - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Nice article, thanks for the work and effort you put into this.As a few of the commenters here pointed out this is only one article with one cunclusion and one can easily find hundreds well written articles elsewhere.
I builded like ~100 custom-watercooled systems in the past 12 years as liquid cooling here in germany is by far more a topic than in the US. A reason for this might be that the sensitivity to noise and the corresponding need for a very silent (to absolutely inaudible!) consumer systems evolved earlier due to the lack of noisy air conditioning. Whatever...
What i want to point out is: Watercooling IS the only way to make a hardcore gaming system absolutely silent. The one i use atm consists of a i7-3930K and 2xGTX580 what maxes out to ~800Watts of thermal power while overclocked. So far i didn't figure out how it could be possible to cool such a monster reliable and very silent at the same time only with aircooling. I say its impossible, but maybe some might tell me how.
"Watercooling" itself is quite a lie, because in the end its again air that interacts as the media between the hot system on the one hand and the cool environment on the other. What the water in the watercooling really does is to overcome the limited spacial offering right inside the machine to actually cool. Esentially the water only transports the heat to a place where it can be cooled much more efficiently: To the border of your case or even out of it (using an external radiator).
Dustin you're right pointing out that you essentially have to add a pump to the system as a noise contributor when using watercooling, but you're wrong with the assumption that this automatically leads to additional noise. Of course youre screwed with a big pump like a laing D5, but there are a lot of pumps out there that are designed not to be heared in a completely silent environment.
Back ~15years as the whole pc watercooling stuff started people were looking for a decent pump. What they ended up with were waterpumps designed for aquaria in livingrooms. Esentially one of the best available waterpumps nowadays are (modded) waterpumps from Eheim: A specialist for aquaria ;)
Derivates from this (like the Aquacomputer Aquastream XT) can't be heard outside of the case. In a 0.5m distance apart my noisemeter shows 0.0sone , so i would call this inaudible.
As for the radiators, what you need ist area. The only thing better then lots of cooling area is...even more cooling area. As a rule of thumb systems i sell as silent have !at least! (100mm)² radiator area per 100 Watts of expected maximum thermal output.
Cooling area is the only real advantage of watercooling over conventional aircooling, so use it! For a conventional single CPU / single GPU configuration a few radiators mounted to your case are enough. For a system like you use here in this article i would strongly recommend an external radiator (like the Watercool MoRa3).
Considering these things (pump and area) everything else than what you found out and concluded would have been magic. If you REALLY want to go for silence one has to rebuild the cooling parts.
At the end a few sidenotes regarding watercooling:
-> watercooling helps save energy! each of my GTX580 uses about 40Watts less energy when used in my watercooled system (approx. 40-45°C GPU-temperature) than aircooled (80+°C). This more than makes up for the lousy ~5W needed for a waterpump.
-> You learn to allways cary a pipe wrench in your emergency bag for pc repairing;)
-> External cooling with an external radiator opens the field for put every(! except for optical drives if you need one) component with moveable parts away from your computer, your desk or even the same room. Once the tube system is completely filled one single small pump can drive meters of tube and many liters of water. In summer my radiator is planted outside my house in a shadowy corner so my room doesnt get heated by my computer at all.
malkolm - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Oh and what i forgot to mention and comes into my mind while reading the comments and complains about no fullcover parts for nvidia and so on:The hardware situation in the EU seems to be completely differnt from the US. Here we have plenty of companies in the small market of watercooling. A brief look at newegg forced me to post this link: http://www.aquatuning.de/index.php/language/en
Not for advertisement, but only to show some of you what you really CAN buy, provided you know where to look at it.
Death666Angel - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Phobya DC water pumps are also great, cheap-ish, powerful enough for most normal systems (CPU+ dual GPU), small and quiet. I would never use a Laing without some serious noise dampening involved.mapesdhs - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Given the level of experience you've referred to, I would be most interested if you could
write an article about these issues, covering the additional aspects of watercooled
builds you've mentioned which are not dealt with in the article, such as external units, etc.
As it happens, I'm in the process of building a 3930K setup with four 580s (for AE), only
air cooled atm, but I was thinking about switching to a watercooled config next year, mainly
for the GPUs (the enormous Phanteks cooler already does a good job of running the CPU
at 4.7). So, would you be up for writing some kind of article? I'd be happy to include it on
my site, full credit, etc., or maybe Anand would be interested?
Dustin has done a nice job of writing an introduction to this field, but there are always so
many more questions someone new to watercooling will want to ask. Starting off with a
closed loop kit isn't complicated (I've built two with H100s) but moving to a custom loop
can be rather daunting. The number of 'additional' relevant points made by numerous
posters shows just how broad this subject is.
Btw, re choice of CPU, once again I'm ever more convinced that a used 2700K is still
a better buy. :D Last one I bought (150 UKP on eBay) took mere minutes to get it
going at 5.0 with an old used Venomous-X on an ASUS M4E. Delidding is not for
the faint of heart...
Ian.
PS. A heartful thanks to all those posting comments! When it comes to sensible/useful
comments worth reading (as opposed to the usual CPU/GPU flame wars), this has to
be one of the best comment threads I've come across. Hmm, perhaps those who end
up meddling with watercooling are just more sensible in general? :)
mapesdhs - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
NB: I was referring to malkolm.
cjs150 - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
A few points about water-cooling1. It is fun. You get your hands dirty (or wet!) in actually building what you want not want the manufacturer wanted for the price.
2. It is not cheap.
3. Pick your case carefully, look at forums for what others have done.
4. A water cooled system is spot cooling: ie it cools only those spots where you have a water block. Air cooling is more general - as long as you have air movement you have a cooling effect. It is vital you have some air movement to cool things such as memory, hard drives.
5. Custom loops should be designed with both air bleeding and drainage in mind.
6. If you have a powerful GPU than a water cooled system will be a lot quieter than running on air.
7. A dremel is your friend !
willis936 - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Great article. It's a very rational look at things that are all too often romanticized. Everyone wants that 5GHz 4770k and a fancy water cooling kit but it's important to stop and ask yourself what you're really interested in. While I'd love to see an article analyzing everything about delidding from when it started, the myths, the logic, and of course lots and lots of testing, I doubt I'll ever see it done because it comes close to stepping on some political toes.Personally on air I could hit 4.2 @ 1.2v on a 4770k before running into thermal boundaries and a delid got me to 4.5 @ 1.3v with stress test temps in the 70s. To get to 4.6 stable I need literally at least 1.45v which results in thermal boundaries. Even if a delid with a custom water loop would keep that temp under control it's a long ways to go for a tiny bit. Money would be better spent on a binned chip that could hit 4.8 on air. That's the nature of the beast and thank you for addressing it and giving people a realistic look at what haswell OC is like. All of the reviews always talk about engineering samples which doesn't give a down to earth idea of what a retail sample will be like.