Computer Nerd content inside: Watercooled my gaming PC

Do you have a decibel meter? I’d love to know how loud your machine is between the PSU fan and any other fans you may have. That’s the only reason why I’d consider water cooling a future system.

Yeah actually I do. I will dig it out and see what it reads.

I will tell you the air cooled case with the ultra kaze fans running full bore was server loud. turned down to 15% each it was near silent and ran cool enough for anything other than games.

this one will play iracing on %25 fan speed and still not even get over anything to be worried about. I can turn off all the fans other than the single radiator fan and the intake and exhaust fans running silently and the temps are just fine for anything other than gaming!

This is nearly the worst possible heat transfer configuration for this system.

First you should be running all of the cooled components in parallel and not in series. Go buy yourself a bunch of tee’s for the coolant tubes and plumb it like this

Reservoir to pump.
Pump line then has multiple tees off the main line, with a single hose going to each coolant block. This way all components get the coldest water possible.

All the outlets from the coolant blacks tee back together to the drain hose. This line goes outside the case.

The drain line then tees into the big radiator AND the small radiator that you have moved OUTSIDE the case. This way both radiators have the hottest water flowing into them, the lowest water velocity and therefore the most cooling time.

The two radiator drains then tee back together, and flow back into the reservoir.

This is the BEST POSSIBLE heat transfer setup.

:thumbup

^ What about different water blocks having different flow restrictions, would you have to install smaller tubing to restrict flow to certain blocks? Or just beef the pump up?

Very good points. I can see that your saying and it makes sense.

The only thing I dont like about that would be all the extra connections, t’s and more tubing.

I get the concept of having each block get its own cool water supply, and the benifit of the water going slower through the rads to have more of a chance to wick the heat out of the water.

I would be interested to see what the water temps going in to a block and out would be then the same for the in and out on the rads.

I have a bunch of t’s well more like Y’s so I could try it but I would have to get more tubing and those connectors are a pain in the ass to disconnect! Its a bit more work than I want to do at this point on this rig. But if I get board i will configure it like you said.

so basicly mine is a high flow rate system with minimal restrictions. If I add say 5-T’s one for each block and 5 t’s for their returns, that would slow the flow rate down alot right, therefor allowing the water to be in the rads longer to wick the heat off better?

Someone want me to build them a sick rig? I want to try it his way to see the differences now!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v247/Vr6Fidelity/TCL/watercooling.jpg

Is your water pump variable speed?

The heat transfer equation here is hump shaped. If your water flow is too slow, not enough water will be flowing over the component and your system will heat up. However, if you flow the water too fast the water will not have enough time to pick up heat from the components, or shed that heat in the radiator section. Therefore there is an OPTIMUM water velocity that will provide the maximum heat transfer.

A variable speed pump will allow you to fine tune your flow for optimum cooling.

Changing to the parallel setup will provide much better cooling to your components especially those not first in line.

18C room temp 19C case temp. Proeor pegged and GPU running a test at around 80% load

Edit mind you i didnt notice I am at 1.4V vcore. That was for stable 4.5ghz, I knocked the clock down because the wife had to use the pc all day yesterday and I didnt bump it back up. so thats a high voltage for 4.2ghz

no pump isnt variable I dont think.