Freddie's new water cooled baby!

**Freddie** · July 28, 2012, 07:01 PM

Hi Guys, I'm back. I haven't been around due work, girlfriends, general life and a newly found obsession with the original series of Dallas (I now hero worship JR Ewing!). But earlier in the year I decided to to get my computer upgraded, new CPU's and video cards are on the market and prices on SSD's have fallen through the floor so why not?

First of all just a heads up, I'm getting on a bit now back when I joined TWCenter in 2004 was fresh out of uni and had just found my first full time job. Fast forward to 2012 I now a lot thinner, have great career, my own flat and a steady girlfriend and looking to settle down and as a result I play less and less games and I don't have as much time to spend helping you guys out with your computer problems, sorry. However I came into some money at Christmas and I want to got out with a bang and tryout something that I've never done before - a water cooled PC!

This is my old PC that I built 3 years ago, Q6700 that I had running at 3Ghz (crappy overclocker), 4Gb DDR3, Radeon 5770 1Gb, X48 platform, this old warhorse is now living out it's days inside of HTPC that I'll post another thread on. With my new PC I wanted to sort the cable management, cooling and I wanted it quieter then my previous PC.

(a bit of a mess but still capable.)

My new PC is based on the following hardware

Lian Li PC-50R midi case (I'm reusing my old case)
Intel Core i5 3570K
Gigabyte Z77 UD3H
Corsair 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz
Nvidia GTX670 2Gb
Corsair Gold Series 650 watt fully modular PSU
Sandisk 64Gb SSD
Seagate 2Tb 5900 RPM HDD
Scythe 4 way fan controller

Cooling Setup
1x XSPC RX240 Radiator
1x XSPC RS140 Radiator
1x XSPC RS120 Radiator
EK Multioption Reservoir X2 250ml
Laing 10W DDC-Pump 12V DDC-1T Pump
XSPC Raystrom CPU block
EK-FC670 GTX - Acetal GPU block
4x EK right angled 3/8 compression fittings
14x EK 3/8 chrome compression fittings
3/8 Clear tubing
Mayhems Pastel - Blueberry Blue Coolant 1 litre
Miscellaneous fittings for rads and pumps etc

The first thing I will say is watercooling doesn't come cheap! Second was to strip down my old rig and get it ready for the my parts.

(computer stripped down)

(support plates that need removing to make way for rad)

I wanted to mount he RX240 rad in the front bays, I removed the hard drive caddy to make room along with the support plates.

Well here we go, I've mounted the res and pump using a 3.8 male to male fitting and then secured them to rad using an UN bracket I bought from a UK specialist web store. It was then a matter of securing the pump with additional support from a EK res bracket that I had to hand bend, the end results wasn't good but it's effective.

(stock Lian Li fans are good enough, there going to be kept quite by a fan controller anyway)

Here's the main rad from the back fitted into my case using some UNI bay brackets I bought from OCUK.

And from the front of the case.

This basic diagram shows how my setup will eventually work!

My SSD is mounted on the back of my motherboards tray which meant having to route the SSD cable to the motherboard flat along the tray.

A trail fit of my cables before I started mounting the rest of my hardware in place.

I went ahead and fitted a rear 120 single rad, it's only 30mm thick but that's what most hydro coolers use. However the 140 single rad that I fitted into the top of my case didn't fit!! The case roof just sat ontop of the support bars. Arghh!

You can see where it was hitting, it only needed to be a few mm wider and it would have just slipped in, now I would have to seriously do some case modding which I wanted to avoid but needs must.

Well after much swearing and cutting latter and I had made some crude adjustments just so I could fit a 140 rad which I don't really need if I'm being honest just seemed a waste not to use the 140mm fans to help cool everything.

And it fits.........barely!

Time for the hot running Ivy Bridge to meet mister PK1 thermal paste along with a state of the art thermal water block!

Ah what's this Freddie with an Nvidia card? An EVGA! The plan was to buy a Radeon 7950 3Gb but at the start of July 7950's were the same price a GTX670 which is stupid pricing from AMD as much as I like AMD's products their pricing for this generation of cards is mind boggling, yes I know they have to make their money back on all the R&D they plough into these things but I'm a bigger fan of value for money (something that AMD has been brilliant at for years until now).

It's naked!

Hat's of to Nvidia for creating a powerhouse on tiny piece of silicon and a small card.

Next up is leak testing and priming.

Oddly enough when I turned it on for the first time it did spring a leak! It was the male to male fitting between the pump and res, I had removed the res several time and put it back on because I wasn't happy with the orientation but at some point I had overscrewed it and the rubber seal had cracked! Fortunately the EK water block for my GTX670 had some spare O rings I just slipped on the faulty fitting and it fixed it right away!

Priming and getting all the air out took several hours, the bigger the loop the longer it takes I guess.

I ended up mounting the 2Tb hard drive on inside one of the old drive cages and used double sided tape to secure to the floor of the case.

All the fans have been wired into the fan controller and the pump is running of it as well so I keep the noise down while it's idle.

I'll post some temps and overclocking results a bit latter but so far I have already got this running at 4.7Ghz Intel Burn test extreme stable.

4.8/4.9 might be achievable but I'm a bit nervous about the amount of volts I'm having to run it off to keep it stable. So far the GPU had been a disappointment, overclocking by 90Mhz has made it unstable still it's mega quick at stock so I'm not worried.

**Top-Tier-Tech** · July 28, 2012, 09:38 PM

I've never understood watercooling... unless the goal is to see how many numbers you can get in benchmarks it isn't particularly sensical. The 3570K can be run on a 100% passive cooler at stock and can be taken to 4.5ghz. with much cheaper, non-risky air cooling. If you were going to run two 680s or 7970s and game at 5760x1080 then it makes some sense at least. But then again why not just buy a better CPU? A 3770K with a reasonable overclock on a $50 air cooler would get you better performance and save money.

Heck for the price of those water-cooling components you could just about step up to the 2011 platform and toss in a 3930K.... I guess this must be one of those personal "this is fun!" projects eh? At least you have a modern PC again.

It wasn't that long ago you put up the details on your last build circa September 2009... Time does fly.

**Freddie** · July 29, 2012, 03:36 AM

Originally Posted by Top-Tier-Tech

I've never understood watercooling... unless the goal is to see how many numbers you can get in benchmarks it isn't particularly sensical. The 3570K can be run on a 100% passive cooler at stock and can be taken to 4.5ghz. with much cheaper, non-risky air cooling. If you were going to run two 680s or 7970s and game at 5760x1080 then it makes some sense at least. But then again why not just buy a better CPU? A 3770K with a reasonable overclock on a $50 air cooler would get you better performance and save money.

Heck for the price of those water-cooling components you could just about step up to the 2011 platform and toss in a 3930K.... I guess this must be one of those personal "this is fun!" projects eh? At least you have a modern PC again.

It wasn't that long ago you put up the details on your last build circa September 2009... Time does fly.

There's not a chance in hell I would even consider running ANY CPU chip at 4.5Ghz passive, it might ok for a short while but eventually heat will build up in the case and eventually it fall over and crash. And even if it were stable for any reasonable length of time the temps it would reach wouldn't be healthy in the long run. The other issue with air cooling is for decent performance you need huge heavy heatsinks, on my last build I had modest Akasa Nero CPU cooler, not the biggest by any means, I had for 3 years and when I went to remove it the other week I noticed the motherboard had 'sagged' due to strain it was under from the heatsink. That didn't fill me with confidence as top end HSF, like the Silver Arrow weighs over a kilo and take up a huge amount of space and don't perform as well as a custom water cooling loop.

I don't really get why any home consumer would buy a 2011 platform, what do you need 6 cores and quad channel memory for? The extra PCI-E lanes are irrelevant now PCI-E 3.0 is the new standard and if your running one software that's highly threaded the chances are you can use OpenGL or CODA to accelerate the programme, 2011 isn't without it's merits but for me there's nothing about it that I need.

I generally do a full rebuild every 3 years and a video card upgrade in-between and my last rebuild in 2009 wasn't exactly a major step up either, I wend from a Core2 Conroe E6400 to Core2 Kentfield Q6700, as far as overclocking goes I don't think the Q6700 went any higher then my old E6400. Looking back I wish I had gone with the Core i5 750, meh, at least that makes my new Ivy Bridge an even bigger upgrade.

Next up is removing the CPU heatshield and replacing the bacon grease Intel uses as thermal compound!

Originally Posted by Crazyeyesreaper

Water cooling actually makes sense with the Ivy bridge chips they need every advantage to keep temps down at higher overclocked, granted the 3570k runs far cooler

the 1.4v will burn that chip up tho,

im hitting 4.6GHz at 1.26v max load, avg load voltage is 1.22v

use Turbo to clock the CPU and use variable voltage, with an offset that way the chip clocks down when idle

simply put the higher heat from the extreme voltage will eventually kill the chip dry the TIM causing higher temps etc

For safe clocking Ivy should be kept UNDER 1.3 volts with 1.275 or lower being better for long term, They dont take voltage like Sandybridge or other Intel chips do, altho your temps arent bad the 3570k does do better on temeps than the 3770k.

This CPU I've got seems to love voltage, I must be missing something I haven't done much reading on IB overclocking but I could have sworn that by messing around with the PPL that can lower the amount of voltage you need for the CPU.

**Top-Tier-Tech** · July 29, 2012, 08:28 AM

Originally Posted by Freddie

There's not a chance in hell I would even consider running ANY CPU chip at 4.5Ghz passive, it might ok for a short while but eventually heat will build up in the case and eventually it fall over and crash. And even if it were stable for any reasonable length of time the temps it would reach wouldn't be healthy in the long run. The other issue with air cooling is for decent performance you need huge heavy heatsinks, on my last build I had modest Akasa Nero CPU cooler, not the biggest by any means, I had for 3 years and when I went to remove it the other week I noticed the motherboard had 'sagged' due to strain it was under from the heatsink. That didn't fill me with confidence as top end HSF, like the Silver Arrow weighs over a kilo and take up a huge amount of space and don't perform as well as a custom water cooling loop.

I don't really get why any home consumer would buy a 2011 platform, what do you need 6 cores and quad channel memory for? The extra PCI-E lanes are irrelevant now PCI-E 3.0 is the new standard and if your running one software that's highly threaded the chances are you can use OpenGL or CODA to accelerate the programme, 2011 isn't without it's merits but for me there's nothing about it that I need.

I generally do a full rebuild every 3 years and a video card upgrade in-between and my last rebuild in 2009 wasn't exactly a major step up either, I wend from a Core2 Conroe E6400 to Core2 Kentfield Q6700, as far as overclocking goes I don't think the Q6700 went any higher then my old E6400. Looking back I wish I had gone with the Core i5 750, meh, at least that makes my new Ivy Bridge an even bigger upgrade.

Next up is removing the CPU heatshield and replacing the bacon grease Intel uses as thermal compound!

To clarify I said the 3570K can be passively cooled at stock speeds only, and said that an overclock of 4.5ghz. can be done with air cooling (with fans). I would agree that the 2011 platform isn't exactly worth the money either but it does have better performance bench-marking capabilities which is apparently what you make gains on with only a GTX670 to go with your 4.7 overclock, that isn't helping your FPS in games all that much for the price and unless you frequently run extremely CPU intensive programs the watercooling cost doesn't justify itself there either IMO. *Shrug*

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 29, 2012, 12:50 AM

Water cooling actually makes sense with the Ivy bridge chips they need every advantage to keep temps down at higher overclocked, granted the 3570k runs far cooler

the 1.4v will burn that chip up tho,

im hitting 4.6GHz at 1.26v max load, avg load voltage is 1.22v

use Turbo to clock the CPU and use variable voltage, with an offset that way the chip clocks down when idle

simply put the higher heat from the extreme voltage will eventually kill the chip dry the TIM causing higher temps etc

For safe clocking Ivy should be kept UNDER 1.3 volts with 1.275 or lower being better for long term, They dont take voltage like Sandybridge or other Intel chips do, altho your temps arent bad the 3570k does do better on temeps than the 3770k.

**Freddie** · July 29, 2012, 11:41 AM

I have to say water cooling is expensive but the beauty is you can get big overclocks on your video card and CPU whilst leaving the fans running a low speed (provided you rads have a low FPI) and I'm a big stickler for fan noise. So the value of water cooling is in the eye of the beholder, performance wise yes it's rubbish value but if you like overclocking, quiet/silent computing and want low temps you only option is really to invest in a watercooling loop. Although saying that for £100 you could get a basic CPU loop which is only a few quid more then a Corsair H100 but would perform better and with that you can add to your latter on.

So what Top Tier Tech are you running?

**Top-Tier-Tech** · July 29, 2012, 02:56 PM

Originally Posted by Freddie

I have to say water cooling is expensive but the beauty is you can get big overclocks on your video card and CPU whilst leaving the fans running a low speed (provided you rads have a low FPI) and I'm a big stickler for fan noise. So the value of water cooling is in the eye of the beholder, performance wise yes it's rubbish value but if you like overclocking, quiet/silent computing and want low temps you only option is really to invest in a watercooling loop. Although saying that for £100 you could get a basic CPU loop which is only a few quid more then a Corsair H100 but would perform better and with that you can add to your latter on.

So what Top Tier Tech are you running?

My understanding without looking too much into it was that you need higher CFM fans to cool the rads adequately which means more fan noise overall doesn't it? Of course low FPI helps but it just doesn't seem like it would be ultimately quieter... I do 100% agree with you that higher costs are worth it to reduce noise levels as that always bothers me as well. I recently resold my stock EVGA GTX 670s because the stock fans have an aweful pitch on idle that drove me up a wall. Artic cooling makes some decent massive air coolers that run really quiet, I am almost certain they would be quieter than your 670's watercooling loop... Like the Accelero XTREME Plus II? What do you think?

I looked into CPU watercooling loop kits but even on those found their rated noise levels to be higher than custom air cooling options. If it were quieter I'd definitely try watercooling out but I just don't believe it is.

As far as what I'm running...

Recently I rebuilt my gaming rig into the Coolermaster Cosmos II case and threw in 4 Noctua fans. I'm waiting on a pair of GTX 560ti 448 core Zotac cards that I got off ebay for $190 a piece to come in before I fire up that rig and see how the Noctua cooling does, prior to that I'd been running in the Thermaltake Level 10 GT with the stock fans.

I have been going to great lengths to make all of my other desktops fully passive and fanless with SSDs to boot so that they are dead silent. I recently built a Z77 system to run my 3 55" screens in 2D surround silently for everything but gaming which is my sig rig of course with an i5-3450 under a Scythe Mugen without a fan, GT 640 (runs incredibly cool even without a fan), and a 400W Seasonic 80 Puls Gold fanless PSU.

I'm also working on a project rig with an FX-6100 under a better sink without fan (Scythe Ninja 3), and a 5870 eyefinity 6 card with a Zalman sink and a few other small GPUs to run a 12 screen desktop (6 21.5", 6 23"). My goal is to run that one 100% passively as well but I expect I may need to downclock the 5870 GPU, although it shouldn't really get too warm since I wouldn't be running any games on there anyway.

Besides that I have another eyefinity rig on 24" monitors for business related work, and an XP gaming PC for legacy games as well as an AMD fusion rig plus two other complete PCs sitting on my floor in pieces waiting to be either assembled or parted out and sold on ebay... not sure yet but I may be parting another one of my complete pcs out if the 12 screen project works as I hope it will. Regardless I'll be selling most of this out when I start building my house in a couple years, with the used PC market you can get away with minimal resale losses if you choose your stuff right. I just figure now's the time to try out all sorts of things that most people don't do so I know what I want most if/when I am limited in budget by a spouse

At least you have time to post pictures and all that on here, until Winter I'm stuck working 60-70 hour weeks so I don't get to do much with computers other than assemble them if I stay up late at night.

How are you liking the 670s performance and features BTW? I really liked the card if it wasn't for the stock fans which you managed to work around. It certainly looks tiny when naked as you have it.

**Freddie** · July 29, 2012, 04:13 PM

With that many rigs and parts you should look to get into reviewing hardware, post some reviews and companies might send you some review samples.

As for performance bear in mind I'm coming from a the warhorse that's a Radeon HD5770 all the way up to a GTX670 so for me that's nearly 4x better performance so yeah it's great to be able to play Crysis 2 with high res textures in DX11 and Fall of the Samurai in all it's glory. I'm a bit worried though, at the moment everything is running at stock and yet both Fall of the Samurai and Crysis 2 have crashed today, temps are fine so I'm hoping there one off's and this isn't ongoing issue. Also I have a bit of coil whine on the GTX670 but as I understand most of the new cards from AMD and Nvidia are suffering this and it's a big worry as I use headphones just a noticeable if I'm benchmarking.

I could have got a 3rd party air cooler for the GTX670 like the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus II but just like the big CPU heathinks it weighs in nearly a kilo which is going to cause it sag which is my experiance from using them in the past. Some of full tower Lian Li cases come with support bars but mines only a midi case so not much help there. Sure their better then stock coolers but again if your looking to overclock the fans will still ramp up (unless you force the fan speed to top out in a 3rd party like MSI Afterburner) the fans to keep the temps down and the card stable.

Right now the nosiest thing in my case is the pump, I can hear it, its' noticeable but I have wired into my fan controller. By turning the controller knob to half way it's now inaudible, the loudest thing I can hear now is the hum of my hard drive, this is by far the quietest computer I've ever owned, before I've had cases that have been fully lined with noise damping material, quiet fans, 3rd party video card coolers, the Zalman CPU flower heatsink (going back a few years now) but even that old rig was still noisy then this. Now if I turn everything up on the fan controller as if I were going to start playing a game to full power it sounds quite loud (not GTX480 loud but loud enough) but the game music through my headphones will drown it out and when I go back to the desktop I'll simply turn the power down.

I would have thought that anyone buying a tenement building otherwise known as the Coolermaster Cosmos II would be water cooling, all that space, it's ideal! I would have to buy a new desk if I owned such a case. If you worried about noise from water pump you get some that have inbuilt resistors or you can do what I've done and hook it up to a fan controller.

I really need to sort my HTPC which has all my old parts (Q6700, 4gb DDR3, 5770) all I need to do is format the hard drive to get it nice a quick and then install my app that allows me to use my Android phone to control the courser with my phone but I'm having to much fun with my new PC!

**Top-Tier-Tech** · July 29, 2012, 05:27 PM

I thought about reviewing hardware before... might be a cool winter project. Would need a good camera that can work with low light (room is painted dark blue for theater use and has insufficient camera lighting to boot.

Crysis 2... I bought the limited edition at launch, then waited for the DX11 patch, then never got around to playing it. ha. Perhaps the crashing is due to the brain freezes (

) your components are having. Actually... what temps are you getting on the 670 anyway? I don't think I seen that in your OP.

Ah, yes, pump noise too. I was just figuring fan noise before. It certainly looks awesome regardless.

I bought the Cosmos II on ebay for like 40% off retail brand new but in "distressed" original packaging. I mainly just wanted the hinged doors and ample spare space plus something that is XL-ATX ready. Just with my current components the thing weighs 65 pounds

Android PC remote eh? the new upper mid range ASUS board have nice apps like that for keyboard+mouse and remote desktop functionality. For an HTPC it is indeed a great thing.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 29, 2012, 05:27 PM

for the record the game crashes may be your overclock = not stable, i can pass LinX, IBT, Prime 95 etc with 4.7GHz on my chip but encoding H.264 video file = crash backing down to 4.6 = no crash, Ivy Bridge is a weird chip to clock, good news is clock for clock its faster than 2011, and in Shogun 2 its the faster chip.

As far as silence my Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro is silent requires a fan controller mind you but with my Define XL Black pearl its 100% silent much like Freddie i can here only my HDDs, granted all fans are hooked to a controller regardless temps are fine so epic win. Ive also grown to appreciate silence, years ago i didnt care back in the days of the 8800GTX 640 and 7800 GTX 512 i clocked the cards overvolted and then ran them at 100% fan speed but these days yea. silence is golden

**Totalheadache** · July 30, 2012, 10:47 AM

yeah love my 580 on water and about to stick the cpu on as well so i can squeeze it up to 4.2ghz...best thing i ever did pc wise. even with a triple rad and three scythes my pc is relatively quiet. gpu fan noise imho is by far the biggest noise creator in a pc.

p.s only thing i dont like freddie is your use of coolant. i prefer normal distilled with pt nuke and a silver kill coil.

maybe i'll post a pic in a week or so..