Unnecessary watercooling, waste of money?

I fancy building a custom case that includes a water cooling loop. However I've only recently just built my PC, and there's really nothing wrong with it at all, performance is more than good enough for what I need and the temps are fine.

The price of a watercooling loop could easily pay for a CPU or GPU upgrade or even some more RAM or another SSD as I'm only on an i5-6500/R9 390 with 8GB 2400mhz RAM and a 240GB SSD.

Has anyone built a totally pointless watercooling setup and regretted not spending the money on more worthwhile upgrades instead? To make things worse I've only just bought a Corsair H45 which is doing a great job (CPU temp is low 20's at idle, doesn't go above low 40's at full load).

The only actual benefit I can see is that I'd end up with a very quiet system as opposed to the racket that the GPU's fans make, and most components could be re used on future builds.

Unless you're interested in pushing overclocks/benchmarks I'm not sure I'd bother with the complexity and cost of WC... I have a rather excessive WC setup in my PC but 0 regrets

Watercoling for me was a great way to be more "hands on" with something i enjoyed (building pc's) and you can really look at the parts in detail when your adding blocks etc, you can also chose the way yoy want your pc to look.

+ i couldnt get past 4ghz on my phenom 1090t so watercooled it and never done anything but watercooling since

ste91 said:

The only actual benefit I can see is that I'd end up with a very quiet system as opposed to the racket that the GPU's fans make.

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For me that's the very reason I've spent stupid amounts of money on watercooling kit.

It's one of them things, people do it if they want to.

People modify cars, other people think it's stupid, people can spend their money how ever they like.

Personally I went Watercooling as I wanted a new challenge, I've made mistakes, learned things and now have a pc that pretty much passive cools itself apart from in mega intensive games.

You do what you want to do, not what you think you should do/People are telling you to do.

For me i enjoy it and its a hobby/pastime.

Originally many many years ago it was to get better performance (i competed in hwbot records).

My last two builds has been more about the silence esp my current build but I wstill want max performance 24/7 while gaming.

Value for money? No way.

Off top of my head my current expenditure on water cooling bits for my current build is well past £1,000. I could have bought a second Titan for that money.

Resale value when I come to swap again I will be lucky to get 25% of that back.

I do my water cooling for the aesthetics and fun building it out. I could have bought a Titan with what I have spent, but its surprising how much pleasure you get when you start and then want to keep changing it.
I do not overclock and I do not bench, but I have one very quite PC which looks amazing and that is the point for me!

I watercool for noise reasons only.

I watercool for aesthetic reasons

I watercool for low noise,overclocking, looks and the.enjoyment of setting it all up

Watercooled for noise, looks and enjoyment putting it all together, Cannot see myself going back to air.

So there are plenty of people out there who use watercooling even though they could have spent the money on a better CPU/GPU/RAM/etc... instead?

Just pricing up some random parts, a couple of "cheap" 240mm rads is about £70, a lot of pumps are around £80, then around £100 for a couple of waterblocks, and then the extras like heatsinks for the other bits on the GPU, pipe and fittings, fans, etc... it's easily £350+ so it's very nearly the same price as if I was to sell my R9 390, add that money together and buy a GTX 1080. Or a 1070 with a hybrid cooler.
Although that opens up another question - what's the point in having a GTX 1080 if you're only running a 1080p @ 60hz monitor?

The more I look into it the more I want to go down the watercooling route but it just seems a lot to spend after being so budget-minded when building the system in the first place I should have just gone all out from the start lol.

Unless your on the bleeding edge or just like a silent system its really all about "Because I can"

hell im thinking abut tyring to fit a custom loop into a node 202 for my mrs.... why? BECAUSE I CAN (try)


(Now if only only her student finance hadent ****ed up and all my wage wasnt being eaten up to cover all the bills for the next 3 months )

I water-cooled my graphics card for a combined £75. I did it for the cooling not the asthetics or the enjoyment, simply for the noise. I've also cooled for cooling but these days it's all about the noise.

I cant break the habit!!!

I've started water cooling before any commercial solution was out and just cant stop.

A mix of aesthetics, noise and cooling ability just means its the default setup for me.

ste91 said:

The only actual benefit I can see is that I'd end up with a very quiet system as opposed to the racket that the GPU's fans make, and most components could be re used on future builds.

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You can use different fans on these things... Be cheaper than a full WC loop.

But if you just fancy doing it, then why not...

I've decide to watercool because I don't like money ..... Or noise, or Heat.

I would say that I have a pointless watercooled system, as I am only cooling my cpu with a 360 and 240 rad. And the Cpu is hardly overclocked. Have I spent a lot of money, Probably. But I tend to buy things here and there so I don't realise how much it had totally cost. When I started out I picked up a load of second hand parts, and since then I have had the bug and upgraded everything bit by bit.

Do I regret it, No.

Am I going to spend more money on it, Yes. I am looking to have a go at a hardline setup.
because it is something I have not done and it will be a nice challenge.

The reason why originally was noise, and now it is mostly aesthetics.