Exactly how hard is it to water cool your CPU and GPU?

[cHk4]

I've owned one water-cooled PC which I bought as a pre build from OcUK many years ago as the thought of water-cooling scares the hell out of me.

With the new Nvidia cards and CPUs on the way I'm thinking of going down the water-cooling route for my next build, looking at the pre builds OcUK do I just feel for the money I could potentially buy the parts and build a better machine. However, this brings me back to my first point in that it scares the hell out of me.

I know Corsair do some kits but I think I want my GPU under water this time, I'm not a massive overclocker or anything like that just want to keep temps of my components down.

Just how hard is it? Any advice or things you wish you knew before you went down the water cooled route?

Thanks

 

[cHk4]

Is there anyway to avoid taking the loop apart all apart and cleaning it? Like if you replaced the liquid every 6 months say? I really want to do this for my next build wether that’s doing it myself or a pre build or getting someone to do it. Just taking it apart scares me

 

[cHk4]

There are so many factors to that. What soft tubing you pick that *can* leech, temperature of the water long term, lots of light in the room, what kind of coolant. Yes you can flush it every 6 months but those 6 months each time will eventually add up and lead to a full tear down. Especially if you start changing brand of coolants.

What aspect scares you? As long as you don't ramp in fittings to acrylic with brute strength, you only want to squash the o rings to create the seal, checking o rings for any tears, nicks or brittleness, pressure testing each part before and during building eliminating any potential leaks during the process. There's really nothing scary to it.

It's just like mechanical plumbing lego. As well as planning out the routing of your loop.

Honestly, I guess it's more fear of the unknown as it's not anything I've ever done before. It does sound simple when you put it like that lol.

I do have a further question and this may be a case of it's an unknown but for example AMD are moving to the LG socket, if I got a CPU block for a 7950x lets say, would all the chips that come out use the same block or would say the 8950x (example) need a different block? Obviously I know if I go Raptor Lake it's the last of this type of chip so there won't be any upgrade path for CPU.

Thanks