Have you left custom water cooled setups

Iv avoided water cooling due to all the potential issues which became guaranteed issues with the test of time. It's too risky to have an issue especially when I'm not at home and the kids etc are using the pc.
Will stick to air, it's most reliable
 
I've had a custom loop for 8 years now and it has served me really well also in the sense that I don't change parts as often anymore because it's so 'difficult'.
 
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Haamur said:
I've had a custom loop for 8 years now and it has served me really well also in the sense that I don't change parts as often anymore because it's so 'difficult'.
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My son's rig (5700x3d, 2080Ti) is in a loop roughly the same age. I change the fluid and blow the dust & cat fur out of the rads annually, but it's otherwise been problem free.

Likely replace the GPU in the new year (9070XT) and he's asked for a SFF case, so I'm looking forward to putting the MoRa 420 to work.
 
RedMogg said:
My son's rig (5700x3d, 2080Ti) is in a loop roughly the same age. I change the fluid and blow the dust & cat fur out of the rads annually, but it's otherwise been problem free.

Likely replace the GPU in the new year (9070XT) and he's asked for a SFF case, so I'm looking forward to putting the MoRa 420 to work.
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I just rebuild my loop to the another case. All the fittings and ZMT tubes looked pristine and I only swapped few tubes and one fitting. Never had any leakage while running my loop with soft tubes and EK premixed liquid *knockknock*.
 
I used to be really into water cooling, there were a lot of benefits, the main one for me was increased performance, with obviously looks and lower noise levels as I used to over spec the rads. At one point I even had a massive external rad lol.

Nowadays most parts (gpu and cpu) are at their limit, the focus is more on undervolting, so watercooling won’t really give me much more performance gains. The only reason to watercool now is for the appearance and lower noise in my opinion.

I just want something hassle free with minimal maintenance so only use air coolers - draining was never a big deal, but installing a Noctua air cooler is more convenient. Aio coolers have never interested me.
 
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I won't stop watercooling. There's something magical about it, I don't get the same pleasure from anything. Sometimes I just sit down, drink my coffee and stare at my custom loop like a little kid and I feel like I've created something so special lol
 
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I tried to ditch my water cooled setup a while back because I was annoyed with the maintenance and difficulty of swapping parts. After about 6 months I was back to water cooling because having fans revving up and down really got to me.

Yes you can tune them a bit to reduce the frequency, but well-set up water cooling is night and day. The price of entry is enough to make you wince these days, but I can't make the compromise on noise and performance.
 
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For me it’s the size you can achieve relative to performance with watercooling in combination with the performance.

I run an external radiator (mora) and pump and the case is very small for what’s in it.
 
I ditched water cooling with my GPU swap.
While I really enjoyed the near silence of many slow fans I needed a pump and a new water block which would have added £400 on top of the £1k for a 4080 in Aug 23.

I switched to a 280 AIO and the oversize cooler on the card is actually pretty quiet.

I only really game on that PC now, it's effectively a steam box / xbox so I'm usually wearing headphones or steaming to the TV, not that it makes a lot of noise. with a 5800X 3D I don't need to run the AIO fans any harder than the WC loop.
For day to to day I'm using a Linux mini PC which is silent unless I try to game on it. This cheap mini is probably 70% of my usage now so that replaces the idle wine of the tower.

The noisiest thing is my work laptop, Lenovo 6 core T14s.... fan on that is always making a racket, probably due to all the corporate spyware tracking my every blink and keystroke.

These days, I don't have the time for overclocking, both CPU and GPU are undervolted.
For me, PC parts have become expensive to the point where I can'tr justify the cost of WC and most GPU now ship with huge coolers which are good enough acoustically.

Still like to see a nice clean WC build, but more as a piece of art.
 
For maintenance all it take is a few strategically placed QDCs and you’ll be fine. Becomes very easy to swap parts and troubleshoot. Agreed though, they can get expensive quick. I have 2 pair QDCs on each the CPU block, GPU block, and my Mora 400 radiator. Came from hard tubing, now maintenance is a breeze. The system is whisper quiet. Like others said performance boost is negligible but the system runs cool on OC, and in some games I did see a small 5%-8% improvement in FPS and better 1% lows. (Excuse the cable management, its still a work in progress lol!)

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I still have mine, but I only use pure di water and mayhems XT1 clear...
flushed it after 3 years, took apart the blocks and everything was almost clean, very little sign of anything.
I also use EK ZMT tubing

So I guess if you don't use dyes and don't care about the looks, you can have a custom loop as reliable and maintenance free as an AIO.
 
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