Moving away from watercooling!

hamza_tm said:
Hah, I just went in and finally extracted that 5080 last night. Several hours, torn fingers, two small disasters and a completely disassembled build later, and I have it.

Rebuilt the PC with the original RTX 3080 for my brother, reservoir leaked and gushed coolant all over the floor, cleaned it up, reassembled, thought okay we're good.

Filled up the reservoir, then the outlet tube leaked at the other end! Had to scramble to undo the compression fitting and hold it up higher than the res to stop the flow. Then struggled to redo the compression fitting properly, every wrong squeeze and I'd have more coolant gush out over the PSU wires I'd shoved down the back...

Finally got it together, carried the monstrous thing upstairs to the bathroom and stuck it next to an industrial-grade dehumidifier sucking up moisture and blasting warm, dry air over it all night.

Dried nicely by this morning, but the pump wouldn't spin up properly. Water just lazily, weakly trundled along the tubes barely making any progress. Luckily I use transparent tubing rather than that EPDM stuff so I could clearly see something was wrong. Somehow managed to lift, rotate, move and otherwise manhandle the entire 15kg+ monster of a machine every which way to get air out and move water along until I at least had some water covering the CPU, then managed to boot into BIOS. Turns out setting the pump speed to 100% manually resolved the issue and the trusty D5 jumped into life blasting liquid with vigour through the two 360 rads, endless tubing, a CPU and GPU block and the res.

Bit of an experience.

Loading up the PC and the like-sized box of WC gear into the car and off it goes!
Click to expand...
Always bleed the system using a separate, external PSU. A simple wire bridging a live and ground pin on the 24-pin ATX connector will fire it up.

That way, if you have any leaks, there is no risk to the system you're bleeding. To double up: Running distilled water only also means that the water isn't conductive in any way. You could pour it on your mobo and your rig would be fine.
 
hamza_tm said:
Hah, I just went in and finally extracted that 5080 last night. Several hours, torn fingers, two small disasters and a completely disassembled build later, and I have it.

Rebuilt the PC with the original RTX 3080 for my brother, reservoir leaked and gushed coolant all over the floor, cleaned it up, reassembled, thought okay we're good.

Filled up the reservoir, then the outlet tube leaked at the other end! Had to scramble to undo the compression fitting and hold it up higher than the res to stop the flow. Then struggled to redo the compression fitting properly, every wrong squeeze and I'd have more coolant gush out over the PSU wires I'd shoved down the back...

Finally got it together, carried the monstrous thing upstairs to the bathroom and stuck it next to an industrial-grade dehumidifier sucking up moisture and blasting warm, dry air over it all night.

Dried nicely by this morning, but the pump wouldn't spin up properly. Water just lazily, weakly trundled along the tubes barely making any progress. Luckily I use transparent tubing rather than that EPDM stuff so I could clearly see something was wrong. Somehow managed to lift, rotate, move and otherwise manhandle the entire 15kg+ monster of a machine every which way to get air out and move water along until I at least had some water covering the CPU, then managed to boot into BIOS. Turns out setting the pump speed to 100% manually resolved the issue and the trusty D5 jumped into life blasting liquid with vigour through the two 360 rads, endless tubing, a CPU and GPU block and the res.

Bit of an experience.

Loading up the PC and the like-sized box of WC gear into the car and off it goes!
Click to expand...
dude that's one hell of a fair reason to give up on WC :(
 
Sc00p007 said:
For high spec setups, after the initial cost its not so expensive. I've had my setup for over 10yrs and feel like ive had my moneys worth. Changed complete cpu block twice, other cpu upgrades i could buy a new bracket to reuse the block. Gpu wise, ive been able to buy one of the cheaper sku's each gen eg palit 5090 and for the price of a new block i get better temp and noise levels than the more expensive models. I've been so happy with wc that im doing a full refresh and starting again with a mo-ra iv build. End game and hope to still have it cooling my blocks for the next 10-20 yrs.
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You make a fair point with how much the mid and flagship models have inflated lately I did some calculations myself and a basic model + waterblock is still cheaper than most mid tier cards and I could buy a basic card + full loop for the price of the flagships like Aorus and ROG Astral and that has got me considering a return to watercooling after a 9 year absence I'm just not sure I want to eat the initial setup cost or not yet.
 
I don't think this holds true. The temp and noise levels on the basic GPUs barring a few exceptions are very close to the flagships. The astral noise levels are worse than the entry levels (the fourth fan is pretty bad) so by moving up tiers you're really paying for the looks/prestige.

I can see the argument that water-cooling costs can be considered to be rising in line with overall GPU costs but I think you're still paying a premium for not much return - quieter load, noisier idle, overall lower temps (though on temps the gap is closing and the benefit is debatable).
 
Joe Jones said:
I never understood people complaining about maintenance. The bulk of my water-cooling setup hasn't changed for 15 years at least. I did 3d print an ABS mounting plate to allow me to use an old waterblock when moving to AM4 platform.

I guess the problem is people using colorants and dyes that then separate out and clog stuff up. I just run boiled water with Zerex purchased from 'TheOverclockingStore' many moons ago....I replace the water so infrequently I still have plenty left. I've probably flushed the rads 2 or 3 times at most and never had anything come out of them. CPU fins always been good. I'm more amazed the Laing D5 has been running all this time...easily 50K hours of service.

Other than that a dust blow out every few months which you would do with air cooling anyway.


The biggest nuisance would be buying GPU blocks just due to added costs, but my latest card isn't water-cooled at the moment as I just don't need to do it.
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Never tried water cooling, what if you didnt focus on colorants and dyes? Does that reduce the maintenance?
 
For one reason or another I ran unmaintained pastel yellow for 4 years without any issues other than significantly stained tubing. Blocks had a twinge of yellow but nothing major.

Right now I'm four years into running temporary coolant whilst I wait for a free weekend to install the proper stuff.
 
I’ve run custom loops for at least 10 years and thankfully never had issues. I’ve always ran mine on distilled water and a splash of antifreeze as biocide and it’s always been fine, no fin clogging or corrosion.

Currently running blocks on my 5090 and 3970 threadripper on 480 and 360 rads. Nice and quiet and really good temps when I’m doing my work in DaVinci Resolve which thrashes the 5090 and can also do on the CPU with certain workflows like proxy generation.

Waiting for a 7970x threadripper to arrive this week which will be a complete rebuild so looking forward to porting everything over.

Moving to zen 4, ddr5 etc etc so looking forward to a good overall bump in system performance. DaVinci Resolve will benefit from the reduced system latencies and I’ll have the option to bumping up to a Zen5 9970x threadripper down the line when the prices come down a bit as they both use the same strx socket

Fortunately I really enjoy the tinkering about with the kit bit so alls good, just take your time and it usually all goes smoothly.
 
So while i am no longer running a custom loop i did snag myself a zotac 5090 arcticstorm. So an aio cpu and aio gpu. i am technically water cooled but zero maintenance aio :cry:
 
So then, after a couple if days of tinkering and re-fettling, I've now got a happy system.

I did have some issues with boot freezes due to getting all the various NVME, Water-cooled 5090, fairly old raid card (it's not that bad but does cause some pci enumeration issues which needed cards moved to different slots to avoid the 92 and 06 BIOS codes ) so I've decided on a newer HBA card to host the 7X14TB drives which is coming on Monday.

Long story short, Threadripper 7970, RTX5090 (All water cooled) 128 GB DDR5 ECC 6000Mhz RDIMS, combined with 9TB of NVMEs and 98TB of spinning rust chugging along like a good thing.

Temps are good, boosting to 5.6GHz+ and all cores boosting to between 4.6 and 4.8 on long runs with manageable temps

 
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In the same boat myself. Not really had any issues with maintenance etc, but a new build is on the horizon and I really cba with a new CPU block, draining, refilling etc. Finally time to cut my losses and go back to good ol air, and AIO.
 
I've been at it for a long time, and I do understand.

My builds are so low maintenance though, and I only do a full drain and refill every 2 years or so:
- QDCs
- Pumps and reservoirs on easy release mounts
- EPDM, flexible tubing
- Clear XT1 coolant
- Longer runs for getting blocks out the way
- Layouts designed for easy access, dedicated fill and drain ports

This is my last water cooled machine, and I'll be getting a framework laptop in 5 years or so if they're still around - any self-built is more work and as we all know time seems to be a rare commodity when we get older.
 
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