The rise of AMD

[LePhuronn]

A lot more faff for not a lot more payoff imo

Dunno about you, but I'm not mad keen on having multiple kilograms of weight hanging off two 1.6mm thick fibreglass boards. The weight saving, the noise reduction and the thermal improvements allowing higher and more sustained boost algorithms easily outweighs the 5 minutes of "faff" of slapping some rubber hose on some barbs between a couple of radiators and my motherboard assembly.

Any water loop that moves past the function and practicality of EPDM hose and barbs is a project of aesthetics and craftmanship. And that is absolutely not a "faff", that is a joy.

 

[Cenedd]

...And that is absolutely not a "faff", that is a joy.

Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with every word of that....it DOES have it's moments. I mean, you've read my thread and the moments of anguish, despair and tragedy, right?!

I think, ultimately, it depends what your motivations are. It's entirely possible to run a very standard air-cooled setup...and I'm doing that at the moment and - having been watercooled for the better part of the last two decades - I have to admit, it's a lot less bad than it was in my head. But I'm not pushing things to their limits or demanding unreasonable performance/silence etc currently. If you want the easy life when it comes to maintenance or not to add unnecessary expense to a build - or a reduced potential for disaster - it's hard to argue against air cooling.
So I'm going to stay on air? No, I don't think so - although the effects of laziness cannot be undersold here! When life calms down a little, stops getting in the way so much and I have the time and headspace to work out quite what I want to do, I'll be back on the road to "unnecessary"-ville because I feel the need to push the boundaries of what I can do*. "Because I can" has long been an accepted reasoning....and I think there's a good slice of "Because I NEED to" behind most of those that reason that way.

*So far that's included soft tubing, hard tubing, milling, 3D design, PCB design, crimping, soldering, lathing, glass work, polishing, metal work and probably far more that I can recall currently. You either enjoy that or you don't....and I'm not about to have any sort of go at anyone that finds an off-the-shelf PC is just fine for them. Well, at least not if they're honest about it!

 

[ALXAndy]

A lot more faff for not a lot more payoff imo

Oh come on man. That's nuts. Every single water cooled rig I have ever had has had the fans jammed at 7v. As thus it is inaudible when not wearing headphones which is a big deal for me. Also I have never had a GPU die under water. I had my Titan XP for years (I literally got bored of it and bought a 2070 ffs) overclocked to 2100mhz and it is still going strong today after Cenedd used and abused it and now his kid IIRC. No issues with flimsy poorly made fans making a racket and or dying and not being able to find replacements and so on.

Air cooled GPUs are a lot better than they used to be, but they are still a pain.

I used to be the most anti water cooling person in the world. I thought it was pointless and stupid. And then I got a Titan XP and god it drove me nuts on air.

What *does* make me laugh though is when someone spends a ton on water cooling and only cools the CPU. Which doesn't even particularly need it given they eat half the power of a GPU these days.

 

[Deathjester]

UPDATES!!

Big news my 5090 Suprim is now packaged, so I'm hopeful I will have that tomorrow or Friday!!

I also got over excited and I'm the proud owner of a 9950X3d, so that will be going in at the same time as the 5090.

The only decision now is do I run the 5090 on air until the waterblock arrives?

Also in other positive news; the Motherboard has been 100% stable since I updated the bios and the firmware. So that's really positive news.

 

[Deathjester]

Addressing the comments about watercooling being a "faff" I haven't really found it to be so, it does make my rebuilds take slightly longer but they look 100s of times better and are magnitudes quieter which is the main reason I do this.

 

[Cenedd]

5090: Nice. Maybe I'm paranoid but might be worth buying a cheap infrared thermometer just to keep an eye on the power connector temperature. You can pick them up for a tenner.
On air: Yes, definitely. Firstly because you want to test it all works properly before you go stripping the cooler off but also because why not. The only 'problem' you may have is that once you're up and working/gaming, you might not be bothered to strip it and change to w/c. Or maybe that's just my issue

 

[Deathjester]

So, my 5090 arrived today, and I checked but my GPU block won’t arrive for around another 3 weeks (obviously I can’t wait that long) so I went to install the 5090 and there’s an issue.
Obviously the case is massive so it’s not technically a space issue; but the singularity distribution / pump board I have is deeper than my motherboard, so the card won’t fit down into the PCIe slot.
Now I’m waiting on a PCIe riser to arrive so I can mount the card vertically. What a day.
Will post some pictures of the card shortly along with some pictures of replacing the CPU

 

[Cenedd]

You probably won't have that issue once it's waterblocked as it'll lop a good third off the length. Vertical is good as long as you get a decent PCIE cable. The 5000 series is the first running PCIE 5 so you'll need a PCIE cable that can handle that. Apparently if you drop to PCIE 4, you lose something irrelevant like a couple of fps so if your cable won't run stably at PCIE 5, you can manually drop the slot to PCIE 4 in the bios to get it stable.

 

[fantasticCG]

Addressing the comments about watercooling being a "faff" I haven't really found it to be so, it does make my rebuilds take slightly longer but they look 100s of times better and are magnitudes quieter which is the main reason I do this.

Yup they look so much better. Its creating Art!

 

[Deathjester]

Sorry, I haven't gotten around to uploading pictures. I will do now my PC is back up and working (even it it does currently look like the jankiest thing in the world.

I already had an infra-red temperature sensor for my pizza oven; temps across all the 2x6 12V look good and consistent across all the wires; I'll keep checking for now but I'm fairly comfortable with them.

The waterblock will drop it from 360mm long to just 210mm which will fit just fine (more than fine actually; it will be shorter than my 3080 Ti).
Then the riser can come out, and it can go back to being correctly installed in the motherboard. Rather than trying to tear the whole of the back IO out with it's 2900g in weight.

I got a coolermaster PCIe Riser, which is PCIe 4.0 so I dropped the compatibility mode in the BIOS as recommended above and I haven't had any issues.
With FrameGen I'm getting around 280 FPS @ 5120x 1440 and that's with pretty much everything on maximum.

With Cyberpunk on max iCUE was reporting that it was drawing over 1000W from the wall; which is pretty mental.

Temps seem fairly good; although for some reason I can't see the 5090 core temps in the AquaComputer service; I might need to look at that soon. Although It's not urgent until I can put the GPU under water.

 

[Cenedd]

From the YouTubing I've done on the subject (ie worth very little yet) it looks like the problems occur if all the current is drawn down one or two of the wires - very unbalanced. Someone did tests pulling ludicrous wattage over the connector and it handled it so it doesn't look like the connector is a car crash. Another possibility is that on some cables, the pins are free to be pushed back resulting in less contact and hence more heat. If yours is even and not stupidly hot, you're probably fine - it's not like every one caught fire or they'd have picked it up pre-launch....you just don't want it to be your one!

Compare the quality with and without frame gen. If it's good for you/the game you're running, fantastic... it's just worth checking you're not getting unacceptable artifacts.

Aquasuite uses it's own built-in hardware monitor these days so it might be worth checking it's up to date - and yes, that might require crossing their palm with a little silver.

 

[Deathjester]

From the YouTubing I've done on the subject (ie worth very little yet) it looks like the problems occur if all the current is drawn down one or two of the wires - very unbalanced. Someone did tests pulling ludicrous wattage over the connector and it handled it so it doesn't look like the connector is a car crash. Another possibility is that on some cables, the pins are free to be pushed back resulting in less contact and hence more heat. If yours is even and not stupidly hot, you're probably fine - it's not like every one caught fire or they'd have picked it up pre-launch....you just don't want it to be your one!

Compare the quality with and without frame gen. If it's good for you/the game you're running, fantastic... it's just worth checking you're not getting unacceptable artifacts.

Aquasuite uses it's own built-in hardware monitor these days so it might be worth checking it's up to date - and yes, that might require crossing their palm with a little silver.

The aquasuite issues appears to have been driver related, a couple of reboots and it's now registered correctly.
Although I hope the "GPU Memory Junction" isn't actually a temperature as it's reporting a fixed value of 255.0c...

I watched too many of the videos on the subject and I agree, it seems that using the brand new cable I have from Singularity it seems fine. I will keep monitoring it for the next 3 weeks, and consider making my own cable but this does sound like a particularly risky option!