Time to start thinking about watercooling?

[Casdawer]

Hello everyone.

I am moving to a new house next weekend and the only place I can put the PC is in the 'Sun Room' which is exactly as described.

This will be a hot room and I'm worried that my PC will melt

Currently, I've got 4 fans and 1 aftermarket CPU cooler (Arctic Freezer i11) and idle temps sit around 35c and gaming wise it's about 60c depending on what fan profile I use.

The room I'm in at the moment stays fairly cool and I never have the radiator on.

So, how should I best keep my system cool in the volcano room in summer?

I have an InWin 503 case (which isn't great for cooling anyway tbh), 3 Apache Black fans (2 x front, 1 x bottom intake) and 1 x InWin fan exhaust.

I was thinking that it might be worth changing the Arctic Freezer to a fairly decent AIO?

The GPU is a GTX970 Strix so stays fairly cool.

Thanks.

 

[Legend]

OK, well first of all let's blow the myth out of the water that an AIO offers superior cooling to a top end air cooler. It categorically will not. Please do not fall for the marketing fluff, it's nonsense. Granted, an AIO would probably be better than your i11, but a top end air cooler such as the Noctua D15 or BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3 will cool better than most AIOs, and at worst will be equal, not to mention being far better value and more reliable. The EK Predator 360 might give them a run for their money, but that's in a different category of coolers on its own really (and far more expensive than any of them).

If you want the ultimate cooling performance, you need to be looking at a custom loop, but with a full loop costing around the £500 mark, that may understandably not be an option. That said, I can't believe this room is so hot that the Noctua D15 or Dark Rock Pro 3 wouldn't be more than enough. Either would definitely be a big step up over the Arctic i11. If your room is so hot that your PC is melting, then you're going to pass out before your components start failing lol!! Besides, your profile says West Sussex, or have you moved to Arizona?

 

[r7slayer]

Yea problem with most AIO solutions is they appear cool at first even for 20-30 mins temps may seem good but as that fluid warms up you see those temps rise. i'm using a corsair h100 right now (not the best but okay) while i'm waiting on putting my custom loop together. It seems good, starts out in mid 50's when starting a game then sits around the 60 mark. After over a hour or so of gaming i see the hottest core hit 78. While other cores are around 68-74. This is with fans around 1000RPM which is about 50% speed i could knock fans upto 1500ish but i don't see much improvement in temps and i notice the noise.