Water Cooling: Advice & Tips Needed

Dark Sun · 24 Sep 2008 at 21:53

Hi Guys,

I'm going to incorporate water cooling into my new rig

I have drawn a flow diagram for my proposed water cooling system

This is my first time WC, so I'm not too confident on the fluid dynamics aspect

Any advice and tips on my flow system would be greatly appreciated

The case is a Lian Li PC-A05B and the motherboard is fitted upside down.

Many thanks

Bradley8988 · 24 Sep 2008 at 22:11

dude i you need a bigger rad.

reflux · 24 Sep 2008 at 22:32

Ever heard of the phrase 'start small'?

Seriously, that is a huge undertaking. You'd be better off buying some decent expandable parts and cooling the CPU to start with.

Dark Sun · 24 Sep 2008 at 22:54

Ok.

If I take out the MOSFET coolers will that help?

So I'm cooling NB, SB, GPU, CPU.

Psypher5 · 24 Sep 2008 at 22:59

Thatll be toasty

sharpygsxr · 25 Sep 2008 at 11:44

i would consider 2 seperate loops for better heat dissapation.

Id go for one loop for CPU NB and SB and the GPU on its own loop, if you really wanted to cool mosfet you could add these to the gpu loop

booyaka · 25 Sep 2008 at 11:54

unless you are going for crazy overclocks - start with cpu & gpu being water cooled and go from there.

Althulas · 25 Sep 2008 at 11:54

You could cool the whole lot in one loop if you use a quad rad

geekyEd · 25 Sep 2008 at 12:06

More rad power is needed here, unless thats a triple and your doing this for silence not performance.

EDIT just seen the rad, thats going to be hotter than if everything were under air.

Daveangle · 25 Sep 2008 at 12:07

Probably best to have the water hit the CPU first, I have that MB and a Enzotech CNB-S1L will cool the SB fine if you got good air flow within the case. Considering its you first time its probably best if you just do the CPU/GPU with a 120.2 RAD if you want to do the NB/SB would really recommend a larger RAD.

Dark Sun · 25 Sep 2008 at 12:37

Many thanks for the feedback.

I think I will start by just cooling the CPU and GPU. I think some posters are correct in stating I should start small as it's my first time with WC. I can always expand later on.

So I will do res/rad->pump->cpu->gfx->res/rad

Daveangle · 25 Sep 2008 at 12:40

Dark Sun said:
Many thanks for the feedback.

I think I will start by just cooling the CPU and GPU to start off with. I think some posters are correct in stating I should start small as it's my first time with WC.

So I will do res/rad->pump->cpu->gfx->res/rad

I have always gone Res -> Pump -> Rad -> CPU/GPU Etc -> Res, I think its the normal way to do it but it has always worked for me anyway.

1kiwi · 25 Sep 2008 at 13:20

Daveangle said:
I have always gone Res -> Pump -> Rad -> CPU/GPU Etc -> Res, I think its the normal way to do it but it has always worked for me anyway.

The general consensus is that it doesn't matter so much as long as your flow is adequate.

You have the same board as me and are planning a similar setup. Like the guys above have said - start simple. I firstly started with single PA120.3 for CPU and PA120.2 for 1 4870. Since then i have added another 4870 and plan to integrate a NB block to my CPU loop. My setup is a little over kill but provides plenty of scope for future upgrades and further cooling.

Other may disagree, but i personally think trying to do all of the above - first time, with a PA120.2 will be overkill.