Where to start: Watercooling loop for single GTX 660 EVGA SC

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framm1

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Aug 18, 2013
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Hi.

The last two weeks I've been enjoying playing around with overclocking. Got a stable 4.8ghz i7-3770k at 1.34vcore, 75° on load, with my h100i. I am a novice at water cooling as there's not much to a h100i AIO other than mounting and applying paste as perfect as possible.

I'm now looking for a solution to cool my GTX 660 SC 2GB EVGA card as it touches +70° in games whatnot. Maybe the extra cooling could give space for some additional overclocking, but I haven't looked into how overclockable the card is. The main goal is to get temps/noise down on the card.

So I found this waterblock thats compatible with my card:
http://www.ekwb.com/ekwb/how-to-build-watercooling/

From there I have no idea what accessories to get; pump, tubes, reservoirs whatnot. The idea now is to get equipment solely for cooling the graphic card, but will still have the possibility of expanding the loop onto the CPU at some point in the future, which obviously would require additional purchases.

Guides are easy to come by, I just have to read them eventually :D, so I'm just interested to hear if anyone have experience with cooling a gtx 660 card and if there's any great tips regarding a basic single loop for a starter like myself.
 
Solution
JackNaylorPE
1. 70C is just fine.....I wouldn't even start thinking about WC unless temps were > 82C

2. The SC series is not a very good overclocker .... my guess is due to the use of a reference PCB and VRM (most of the competion uses custom PCBs with beefed up VRM)

http://www.bjorn3d.com/2012/09/evga-geforce-gtx-660-sc-superclocked-2gb-video-card-review/

While in our previous “Kepler” line of GPUs, we were able to overclock our GPU to really high frequencies, even 300+ MHz on the core clock speed and 400+ MHz on the memory frequency, the EVGA GTX 660 struggled to even get up to 75 MHz higher from the standard factory overclock. With the factory overclock only being roughly 66MHz higher than the reference card, we should have been able to...
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JackNaylorPE

JackNaylorPE

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Oct 30, 2004
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1. 70C is just fine.....I wouldn't even start thinking about WC unless temps were > 82C

2. The SC series is not a very good overclocker .... my guess is due to the use of a reference PCB and VRM (most of the competion uses custom PCBs with beefed up VRM)

http://www.bjorn3d.com/2012/09/evga-geforce-gtx-660-sc-superclocked-2gb-video-card-review/

While in our previous “Kepler” line of GPUs, we were able to overclock our GPU to really high frequencies, even 300+ MHz on the core clock speed and 400+ MHz on the memory frequency, the EVGA GTX 660 struggled to even get up to 75 MHz higher from the standard factory overclock. With the factory overclock only being roughly 66MHz higher than the reference card, we should have been able to see at least 150 MHz overclock on the GPU. Sadly even with maximum voltage settings, and the power target set to 110%, we were only able to reach 75 MHz higher from the factory overclocked settings. On the other hand the memory overclocked just as good as we have expected. We settled at a very stable 350 MHz overclock from the standard 6008Mhz effective frequencies.
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OTOH, the good thing is that most full water blocks are designed for the "reference" card and not custom factory OC'd cards..... if you have the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Superclocked 2 GB (02G-P4-3662), EK has a full coverage card

Here's why non reference cards can present issues:

NVIDIA-Reference-PCB.jpg


Custom PCBs w/ beefed up VRMs make the card a better overclocker .... but it presents a challenge for WB manufacturers who have to decide if each model will sell enough units to make it worth it to make a new design for each one.
 
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