Water Cooling Help (R9 290X, 4770k)

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EthanBrown1

Honorable
Dec 29, 2012
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10,510
I have never done water cooling before, but I'm making a $3,000 dollar computer, and figured it might be time to give it a go. I was planning on getting the following parts:

  • Haf X
    Asus Sabertooth Z87
    32gb G.SKILL Ripjaw 1866mhz
    840 EVO 250GB
    Seagate 4tb HDD
    Cosair RM1000 Watt Fully Modular
    Powercolor R9 290X LCS
    i7 4770K
This gives me about $200-$400 for a water cooling set up. I had looked at the Raystorm AX360 kit, however I'm not sure that thats good enough for a 290x? I plan on overclocking the 4770K as far as the silicon lottery allows me to, and I wouldn't mind overclocking the 290x a little bit as well. Also: Before you say "Wasting money on ram/hard drive" this system is gaming/video editing, so ram is useful. PSU is probably overkill as well, but meh 850W is like 50 bucks less.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks ;)

Edit: Also, this system is for a friend, so is water cooling relatively low-maintenance? He can probably replace the water ever quarter or so, but is more than this needed? At that point, I think it would become a little bit too hard for his use.
 
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manofchalk

manofchalk

Glorious
May 11, 2012
12,914
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If your building this system for a friend, I wouldn't include custom water at all. If you do a loop right its not maintenance intensive, but it complicates everything to do with the build. Say the motherboard fails, he wants a different case, wants to do a platform upgrade, something happens and he needs to testbench the system or wants to upgrade the graphics card.
Water-cooling just makes all of that a lot more difficult, because you have just anchored everything to the case, and to remove core components would require draining and disassembling the loop. For someone who isn't confident to build their own system and has you doing it, if they ever need to fix the thing its adding another layer of complexity to the problem.

Also when it comes to video editing, more HDD's is better than bigger HDD's. You want to distribute disk load as much as possible, so your single HDD isn't juggling the project files, raw footage and output during rendering. Go dual 2/3TB drives. This also gives options for RAID.
 
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Davil

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2012
311
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That's a kind of low budget for water cooling to be perfectly honest. A decent pump will run you about $60, a reservoir around $40, Cpu block around $75, $130 for a full coverage gpu block, $60 for a radiator, $50 or so for fittings, then add tubing, coolant, and shipping and you'll be a bit over $400. Might be worth it to deal with the noise from that video card though. All in all you'll need at least about $400 if you're cooling a single video card, and about 300 without.

As far as maintenance there really isn't much maintenance involved with the loops now a days if you use a good coolant. If you get better tubing and coolant that is antimicrobial and lubricating you really don't have to change out the coolant as long as it's still clean and temps are ok. Koolance's coolant doesn't recommend changing it out any more often than about every 2-3 years. You can also add in a drain valve which costs about $5 or so before the pump so that draining is easy.

Of course the easiest most cost effective thing to do is buy a kit from a company and expand it later, or just buy a closed loop and leave the video card out of it. Up to you either way. Just make you have adequate airflow in the case as well so that the mosfets and vrms around the motherboard don't burn up due to lack of air.
 
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