CPU liquid cooling kit

It is one of the most effective cooling methods, much better than air cooling or a closed loop water kit. It does have it's draw backs. It's expensive, and kind of a pain to set up and is time consuming. Also you have to be very careful because one small leak can cause major problems.

To get started you will need to determine your cooling needs:

Step 1 - Heat Load Calculation.

a) CPU Load - For this I usually use this PSU calculator

http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine

Plug in ya CPU, anticipated OC and voltage.... hit "overclock my CPU", thatz ya number....for me it was 135 watts. We don't wanna use the total PSU wattage, it accounts for capacitor aging and adds headroom.....just use the "overclock my CPU" subsection where it gives ya the wattage for CPU only

b) GFX Card Load - For this I usually use Guru3D.com's Power Consumption Data

Example: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_780_review,9.html
Quote:
Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 231 Watts

Now I typically shoot for a 25% overclock .... Now at the very least, if ya wanna go 25% faster, ya gonna use at least 25% more power. But I remembered reading at some point that the way some sites recommended estimating OC'd wattage was to take the % speed increase and square it .... so if I wanna go 1.25 times faster, 1.25^2 was 1.56. But that seemed way to much especially w/ today's voltage limits so I usually go with 1.28 - 1.35 for a 25% OC.

231 x 1.28 = 296 watts or 592 watts for two cards.

c) RAM - I don't see any reason to cool RAM unless ya doing LN2 but if that's ya thing, I figure 3 -5 watts per stick based upon the above PSU calculator and and things I have read in various stickies over the years.

d) MoBo VRMs and Chipsets - Martins and most sites I have visited recommend 10 - 20 for each or 20 - 40 total.


e) Pumps - Most peeps forget about this item .... but ya can find the wattage for ya pumps on martins site

Example: http://martinsliquidlab.org/2012/01/29/swiftech-mcp35x2-pump/6/

Here you will see a max wattage of 51.52 watts for the twin pumps and 46 watts of heat.

Summary: For me it was 135 (CPU) + 592 (GFX) + 20 (MoBo VRMs) + 46 (Pump) = 792 watts


Step 1 - Heat Load Allocation.

Th next step I take is to "guestimate" what portion of the heat load is to be handled by the rads / fans. To my understanding, Martin specifically designed his tests to measure ONLY the cooling provided by the rad and fans.... even thermal radiation from the rad shroud thru the sides is excluded. And don't forget , heat is being radiated by all the tubing, fittings, exposed portions of water blocks and backplates, etc. ..... and not everything hits max load at the same time.

Now I'd like to claim some scientific method or keen insight was used but I basically came up with the numbers based upon reading all of peoples build results here on OCN..... looking at what the numbers said they should have and what they actually had ....and then looking at my own system (six temperature meters installed to measure temps at various points in the loop + ambient and case temps). At the end of the day .... it seemed for the most part, if ya had enough rad / fans to provide about 60% of the calculated heat load, you were doing OK. Now this is for the typical office application / gaming system and a higher number should be used for 24/7 folding, bitcoin mining or other similar uses. Suggestions welcome.

So in my case.... 792 x 60% = 475.2 so I went a lookin for 465 - 500 watts of rad cooling as a minimum

Step 3 - Rad Estimation.

All data based upon test results from martins liquid lab

http://martinsliquidlab.org/2012/04/12/alphacool-nexxxos-ut60-360-radiator/4/
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?287200-Flower-Labs-News-Comparison-of-Radiator-Cooling-Efficiency
http://martinsliquidlab.petrastech.com/Radiator-Fan-Orientation-And-Shroud-Testing-Review.html

Martin has a great set of data on his site for numerous 360 radiators including the Alphacool ST30, XT45 and UT60 each of which "tops the charts" from 1000 rpm on up. Xtreme systems had comparable data on the Monsta. As I found it difficult to try and convert the 360 to 240 and 480 equivalents each time I sized a system, I made a spreadsheet to "do the math" for me". Now I am by no means suggesting that all the data is, using that technical term from "My Cousin Vinnie" ..... "Dead-on balls accurate". It is however several orders of magnitude better than the "1 per heat producing component" rule of thumb.

As i got tired of interpolating all the time, I created a set of spreadsheets which do all the calculations for me. You can download them here which is where I originally posted all of the above

http://www.overclock.net/t/1457426/radiator-size-estimator