Liquid Cooling Conundrum

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shrinerh

shrinerh

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Jan 12, 2014
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I have in my computer an Asus ROG Matrix Radeon HD7970 GHz Edition card with 3G GDDR5 Memory, an XFX Radeon HD7970 GHz Edition card with 3G GDDR5 Memory, and an XFX R7 card with 2G GDDR5 Memory. All three cards still have their stock coolers installed, the Asus card being the best with their 3 slot Direct CUII cooler. Unfortunately, they sit at temperatures a little above where I want them to be, and I have decided to rip the whole thing apart and install a liquid cooler that will run on the Asus and XFX 7970 cards. The third can stay as is, it isn't in a crossfire array and runs 3 small monitors that don't have anything major going on on them.

The issue is, I don't have room in my case for another liquid cooling system, and a new case isn't the right solution. I have a blue Antec Lanboy Air case and would rather keep it and rework the system. I have a Thermaltake BigWater 760 Plus dual bay system with a 120mm fan radiator with 1 fan, pump and reservoir that runs to a dual 120mm fan radiator with 4 fans on the top of my case, then runs to my processor, an Intel Core i7-4820K Ivy Bridge-E Quad-Core 3.7GHz chip in a 2011 socket, and then run back the the dual bay unit. This works beautifully on just the processor and keeps it extremely cool.

My question is, if I were to send the tubes from the BigWater unit straight to the processor, then send it to the radiator on top, and then to the graphics cards, then back to the unit, would that be sufficient to cool the whole loop? I think the pump would be strong enough, but I could be very wrong on that as well. Would the system work out if I replaced the unit and got a separate pump and reservoir? Or would it simply be better to just have two separate cooling systems, one for the CPU and another for the GPUs and just find room to mount everything? If anyone has any info, tips or ideas that would work better than what I have come up with already, that would be awesome.


 
Solution
Jake Fister
Your pump should be fine. I know a lot of people say you should stagger your radiators and components but I don't think it's that much of an issue. The water moves through the components so quickly that the temps barely change at all. The rate of flow is much higher relative to the rate of heat transfer. In short, you should sequence everything it a way that is most convenient. It sure won't hurt to stagger, it just probably won't help as much as people think.

I have an FX4130 and an R9 270x on one double 120 rad and it keeps my temperatures very low. I mean, my CPU doesn't get above 40C playing Titanfall on insane, low. Of course that's mainly because it only has 4 cores, but I'm happy with the performance as such. Don't feel a need...
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DarkSable

DarkSable

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Sep 27, 2012
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The pump would be fine with it, and yes, you should absolutely just have everything on one single loop, but why in the world do you think a 2x120mm rad is enough to cool a processor and TWO hot-running graphics cards?

I would consider it barely sufficient for a single graphics card. Seriously.

Look at either building an external radbox, or figure out a lot more places to fit radiators in your case, or else you're going to not be happy.
 
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shrinerh

shrinerh

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Jan 12, 2014
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As it stands it would have two radiators, the single in the BigWater unit, and the double on top of the case. That's exactly why I was asking. I can find room for an additional radiator if that would be the better option. I guess my question then would be where the radiators should be placed in the loop in conjunction with where the GPUs are and where the CPU is. In that case, especially when adding that much more length to the loop, are you positive that that little pump would be enough to keep the entire system running as it should? Like I said, although the current system has been in there and working well for a while, I am by far no expert when it comes to liquid cooling, So you'll have to forgive my ignorance if that's a stupid question.
 
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Jake Fister

Jake Fister

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Jun 4, 2014
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Your pump should be fine. I know a lot of people say you should stagger your radiators and components but I don't think it's that much of an issue. The water moves through the components so quickly that the temps barely change at all. The rate of flow is much higher relative to the rate of heat transfer. In short, you should sequence everything it a way that is most convenient. It sure won't hurt to stagger, it just probably won't help as much as people think.

I have an FX4130 and an R9 270x on one double 120 rad and it keeps my temperatures very low. I mean, my CPU doesn't get above 40C playing Titanfall on insane, low. Of course that's mainly because it only has 4 cores, but I'm happy with the performance as such. Don't feel a need to upgrade it any time soon. Anyways, because of that, it doesn't dump hardly any heat into my loop before it runs across my video card. Run the loop across cooler components first to keep the temperature difference between coolant and component as wide as possible, thus keeping the heat transfer rate as high as possible.

Hope that babbling helped somehow haha
 
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