1st time builder. Worried about water cooling. Advice?

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Otec_Canon

Commendable
Sep 8, 2016
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Ahoj. I am building my very first PC. I've nearly all of my components gathered except for a few. Verily, I'm waiting on my motherboard to arrive. My components are as follows:

ASUS RAMPAGE Extreme v 10 motherboard
2 EVGA GTX 1080 FTWs
6900K CPU
Phanteks Enthoo LUXE full tower (white)
64gb of Corsair Dominator DDR4 RAM
1 Samsung EVO 1tb SSD
1 Samsung EVO 250gb SSD

My question for you all is in regards to water cooling. With my RAM modules, it may not be possible to fit a large heatsink. From what I've read, bigger heatsinks are better. If I've read wrong, please inform me; I've an open mind and welcome suggestions.

So, to address this, I've been looking into the Corsair h100i V2 CPU cooler. I hear nothing but praise for this on the surface level. While that may be the case, I cannot help but worry about one little leak and having it destroy my components.

What are your experiences with this? Your experiences with water cooling in general? I'm not going full-fledged water-cooled; just for the CPU.

I've been planning an animation project for the longest time and wanted to build a rig that would accommodate my Cintiq. I tried to future proof it a bit, which explains all of the pricey components. Any help is greatly appreciated. Once built, I will definitely post it. Motherboard is arriving Monday, so I'm very, very excited to get my project started -- as well as play a bit of H1Z1; that game looks like so much fun!

Thanks in advance.
 
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synphul
Larger air coolers are unlikely to fit, not with the relatively humongous corsair dominator ram. The r1 cooler only allows for ram up to around 35mm height (according to the cryorig site). Bequiet dark rock pro 3 barely clears ripjaws x ddr3 at around 44mm. Noctua's larger coolers around the same. Dominator ddr4 is 55mm tall so with that height you're looking at water cooling. Especially since you have ram both sides of the cpu on x99 boards and the large air coolers will hang over both banks of memory.

As Ecky said, leaks are rare but they do happen. How much damage depends on the leak and what gets shorted. Maybe nothing, maybe the cpu/socket, maybe only the gpu directly underneath, maybe both. Setup in terms of what power headers...
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Ecky

Ecky

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Feb 3, 2013
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You're right in that bigger heatsinks are better; the name of the game is surface area, and watercoolers' only advantage is that you can have a larger cooling surface than is possible to safely hang off of a motherboard. Any watercooler smaller than the largest air cooler is generally going to be a bad value.

Leaks are rare, but they do happen. I've killed numerous motherboards and video cards in watercooling accidents over the years. Protip, don't fool around inside the case when the power is on, even if you feel you're being careful, if you have tubes full of liquid inside it. Pumps also inevitably fail, generally within 4-5 years I've found, though this is rarely catastrophic.

There are some great large heatsinks which should cool any stick of RAM that doesn't have an absurd and useless heatspreader, which DDR4 doesn't need. Get some shorter RAM and, if you're still concerned, pick up the Cryorig R1 universal, which has extra clearance over the board for tall RAM. It outperforms most watercoolers and is cheaper too:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/CRYORIG/R1_Universal/

Relative_perf.gif


 
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synphul

synphul

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Mar 11, 2011
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Larger air coolers are unlikely to fit, not with the relatively humongous corsair dominator ram. The r1 cooler only allows for ram up to around 35mm height (according to the cryorig site). Bequiet dark rock pro 3 barely clears ripjaws x ddr3 at around 44mm. Noctua's larger coolers around the same. Dominator ddr4 is 55mm tall so with that height you're looking at water cooling. Especially since you have ram both sides of the cpu on x99 boards and the large air coolers will hang over both banks of memory.

As Ecky said, leaks are rare but they do happen. How much damage depends on the leak and what gets shorted. Maybe nothing, maybe the cpu/socket, maybe only the gpu directly underneath, maybe both. Setup in terms of what power headers are used for the pump and pump failures along with water bubbles trapped inside seem to be the more common glitches with aio's. So long as you take care, follow the directions and read a few installation guides online that give tips you should be fine.

64gb of ddr4 isn't cheap, especially when considering the dominator ram. You're somewhat limited due to the higher tdp of the 6 core i7 as to what coolers will be sufficient, as in a 212 evo or smaller cryorig h7 may not prove to be enough under heavy load. That leaves larger air coolers and aio's and your ram is just about too tall for any larger air cooler. The only one I can think of might be the thermalright true spirit 140 power, it's tall and skinny. It may fit between the two banks of ram however the width of the cooler tower may interfere with the first pcie slot for your gpu. That would require turning the cooler to blow up to the top and then you'll be back to potential ram height clearance conflict. The h100i would be about your best bet due to ram size.

Others may have different experience or information in regards to water cooling. Personally I wouldn't be comfortable leaving it on overnight while I'm away from the pc for a long period of time just in case something were to go wrong. I'd want to be there in case something happened requiring a quick shutdown. Not that a leak if it were to happen couldn't happen at anytime but if it happens when you're asleep there might be greater chance of shorting, liquid spilling onto running powered components for hours rather than minutes.
 
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