[quotemsg=14773572,0,35894][quotemsg=14765673,0,67821]For the 900 series having a liquid cooler attached isn't necessarily ideal. It doesn't "eliminate noise" as said in a comment above as it has a PUMP and a FAN. Furthermore it has to run those at all times whereas many 900 cards can run without any noise in idle/light usage.[/quotemsg]
Water cooling certainly can eliminate noise .... at least in the realm of reality where we are talking about "below detectable limits" or background noise. I'm sitting here w/ 2 cards in SLI typing this message and the systems is dead quiet .... my radiator fans are not running. My pump is running but it's noise level is undetectable. I had to buy a flow meter to tell if it was running.
The system has ten 140mm fans and 2 pumps, sitting 18" away, side panels are off and close your eyes and you can't tell the system is running ... and that's even while running Furmark w/ the cards OC'd 26% and drawing close to 300 watts each .... the fans top out at about 850 rpm .... if I manually boost the speed, you can detect them at about 925 rpm.
All pumps and fans do not make the same amount of noise .
The H100i produces vacuum cleaner like 68 dbA whereas the H220-X produces only a bedroom / library like 32 dbA, thereby "eliminating" 46 dBA. Let's not play a semantic game here..... no one is implying 0 dbA, we are not talking about eliminating noise to 0 which is an impossibility given typical home / office background noise levels:
http://www.nonoise.org/library/household/index.htm
Quiet Room 28-33
Typical Living Room 40
A quiet bedroom at night or library is generally listed as 30 - 33 dbA. So when we talk about "eliminating noise" we are talking about one of the accepted dictionary definitions of "eliminating noise as a consideration". That can most certainly be done with water cooling.
More specifically.... the Asus Strix 980 for example has two 92mm fans..... taking those off and replacing them with a radiator and two 140mm fans at a much lower rpm will eliminate noise.
And no, the fans by no means need to run all the time. I have my radiator fans set to turn off when not required using the utility that came with the MoBo. If the heat sink doesn't need fans when air cooled .... the radiator won't either. The circuitry on the GFX card PCB controls the fans via fan connector on the PCB, simply by connecting the radiator fans to that connector, you will realize the
exact same control scheme with the radiator fans as with the stock card fans on air. A dual 140mm fan water cooling system is most certainly capable of eliminating any noise above background level, equivalent to a bedroom at night or library.
Now of course, if you used the Kraken GFX card adapter and an H100i, you will certainly have the capability to increase noise. Both air cooling and water cooling can be done well or done poorly. A GFX card however is limited by the amount of weight it can support, so air cooling is limited by the size of the heat sink that can realistically be physically supported. That in turn dictates both maximum fan size and rpm. Water cooling frees you from both those restrictions. There are quiet pumps and there are quiet fans..... with any decent pair of 140mm fans, rpms which generate detectable fan noise are wholly unnecessary for a GFX card generating < 200 watts.
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All I can say is that I'm running a EVGA GTX 980 SC - EKWB water block on an expanded Glacial 240L with a pair of high static pressure Cougars and temps (both CPU and GPU) stay around 45C at load. And I barely notice it.
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