Is watercooling worth it?

[Spyral]

Hi,

I decided to build a new computer for the first time, and am wondering if watercooling my gpu is worth it? I bought the gigabyte gtx 770 3x windforce graphics card and it cost me a bit of money, so I don't know if throwing on a watercooling kit onto it would be the best idea since it'd be my first time doing it. From what I've been reading, cooling your gpu is more of a "if you got nothing better to do" kind of investment. I also wanted to liquid cool my cpu, which i think would be a better idea. But like i said, not sure if its worth the investment. Just would like to hear your guys' thoughts. Thanks.

 

[MC_K7]

As you said it yourself, this is for enthusiasts. If you want to invest time and money in it, it's a passion more than anything else. If you think it's a hassle or seem to be too much pain in the ass to do, then this is not for you. Personally, I think the time and money invested in water cooling is just not worth it, sure you can squeeze a little extra performance out of the your components, but it's not worth the hassle, I think every 3 months you need to empty your loop and refill it and I'm too lazy to do this. But I respect people who do it, it's like a hubby or something you can proudly show to your friends.

 

[manofchalk]

Water-cooling the GPU is actually gets better results than the CPU, nowadays (Intel) CPU's are limited by the thermal transfer between CPU die and heatspreader, not the cooling mechanism strapped to it.
GPU's are limited by its cooling mechanism as they only have so much space to work with, the design of putting AGP/PCI/PCIe slots where they are on the motherboard never considered large heat output components being put there, as back then graphics cards weren't really that powerful and didn't require much in the way of cooling.

Whether its worth it really depends on you. If your looking at it from a purely price/performance perspective, water-cooling isn't worth it, it just costs way too much. If you want just outright performance, water-cooling is the best thing you can get until you start using LN2 or other active cooling methods.
I personally got water-cooling because I wanted it, not for any performance reason as my overclocking ambitions arent exactly high. To me its a hobby, I like messing around with computers, and water-cooling was just an extension of that.