What parts can be watercooled?

[Chris_6]

Can you overclock memory and/or hard drives, or just the CPU and Video card? I've seen confusing pictures of water cooled pc's with all over the place. And if you CAN overclock the memory and/or hard drive, do you have to do that to get best results?

I was thinking if they only cool the CPU and video card, then why would they have all those extra hoses.

I'm not planning on buying any time soon but I want to plan this out thoroughly.

 

[faalin]

the main things are CPU and GPU. They do make waterblocks for ram, some high end motherboards, and ive seen HDD blocks before but they are very rare.

Waterblocks for ram are pointless they restrict water flow for no performance gain, any small amount of air over them will keep them cool enough. I took a set of 1600Mhz up to 2202Mhz with just air passing over them

Waterblocks for the motherboard are only needed if your really pushing high overclocks, i used one on a Asus R3E board because i was pushing 4.9Ghz on my 950 with 1.6v which was well over recommended.

HDD waterblocks are just for show and not needed.

 

[bjornl]

Water cooling doesn't mean overclocking unless you want to overclock. Water cooling is just a very efficient way to move heat out of your case and to cool the components.
For example. if you cool a HD by blowing on it the heat gets moved off the HD in to the case. Which then makes further cooling of the HD more difficult plus it complicates cooling the other stuff. With watercooling the HD you put the heat in to a heatsink (waterblock) and instead of blowing air across to move the heat out of the heatsink, you flow water through it which is then heated. This water does not radiate much of the heat in to the case which simplifies cooling the other components. You then move this water to a radiator where you use blow air across the fins to move the heat out of the radiator and there by out of the case. You never overclocked the HD, you just cooled it (in this example).
You can not over clock a HD, btw.

Water cooling is more complex than air cooling. The challenges are similar though. With air cooling you need to keep a supply of cool air coming in to the PC, you want a PC case with good air flow and a decent amount of air inside it. With water cooling you need worry about the water temps, for example if you use a single hose to cool several components only the first one gets the full effect the rest get to be cooled by slightly to significantly warmer water. The solution is to use seperate runs for every major component. Also some mix and match in air cooling with water cooling. Putting fins on their water blocks and blowing some air across to reduce the amount of heat hitting the radiator. Cleaning a water cooling system is more complex as their can be algae growth (or similar) in the various parts which will around once a year or so need to be thoroughly flushed (there are things you can add to the water to reduce this). The pump is often loud and can cause case vibration. The size of the radiator and the amount of water it holds is an important consideration. The more water it holds the longer it will take to heat up and the easier it is to cool down. Different amounts and length of fins on the radiator impact its ability to cool stuff down. I know one guy who solved the cooling issue and the pump noise by mounting both inside a mini-fridge. Others use peltier-junctions to cool the radiator down sharply.

 

[grimfox]

As far as what all those extra hoses are for. If you see a hose headed for the 5.25 bays, it's likely going to a reservoir and/or pump. It could also being going to a radiator with the fittings on that end of the case. I could see where it would be easy to assume a hose headed in that direction might be for a HDD block. That's just not done anymore. It used to be that a high speed HDD up front would generate a lot of heat thus there would be a waterblock for it. (needed or not is another question) But you can get a lot more out of a cheap SSD these days than the fastest HDDs. Ram chips are a lot more efficient too, so there is very little need to water cool those anymore. Like Faalin said only an extreme overclock really requires water cooling beyond the CPU and GPU.

 

[Chris_6]

Thank you to all who answered. It makes sense to skip water cooling for the Hard drive and memory.

the main things are CPU and GPU. They do make waterblocks for ram, some high end motherboards, and ive seen HDD blocks before but they are very rare.

Waterblocks for ram are pointless they restrict water flow for no performance gain, any small amount of air over them will keep them cool enough. I took a set of 1600Mhz up to 2202Mhz with just air passing over them

Waterblocks for the motherboard are only needed if your really pushing high overclocks, i used one on a Asus R3E board because i was pushing 4.9Ghz on my 950 with 1.6v which was well over recommended.

HDD waterblocks are just for show and not needed.

So do you think I could overclock the CPU and GPU pretty good using 1 of these: CORSAIR Hydro Series H90 High Performance Water/Liquid CPU Cooler for Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.3 GHz AND one of these HYBRID Water Cooler (All in One) for GTX 980 Ti (which also looks like it needs something like this? : Hydro Series HG10 N980 GPU Liquid Cooling Bracket

I'm not going to be building the system quite yet, but I wanted a better understanding for proper planning and hopefully eventually finding the right pieces on sale. 😉

 

[grimfox]

I can't say from personal experience. The All-in-One (AIO) coolers have a reputation of being less effective than a similar custom set up. A custom loop has more thermal mass, I'd generally say double that of a AIO. I think the primary benefit of a AIO cooler over an similarly priced air cooler is weight distribution and to a lesser extent noise. It's benefit over a custom loop is simplicity. Based on the amount you are spending to get into water cooling you can buy a custom "kit" from EK water blocks and pick a full coverage waterblock for a 980ti for about 100USD more than your pair of AIO coolersand accessories. There's a little fudge factor in there since i don't know your exact setup. Since you aren't buying right now, that'll give you some time to save up a little extra for a much nicer cooling system.

 

[faalin]

Getting into custom water loops at first can be expensive. after the first buy in it gets cheaper.

for cpu and 1 gpu a ballpark estimate would be

360mm radiator would be the minimum i would go, could be 3*120mm or a 120mm + 240mm but you want 360mm or more in radiator space $100-150
cpu block $75-100
GPU block $100-150
Pump $60-75
res $30-50
fittings and tube $50-100
Fans $30-70
use distilled water with a silver kill coil

As you can see your first buy in can be very expensive, but you next time you might only need to get some tubing and maybe a new GPU block everything else can be reused.

 

[grimfox]

That's why I suggested getting an EK kit. There is a notable cost savings over buying everything piecemeal. In this particular case a savings of 20% or potentially more. Not as cheap as his original plan but a more competent system overall.

https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-kit-l360-r2-0
+GPU block & fittings
=~400USD

 

[Chris_6]

Thank you everyone for your replies! I appreciate every one. At least now I know what I want now, I am a little bit weary about installing hoses myself, but I will probably go ahead with it anyway. 😀

 

[grimfox]

It's not terrible to set everything up and run a leak test. You can google "leak test a water cooled computer" and find some decent videos that will give you some confidence. I'm sure there are lots of youtube videos on building a watercooling loop testing etc. We are here to help too.

 

[Chris_6]

It's not terrible to set everything up and run a leak test. You can google "leak test a water cooled computer" and find some decent videos that will give you some confidence. I'm sure there are lots of youtube videos on building a watercooling loop testing etc. We are here to help too.

Well thank you very much, I really appreciate all of this. 😀 I'll be back sometime but it might be longer than you expect... parts in canada are at least 30% higher than the US. (even on the best site I found so far newegg.ca )