The Neophyte's Custom Liquid Cooling Guide: How To, Why To, What To Expect
by Dustin Sklavos on September 30, 2013 12:01 AM ESTIf our whole hypothesis is that watercooling is (in most cases) superior to air cooling, then we need some measure of data to prove it. That means building our system and cooling it under air first, and seeing just how much overclocking performance we can get out of it before heat becomes too serious an issue. This is difficult to fully quantify; luck of the draw means we could wind up with stellar, efficient overclockers on both the CPU and GPU sides, or absolutely lousy ones. Haswell, in particular, seems to be afflicted with unusually high variation between individual chips.
To get some idea of how assembly goes in the Corsair Carbide Air 540, you can refer to my review. Suffice to say the system came together pretty easily. The modular nature of the SSD cages allowed me to remove all but one, and the 3.5" drive sleds went unpopulated but connected for the future. My biggest concern was the lack of clearance between the Noctua NH-U14S and the top GeForce GTX 780.
It looks like they're touching, but fear not, they're just playing the scariest game of "I'm not touching you" I've ever seen. This board is designed for quad-GPU graphics systems, which puts the primary PCIe x16 slot at the top. The upshot of that is the excellent spacing between the two cards: they're two slots apart, allowing for plenty of airflow between them.
Ignoring for a moment the fact that I've always been lousy at cabling, we're presented with something of an issue. The Carbide Air 540 doesn't really necessitate neat cabling since that cubby in the bottom left of the photo is typically where the mass of cables always goes. However, the AX1200i is a very deep power supply, and that cubby is where I intend to put the pump and reservoir. This is, in my opinion, a failing of the Carbide Air 540's design: there's a tremendous amount of open space at the top right, and no real way to occupy it.
Overclocking on air wasn't actually tremendously difficult, but it's where I ran into some real issues with the i7-4770K. This is...not a spectacular sample. VRIN starts at 1.812V, and the VCore's default voltage is already at 1.2V. With load line calibration set to Turbo, I was able to get the chip stable at 4.3GHz, but VCore was reading ~1.3V in Windows. Thermals were reaching the low 90s under OCCT. 4.4GHz and 4.5GHz were both bootable, but thermally too dangerous. For stability testing, I did a five minute run of OCCT followed by a run of POVray 3.7 RC, per Ian's suggestion.
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The two GeForce GTX 780s fared a bit better. I maxed out the power and temperature targets, and while the fans got pretty loud, I was able to get a +125 offset on the core and stunning +550 offset on the GDDR5, leading to a peak boost clock of ~1150MHz and a GDDR5 clock of 7.1GHz. Any higher than that on the GDDR5 would work, but produce artifacts. Peak boost was pretty tough to maintain, though, with the cards regularly dipping back at least a couple of boost bins under EVGA OC Scanner X. Stability testing was initially done with OC Scanner X, but I found it to be remarkably unreliable. Per Ryan Smith's suggestion, I switched to using a Crysis Warhead benchmark and then running Fire Strike Extreme in 3DMark. Crysis Warhead was pretty good at ferreting out unstable overclocks, but 3DMark was fantastic at it.
All in all, the overclocks were decent, although the i7-4770K apparently lived to underwhelm. I'm also a little disappointed the 780s couldn't hit 1.2GHz under boost on the core, but the excellent GDDR5 overclock takes some of the sting off of that.
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madisoncarter127 - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
himadisoncarter127 - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
My last pay check was $11000working 10 hours a week online. My brothers friend has been averaging 17k for months now and she works about 18 hours a week. I can't believe how easy it was once I tried it out.dgingeri - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
You've sold me on the case, and convinced me to not try water cooling for a while longer, and possibly never. It looks like a lot of hard work for little to no reward. I'll stick to my H100. The case looks great, though.Shinobi_III - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
If you put the pump in a reservoir, you will no longer have a "noisy" pump.Noisy being a rather absurd wording, considering how incredibly little noise a EHEIM 600l/h pump produces.
That pump you used in the article is ridiculous, what is that, a pump for ants?
And compression fittings are complete suicide, they fail sooner or later.
Perfectly regular ridged slide-over fittings, and a zip tie if you're nervous, will never fail.
And the coolant is ridiculous too, get "long life" automotive coolant, mix it 1:10 and you will never need to worry again. Those bottles are just rebranded, ready-mixed glycol with a giant price tag.
HisDivineOrder - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Watercooling GPU's makes sense, but how long before CLC is common on those? It can't be long since everyone's used to CLC's on CPU's where you don't even need water cooling at all. I imagine it won't be long before GPU's too don't need watercooling anymore since they'll be integrated into the CPU.Given that Intel will make its own version of Mantle in short order that they'll pay entire publishers to use, I'm pretty sure we can kiss any advantage discrete cards have goodbye. I'm sure Intel will send AMD a fruit basket for both the idea and making everyone okay with it.
ImSpartacus - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Hot damn, this is comprehensive as fuck.Good article!
livingplasma - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Thanks for the great article, it's good to see a major tech site like Anandtech cover the often misunderstood art of water cooling. Just skimmed through the comments and a lot of my fellow water cooling guys/gals made some very important points. From my experience it is most important for radiator fan orientation to act as INTAKES. Flipping those top fans to intake can decrease your load temps ~8 degrees celcius from my experience as the way it's currently set up the top 2x120 radiator is using the air from the 3x120 radiator (which is already saturated with heat). Properly decoupled pumps will minimize noise/vibration transmission to the case and with the MCP35X's PMW control it can run very quietly when slowed down 50% which is more than enough flow for most setups. Radiators themselves are low flow resistance, full cover gpu blocks are probably next and CPU blocks tend to have the most but even maxing out a pump only decreases temperatures CPU by a degree or two (plus now the pump is dumping in more heat as well). Removing the stock GPU cooling setups is probably the biggest contributions to water cooling being more quiet than a regular air setup and even with a modest setup the temperature differences are huge as shown with the author's setup.1Angelreloaded - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Dustin, Do you know the difference between a Serial and Parallel loop? or how the High flow and Low Flow pressures effect heat dissipation on certain blocks? I understand this may be your first time setting this up; however, in the computer field research is everything, you already know this just like modifying a car without research you end up with an underperforming and underwhelming creation. This is not how a liquid cooled setup should be set up at all, and BTW your Proc temps are higher because the Air source feeding it is already heated from your GPU Rad outlet, try reversing the flow on intake to exit Flow and your CPU temps will be better, CPUs on average run at lower temps on full loads compared to GPUs that can average 70-80 C especially while gaming.hot120 - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Man, there are quite a few fake 'experts' critiquing this fine article. It seems everyone wants the article done their way. Delid this CPU, change that fan, move this radiator, use that Kill Coil. Enough is enough. It is a basic article on watercolling, and is not meant to cover EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE configuration. Only the most extreme of the extreme computer users will consider delidding their CPU's. Only the most insane of the extreme computer users will spend $800 on a custom loop to shave 5-10 degrees off their CPU/GPU temps. I'll take my $100 and by a CLC and live happily ever after with my CPU that is +10 degrees (over custom) and my air-cooled GPU. Some of you are tripping!pandemonium - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Thanks for the introduction article to watercooling. To me - verified according to the results - this says it's still not worth it for a general user and gamer. The cost of increased power, thermals, and noise do not appear to outweigh the performance increase. I know other setups produce better results, but this is a good sample for not bothering with it.Watercooling is still for benchmarking...and that's about it.