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celticguy75 · ‎12-09-2010

Hey, I've scanned the forums, and read the few topics that have mentioned the watercooling solutions, and was wondering if any of you could spare a few minutes to answer a couple of fairly basic questions or point me in the right direction to find answers.

The build I'm currently planning is

Haf-X chassis
Rampage III Extreme
Core I7 CPU (Subject to price)
Cooler Master V10/Corsair H70 (Air or water cooling)
Ballistix Tracer DDR3 PC3-12800 (6gb to start with, with more coming in eventually)
Single Nvidia GTX480 (Not sure which manufacturer yet, with plans to SLI 2-3 at a later date)
Silverstone 1500W PSU

My thoughts originally were to aircool the CPU, and not worry about providing additional cooling to the memory/GPU, but looking at some of the options available, I'm starting to have some doubts. I can see with some of the builds that have gone on, there are a few areas I should think about cooling with water.

My plan is to build the system, get it to run using basic, default options, then as time & confidence grows, to begin toying with the OC potential of the board.

1 - CPU - From what i've read, & seen, the H70 seems a good compromise between air cooling the CPU and a full bore water cooled system.

2 - Memory - Bearing in mind I'm not going to be overclocking this, would it be advised to leave additional cooling alone for now?

3 - GPU - Again, bearing in mind a single GPU & no OC, am I right in thinking that it would be safe to leave it air cooled with a stock cooler?

I do like the thought of getting into the watercooling side of things, especially with the noise reduction aspect, however, the sheer amount of different approaches are a little startling, and I could use some pointers on this. I've seen the options available for full board coolers (and I like the Danger Den design, even if it doesn't look quite right to me) If there's a particularly good place to start, or if someone has watercooled their Rampage III system and documentated it , I'd be immensely grateful for a point in the right direction.

I hope I've explained myself, and that you can understand what i'm looking for.

I appreciate the time and look forward to any advice you can give.

martin_metal_88 · ‎12-09-2010

First of all, change few thing in your build. Try to avaoid Ballistix, not really reliable. Go with G.skill, corsair or mushkin memory. They are WAY better. Drop this 480 ( unless you already have it ) and get a 570 that is cheaper and perform same if not better. Now that you don't use 480 which is power hangry like hell, you can save a lot and get a better 1000-1200W. Now that you have save about 400$ on the rig following these advice, we can start to talk of WC 😛

the H70 is a good compromise. But don't hope to reduce the noise. You still have a rad that make the same turbulence that a air cooler would do and to that add a pump. IMO, get a good aircooler with decent fan like a prolimatech Megahalem with 2 X Scythe Gentle typhoon 1450/1850 RPM fan. It will out perform a H70. If you want to go water then you are better do it all the way with a complete loop thatyou have to do by yourself.
Also avoid the V10, it's huge but not really good, and really noisy due to the high turbulence.

There is no need to cool the memory unless you deal with ULTRA high OC.

Martin_metal_88

celticguy75 · ‎12-09-2010

Hmm,

Thanks.

I have to admit, the GPU situation was in flux, and now the 480 is EOL'd, I will probably change my mind on this and plump for something different.

As I see it right now, there are 3 things in flux with my system

1 - GPU
2 - CPU
3 - HDD

I'm still very taken with the H70 Idea, mainly because it seems to work well from reports, and because it's a lot neater than an air cooling solution for the CPU. (Some of the air coolers are almost ludicrous in their size now. The V10 has a nice look to it, and I do like cooler master solutions. But when I saw how tidy the H70 looked, I was impressed.

The full water cooling solution is very tempting as some of the designs I've seen combine excellent cooling results with very neat & tidy layouts (This is pretty important to me, as I loathe messy configurations.

ottoyu34 · ‎12-09-2010

Welcome to the forums!
First of all, everything is designed it work well enough with stock cooling. While you could upgrade the cooling, generally you would overclock to benefit from the increased cooling capacity and maintaining/lower noise level. Yes, give it a try on air first, then moving on from there.

I'm currently watercooling my Rampage III extreme board, you might have seen my waterblock in another thread. I will be updating my build log on the progress.

Also, if you are not in a rush of using this PC, I would suggest holding off it ATI 69XX cards and Intel Sandybridge is out.

Retired · ‎12-09-2010

H70 is the easiest route i my opinion. if you do a full water setup, you itll start to get pricey. if you do a cpu block, then you should also upgrade your chipset, and probably think about your GPU, although everything is designed to run at least on air. water is just a luxury.

celticguy75 · ‎12-09-2010

I must admit, I'm really looking forward to this. The RIII is a really nice looking board with a lot more power than I'm used to. My current build (self built) is a Abit IT7-Max2 with a 2.53ghz cpu and has been maxed out with 2gb of ram for about 6 years. I'm reluctant to play with it any more until I have my new system, then I think I might water cool this one just as a practice run. If anyhthing goes wrong, then I still have the new system to use and I haven't damaged anything expensive. Although, by the time I've got these bits, the Rampage IV might be out 😄

ottoyu34 · ‎12-09-2010

Like martin mentioned, you could saved a couple hundred dollars getting more sutiable components, and that might get you started in watercooling.
But meanwhile, I suggest taking it step-by-step first. There isn't point watercooling your current rig since you can always leak test out of the case.

btw, for CPU. i7 950 is the sweet spot now.

celticguy75 · ‎12-10-2010

Well, Thanks for the advice guys.

I guess what I was really looking was a "yeah, that'll work ok". I've definitely listened to what's been said, and for now my build is looking a little changed. I'm shooting for a early 2011 build, and a budget of around £1500-1600 max I think.

HAF-X - Despite a few people complaining, I still like the design of the case, and I have this crazy idea to use three different lighting effects (red,green,blue maybe) depending on my mood. Currently, it's around £130 mark

Rampage III Extreme - No change there, I love the black/red design, and the whole board looks good. Currently around the £230 mark

Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 or GTX 580 - Changing from the 480 which was about the best when I started looking at this build. I'm tempted by the thoughts of the 580 in three way SLI eventually. The only mitigating factor I can see if price, which will obviously change
Right now, the 580's are around £400 each

PSU - The reason I went for the silverstone was, it was over the top in producing power. It was more expensive I know, but I think its a combinatino of handling what's there now, with what might happen in the future (3 way SLI etc..) I might be over-doing it on power though, and would welcome advice on what else I could use. You are right in the price at £250 is high, and I could make a saving here.

CPU - I'm currently looking at the Core I7 950 3.06Ghz (Bloomfield) which is around the £200 area. Obviously, this & Memory are tied together and will change depending on the price in the new year. (Intel Core i7 960 3.20GHz is the next highest, at around the £400 mark)

Memory - I'm torn on this one. I've long been a user of crucial memory, hence the ballistix choice. I haven't heard bad things about them before. I looked at the Corsair, and the dominator series. The "memory selector" gave me a shed load of options, and I know that my choice of memory is affected by my choice of CPU. I'm looking at between 4-8gb to begin with I think.

CPU Cooling - Corsair H70 - I'm going to go with this, but I might exchange the stock fans for those Scythe Gentle Typhoons. The H70 is about £70-80.

The rest is dependent on the price of hard drives (particularly SSD's in the new year) I suspect SSD's will stay high for another year though, so I may buy a standard drive to begin with and then when SSD's drop, get a 120gb or similar as a boot drive.

I'd be interested to know what you guys think.. Like I said, it's been a long time since my last build.

ottoyu34 · ‎12-10-2010

Sounds like a great plan.

Retired · ‎12-11-2010

Too cool CPU GPU SB,SB and memory you are looking at aditional 1000$

Rampage III Water Cooling