Water cooling PC Very cool

[stonehart]

Working on a new PC build and looking at water cooling it for the first time... because reasons.
While hunting around for nice builds I found this video.. now this is cooling taken as an art form.

Not going to be anything like this as I am after functionality not aesthetics but man that must have cost a hell of a lot considering much of that is custom.

 

[Charlie Prime]

A couple of my young PC techs are into water-cooling. To them, it's like the hot-rodding of cars that us old guys used to do. They have photos of their rigs up on the wall in their offices, and are always lusting for that next performance enhancement. It is an art form.

 

[stonehart]

A couple of my young PC techs are into water-cooling. To them, it's like the hot-rodding of cars that us old guys used to do. They have photos of their rigs up on the wall in their offices, and are always lusting for that next performance enhancement. It is an art form.

Water cooling is really not all that hard to do from the study I have done and having seen systems in the flesh so to speak.
I am trying to keep noise in the studio space as close to nil as possible and water cooling seems to be the way to go. But having said that I am still looking at air cooling as well to see how much of an advantage the extra cost (and it is not small) water cooling will give me. The rig will also be used live as a controller computer so it has to be able to deal with the heat on stage and believe me it gets hot up there.
The big but here is just as air cooling is dependent on the ambient temp of the room you are in water cooling suffers from the same limitation hence why I need to justify the extra cost.
It maybe that I will need to water cool the GPU as well (graphics card) as this will be driving video sync as well... still sorting budget and trimming things down to what is needed.

 

[mike]

Many of my gaming pals swear by them, ive avoided them because i just have this aversion to mixing electricity and water.

Im running a GIGABYTE Radeon R9 280X, which has 3 fans on the card, plus ive crammed another 3 fans into the case itself to keep the air flowing. the MB has another one as does the power supply.

8 fans in the one box

 

[Randall]

One of the guys I used to work with lived in an apartment and had tubes running out of his PC to a barrel of water on his second story balcony, which worked fine until it got 30 below and all the water froze. Same guy made a few extra bucks on the side by buying a high-speed Internet connection, creating a wireless ad-hoc network, and reselling internet access to his neighbors. Quite a character .

 

[boomerang]

I've seen some of these jazzy set ups in high end computer stores. Is water cooling only done when "overclocking" ? Or is it mainly a matter of just a lot of circuitry crammed into a small space ?

For a short time, I worked as a de-bugging tech on industrial routers. It was a huge factory that ran 24/7 and I was night shift. We had both heat guns and freeze spray to be applied to individual chips to see if they might be failing at high or low temps only. We would eventually write up what we thought was the failure and pass it on for part replacement. One of the techs had the system beat by cranking up the data flow and holding the heat gun on a selected chip until it was completely fried. I guess you could say he had pinpointed a bad component on the board.

 

[stonehart]

Many of my gaming pals swear by them, ive avoided them because i just have this aversion to mixing electricity and water.

Im running a GIGABYTE Radeon R9 280X, which has 3 fans on the card, plus ive crammed another 3 fans into the case itself to keep the air flowing. the MB has another one as does the power supply.

8 fans in the one box

Nice setup

New PC will be Intel i7 Turbo 4.0GHZ 4x core 8x threads with the Haswell unlocked
On either a Gigabyte (GA-z97x-SLI) or ASUS saberthooth z97 Mark 2

Max out with 32 gig ram running win7 pro .. because reasons... well simply win7 standard can not do over 16gig ram anyway and I want the head room.
SSD x2 in raid and platter drives as storage..

GPU is a GeForce 770 .. that is overkill for my needs anyway but hey it will look nice.

Anyway as you can see I am going to have heat issues and this thing is going to have to deal with stage temps (which get hot).

So the case I have is a : Corsair (CC-9011018-WW) Vengeance Series™ C70 High Airflow Mid-Tower Case, USB3.0 .... these things are built like a brick wall.

 

[stonehart]

after reading the above thread I guess you are wondering what the hell this is being used for if it is not for gaming.
Well sure you could game on it as the main specs are very much that but that is not its intended use............ but hey it may get to do that just for the lulz

It has to deal with a very large amount of audio, video, and lighting sync at real time speeds with zero problems 100% of the time.

Will be running into Dante network audio for main backing and SFX mix along with 7 IEM mix (in ear monitoring) for the band on stage as well as video sync and one to lighting.
The only bottle neck here conceivably is networking speeds I think... will see in testing.
Basically there is a stupid amount of midi samples/audio going on which has to be sent to the front of house mixer and monitor tech at the same time.. we use Digital sound desks these days.
Add lighting and video to the mix and yeah it has to deal with a fair bit...
Thus I am aiming at overkill ... note the above stuff I posted is a base line and it is very likely it will get up specked over the next few weeks.

 

[Randall]

My next build will be an inexpensive but half decent quality silent unit for basic home recording ( if that's even possible ).

 

[mike]

Dont overlook the power supply for a gaming rig, standard units tend to shut down when they are called for heavy lifting like high spec graphics rendering

I use a

In Win Commander 650 W Power Supply Review | Hardware Secrets

Its been fantastic

 

[stonehart]

Dont overlook the power supply for a gaming rig, standard units tend to shut down when they are called for heavy lifting like high spec graphics rendering

I use a

In Win Commander 650 W Power Supply Review | Hardware Secrets

Its been fantastic

That is a nice heavy duty supply and modular which gets a big thumbs up from me when it comes to cable management.

I was looking at this one as I have not got the PSU as yet.

Dragon Computer (DragonPC)

wanted to make sure I had more power than I needed but not go over the top.

 

[mike]

Looks to be a great PS too, and yeah the cabling on the In Win is fanstatic
The new video card wanted two leads, and they just came out of the box and plugged right in

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Nice setup

New PC will be Intel i7 Turbo 4.0GHZ 4x core 8x threads with the Haswell unlocked
On either a Gigabyte (GA-z97x-SLI) or ASUS saberthooth z97 Mark 2

Max out with 32 gig ram running win7 pro .. because reasons... well simply win7 standard can not do over 16gig ram anyway and I want the head room.
SSD x2 in raid and platter drives as storage..

GPU is a GeForce 770 .. that is overkill for my needs anyway but hey it will look nice.

Anyway as you can see I am going to have heat issues and this thing is going to have to deal with stage temps (which get hot).

So the case I have is a : Corsair (CC-9011018-WW) Vengeance Series™ C70 High Airflow Mid-Tower Case, USB3.0 .... these things are built like a brick wall.

Welcome to the world of PC preposterousness. I actually had a fluid-cooled Mac once, a Power Mac G5. Those were hot-running chips, and that's one of the reasons Apple went Intel. These days, Apple also focuses on more sophisticated cooling methods, and some models don't even need fans. But all run quiet.

As to a powerful PC, well a Mac Pro, with an Intel Xeon, is amazingly powerful for such tasks as 3D rendering and other content creation. It's not meant as a gaming machine, of course, but it can't be beat on price from the Windows PC world for comparable hardware.

 

[stonehart]

Welcome to the world of PC preposterousness. I actually had a fluid-cooled Mac once, a Power Mac G5. Those were hot-running chips, and that's one of the reasons Apple went Intel. These days, Apple also focuses on more sophisticated cooling methods, and some models don't even need fans. But all run quiet.

As to a powerful PC, well a Mac Pro, with an Intel Xeon, is amazingly powerful for such tasks as 3D rendering and other content creation. It's not meant as a gaming machine, of course, but it can't be beat on price from the Windows PC world for comparable hardware.

Thanks Gene I wondering when you would hop in this thread

In the background production wise there is a bit of a debate as far as what system we end up with this time.. Mac or PC debate ... *sigh*
However I am the sucker who will end up with the bill either way LOL!
The main reason for the PC choice (in my opinion) is a large amount of the gear I have is PC related and the cost of changing that along with software is more the problem than PC or Mac.. I happen to like both platforms myself. The Keyboard player is all Mac and his gear is stable as a rock.

Just as an aside we do use a couple of I-Pads for Hot Que of some sound FX live .. tell you what they were the best investment for that task ever.. rock solid and worth every penny.
With a touch of the screen the SFX rolls every time.
I am sure you know "Dark side of the Moon", well the voices on the album saying things like "I am not frightened of Dieing" are hot que as the keyboard player may take a bit longer or shorter depending on his mood to play out the intro so a video audio sync is a no go. Anyway the I-Pads work so well in this situation.

 

[Randall]

Welcome to the world of PC preposterousness. I actually had a fluid-cooled Mac once, a Power Mac G5. Those were hot-running chips, and that's one of the reasons Apple went Intel. These days, Apple also focuses on more sophisticated cooling methods, and some models don't even need fans. But all run quiet.

As to a powerful PC, well a Mac Pro, with an Intel Xeon, is amazingly powerful for such tasks as 3D rendering and other content creation. It's not meant as a gaming machine, of course, but it can't be beat on price from the Windows PC world for comparable hardware.

Interesting. The Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM each tend to give the Apple that hardware edge you mention, but not by all that much. A quick look around revealed $4000 for the Apple and around $3500 for a Windows based system with the same CPU, but with only a single ( but comparable ) graphics card. No doubt a second card of similar quality would push the price up over that of Apple, but the Windows systems tended to have more storage space, RAM, and upgrade options. The Mac does however look pretty cool with its tubular case design. It's a very nice workstation: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

 

[stonehart]

Interesting. The Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM each tend to give the Apple that hardware edge you mention, but not by all that much. A quick look around revealed $4000 for the Apple and around $3500 for a Windows based system with the same CPU, but with only a single ( but comparable ) graphics card. No doubt a second card of similar quality would push the price up over that of Apple, but the Windows systems tended to have more storage space, RAM, and upgrade options. The Mac does however look pretty cool with its tubular case design. It's a very nice workstation: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

 

[Creepy Green Light]

My take away from all this was the soundtrack to video. Time for candlelit room and the headphones...