Watercooling, coolant and Tim.

hey ya,

a number of questions here.

1. Yes, go with a cheaper card because the cooler doesn't matter.

2. It doesn't matter too much to be honest since you're going to be watercooling, go with the EVGA one.

3. DO NOT USE DYES EVER IN YOUR LOOP, EVER!!!! Go with coloured tubing instead. You want to be using distilled water with a few drops of PTNuke in there and maybe a killcoil. The Dyes filter out in your blocks and gunk them all up.

4. Nope, you're going with a kit which is fine, as far as kits go that's one of the best.

5. Not really, just bleed the bubbles out every few months, remember you'll need to flush your loop once it's built to get rid of the flux, use a 50/50 water/vinegar solution for that, you'll need more than 250ml of fluid, i'd personally get 1L just in case.

6. Pretty much the same as any normal paste, MX3 I think it is, or IC Diamond, AS5 they are all very good.

7. Sounds about right, either way thermal paste is it.

8. Push pull is where you have 3 fans pulling air on one side and 3 fans pushing air through on the other.

9. Yes is the simple answer, you get more airflow which increases the efficiency of your rad

10. If you're looking for quiet then go with some gentle typhoons, they are uber good and quiet.

Hope that helps

Comps

I believe it's Thermal Interface Material , also is there evidence of colored fluids clogging blocks? I mean evidence that specifically the dies congeal into gunk, rather than color other gunk (plasticizers that leech from the tube for example)? I've used them without issue.

There are loads on google and a few on here, it's mainly the CPU that filters it out and gets all gunky.

1. You're not taking off the PCB, you're removing the cooler; what matters most is that you get what you want and know what you're getting: the FTW 670 uses a 680 PCB, so the Razor 670 water block wouldn't fit. Different cards offer different features: more RAM, higher clocks, etc. For example, getting an EVGA card with a stock higher clock means that you know it can run OC at that speed and still be under warranty. You could very well buy a basic card that ends up not being able to OC as high as a pre-OCed card, it's just the luck of the draw.

2. You shouldn't need to worry too much between 8 and 10 phases; basically they mean 'stable power'. Asus has a tendency to sell cards that are already capped out with their OC, but they also have a tendency to use non-standard PCBs sometimes.

3. The only dye I personally would ever consider is the UV clear. This way the water could be normal and clear with no LEDs or with normal LEDs (for example: RGB) and glow when using UV LEDs.

4. ...

• Your RAM is wrong. The X79 chipset supports quad channel RAM, not dual. Ivy Bridge is dual channel.
• You can undervolt an SP120 performance to the same noise level as the quiet edition, but you cannot overvolt the quiet to get the same air flow as the performance; I'd recommend a fan controller (or onboard QFan control) and the SP120 performance.
• You probably shouldn't post publicly that you're planning to violate an OEM license; MS hasn't seemed to care through Win7, but they've added a bunch of stuff that makes it sound like Win8 will be different and they will actually be checking for valid OEM licensing.
• Again, as I mentioned in #1, the FTW 670 and the 670 water block don't match.
• You will probably want to get a bigger SSD and put all your games on the SSD instead of the 1TB mechanical; SSDs make gaming soooooo much faster, particularly with texture and map loading.
• If you do a custom loop, you will want to include your CPU in it and not use the H100: there's no reason to waste the H100 rad space when it could hold a much better custom rad used for both the CPU and GPUs. A quick note that when doing rad placement, remember that you either want the air to go rad-in/straight-out or straight-in/rad-out; passing heated air from one rad through another doesn't help anything.

5. You will need to perform regular maintenance

• top off reservoir when water evaporates
• vacuum dust from fans/radiators
• change water out about once per year
• when necessary, clean blocks and change tubing

6. I've always been big on AS5, but will be trying Phobya HeGrease this time around; I've heard good things about it.

9. It depends on the fan. Fans with high static pressure like the GT AP-15 and SP120 see very little improvement when going to push-pull; but fans with lesser static pressure can benefit greatly. It also depends on the thickness and FPI of your radiator. The RX360 has very low FPI, so would not benefit as much as say a GTX360. I personally wouldn't bother with push/pull unless I was using weak fans, exceeding about 15 FPI, or using 80mm thick rads. I'll note that I have both and the SP120 performance pushes air backward through an AP-15 and also pulls it backward through an AP-15 at the cost of a little more noise to give you some perspective (puting an SP120 and AP-15 back-to-back sounds like a tornado).

10. It depends on the fan, but usually yes. Puting fans in series (push/pull) almost doubles their pressure, so if you're going to be running the fans extremely slow then it could help quite a bit. You can think of it as the first fan only having to push the air half-way and then the other fan can pull it the other half. Since noise increases logarithmically, having double the fans with each at half the noise level would be lower than half the fans at full noise level. You also have to keep in mind, though, that a fan on the far side of a radiator has a muffler while one exposed to the outside is more audible. Noise to CFM graphs for fans are usually not linear either, so the only way to be sure of what you need or want is to try it yourself.

There are about 50% of people on both sides of the fence here: not about Mayhem's, but about dye in general. The problem is that the issue is very complicated and chemical. Certain coolants and certain dyes should never mix, certain coolants and certain lighting should never mix, certain additives and certain dyes should never mix, certain additives and certain coolants should never mix, certain tubing and certain dyes should never mix, certain tubing and certain coolants should never mix, certain tubing and certain lighting should never mix, certain tubing and certain additives should never mix; you get the idea: it's complicated. Many times a tubing/lighting issue gets blamed on the dye, other times an plating issue gets blamed on a dye or additive, etc.

Research as much as you can with what you want to use and then hope for no issues. The research will decrease the chance of an issue substancially because many people have already found many combinations of things that don't like each other. There are, of course, always some products that are just all-out bad as well.
All radiators come with crap inside them and have to be flushed clean before use. Flux is left over goo from soldering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(metallurgy)
personal choice: I like the idea of using LEDs to make the water whatever color I want it to be. You can even use RGB LEDs and have it cycle.
It's mostly personal choice on look and feel; just make sure it has the power to handle what you put on it. I prefer ones that can be controlled with software by reading temps. I personally am going with the Aquaero, but that is overkill.
I wouldn't: some would. In RAID 0, you lose TRIM, so you are relying soleyly on the SSDs garbage collection: I have trust issues with that process and it has some limitations you have to be aware of that are irreversible.
Frequency of stuff is going to be very system-specific. UV light decays some tubing, certain dyes decay others; clear tubing tends to require more frequent replacement (it gets brittle or flakey); etc. The same goes for coolants: some should even be ok for two or three years if the loop is friendly to the coolant. I'm personally using norprene: it looks tacky, but lasts forever and has almost no evaporation.
The best CFM/noise fan is still the GT AP-15, but the SP120 performance is fairly close and on full speed outperforms the AP-15 in both flow and pressure. I've personally decided to use the AP-15 because I'll have at least 25 fans, but if Corsair had made an SP140, I would have chosen it hands down for how well the SP120 impressed me.
I would guess, but I don't have a Switch 810 to know for sure.

Very well explained and stated, this deserves a Rep+

It doesn't control 8 fans, it controls 8 channels with each channel able to supply 30 watts. That means at max load you could have 80 SP120s running from it, but I never recommend maxing things out. I'd recommend that you daisy-chain the fans on each rad or rad side so that they increase/decrease speed in tandem. For example, one knob would control 3 pull fans and another 3 push fans or more if you have other radiators.

This actually isn't much as I am puting my fans in a pull-only configuration and only having one exhaust fan: I may add more exhaust fans, but decided to see what normal air pressure brings to the table first.

If it were me, I'd just get the 240/256GB and not bother with a separate OS drive; but you may have a lot more games than I. If you decide on a separate OS drive, consider the space requirement for the OS, swap file, and at least an extra 20% free space. SSDs make heavy use of free space in order to keep the drive running fast.

My Windows 7 64-bit 'Windows' folder alone is 30GB, so I imagine with the common files and stuff under Program Files, it ends up being around 40GB. You can estimate swap file size at about 2*RAM. If it were me, I'd probably not go below 80GB for an OS drive, but 64GB will probably be fine, just without as much free space. If you go this route, you'll need to remember to move your user directories to the gaming drive, though, because they get very big. As I said before, If it were me, I would just use a single SSD for OS and games and have it larger sized instead of trying to split off the OS to its own drive. In the days of mechanical drives, having the OS on a dedicated drive mattered, but that is not the case with SSDs.

"better" is subjective, and I've not used either; but if given the choice, I'd go for the Switch 810. It just seems more sleek and less crowded so you can do what you want with it. The Stormtrooper seems to be more a LAN gaming case to me (with the handle and all).