re: Water Cooling: My First Loop

When I get home and get something to eat I will help you out. I keep up with all the new parts, testing, thermal/flow charts, etc.

Meanwhile, answer these questions for me:

1. What is your goal with this loop? (e.g., you want to really push your hardware, you just like the aesthetics, you want something quiet, you only want to OC CPU, etc. etc.)

2. How much 5.25" bay space do you have? This will determine selection on reservoir, pump, and possibly fan controller.

3. Unrelated, but why 3 SSDs? RAID?

4. Are you water cooling only GPU and CPU? (i.e., not RAM, Mobo chipset, etc. -- which is not recommended anyway).

5. How important is PC silence? There are three desirable features: Compact, quiet, and better cooling performance. And in general, you can only pick two, and compromise on the third.

6. What about aesthetics? Custom loops are not cheap, but there are ways to cut costs. For example, using barbs and worm clamps instead of compression fittings; getting clear food grade tubing instead of watercooling-rebranded or colored tubing; using a small case-mount reservoir or T-line/fillport instead of a bay reservoir; etc.

7. Rough estimate of your total watercooling budget? (not including the Raystorm you already bought, which was a good choice).

8. I concur that you should get your 680 before doing the loop. Do you see yourself going SLI in the near future?