Water Cooling 101: Upgrading Your Loop

Testing

Of course watercooling isn’t only about drooling over the look and flow of your finished loop; performance is a huge factor. We did some testing to see how our additions affect our loop’s performance.

Components:
Motherboard: Gigabyte G1.Sniper3
CPU: Intel 3770K
Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR3 1600 8GB Kit
GPU: Asus GTX970 Strix
Storage: OCZ Vertex 3 120GB
PSU: Corsair RM750x

With the processor set to 4.5ghz @ 1.18V vCore, we grabbed a quick screenshot showing both our CPU temps and GPU temps at idle.

Ambient: 72°F / 22.22°C
Idle Avg CPU: 102.2°F / 39°C
Idle Avg GPU: 78.8°F / 26°C

These are pretty legit idle temps with the GPU down to 26°C. Let’s see what happens when we run IBT for a pass on Very High to stress our CPU.

4.5ghz @ 1.18V vCore
Load Avg: 161.6°F / 72°C
GPU: 26°C(idling)

So we actually dropped our CPU temp by 2.25°C! Not only that but our idle GPU just sat still at 26°C. So we not only added some heat to the loop in the form of the GPU, but we were able to drop the CPU load temps a bit. Not bad at all. Finally we’ll run Unigine’s Valley Benchmark to see what sort of temps we should expect from our system while gaming.

4.5ghz @ 1.18V vCore
Load Avg CPU: 135.5°F / 57.5°C
Load Avg GPU: 91.4°F / 33°C

Very impressive! Our CPU average temp is well below 60°C and the GPU temperature under full load is only 7°C over it’s idle temp. While we’re not going to get into overclocking this Asus Strix GTX 970, I can assure you we would run into a voltage limit before a thermal limit. You literally could barely do any better on cooling for your GPU than this.

And with that I feel this upgrade is complete. With the looks and performance we achieved here I would be more than happy to run this as my personal gaming rig 24/7. However, for the ThinkComputers Water Cooling 101 series, of course we’re not quite done upgrading yet. Join us next time for Water Cooling 101 Episode 7; we take things to the advanced level by adding our memory to the loop using a pair of Phobya memory blocks that are primed and ready to go!

If you missed any of the previous Water Cooling 101 articles be sure to check them out!