Paradigm Gaming

I'd be interested to know the thermal variation between dual D5 vs. dual DDC 3.2 in a complex loop. Like most others, I'm a D5 fan, even though they are harder to 'blend in', but there's something to be said for the pressure that a DDC can produce. It doesn't move the volume of water, but it moves it more forcibly. Granted the heat disposition can be an issue, but what is the thermal variation between dissipating that heat back into the fluid (D5) and dissipating it back into the air (DDC)? DDC's have a higher fail rate than D5's, so it would beg the question that if it was thermally advantageous to move fluid with more force, given the amount of 90 degree turns involved with multiple water cooled components and radiators, wouldn't it make more sense in a dual motor setup to use dual DDC's since one of the core advantages of dual pumps in a loop is the ability of the loop to survive a pump failure.

Welcome! Looking forward to being visibly confused and arguing about it

Welcome! New here myself. I like your rig, and if you don't play games ... it checks email just as fast as the rest of ours

I'd be interested in getting thoughts on this topic. I've not built with distribution plates yet, but I intend to in my current Enyo build. I won't be using a distro plate with a pump, I'll only be using it as an aesthetic to control the loop. I still prefer a more traditional approach to reservoirs, but even so I've found myself moving away from tubular to the newer square designs like Watercool's Heatkiller and Raijintek's Antila. Bitspower even entered the square reservoir market not too long ago. I was curious about distro plates when they were a novelty a few years ago, but I think Singularity and Lian Li have moved them into the mainstream. Hell, even Thermaltake now offers an open air chassis with a complete distro plate back. Bykski and Barrow have since developed dozens of case specific distro plates. Bitspower's hexagonal water reservoirs are also very interesting, although not optimal for large volumes of fluid. As water cooling gains popularity, it seems like enthusiast manufacturer's have pushed to envelope on reservoirs. Monsoon actually produces a completely modular reservoir system now (MMRS - Monsoon Modular Reservoir System) where you can actually custom create a modular reservoir with all of the parts and pieces available in different colors. It's quite fascinating. If you build with water, how do you lean?

Respect

@Sir Beregond ... nekro'ing this thread. Wanted to see if you completed your upgrade and what you decided to go with. I've not seen a PC case enter the market like the O-11 Dynamic in terms of popularity and volume since Corsair came out with the Obsidian lineup. The O-11 to me is set up for traditional fan placement to optimize pressure. I'd still bring the air in from the back and the bottom and exhaust it through the rear and the top, depending on where you plan to put the case. I prefer positive air pressure inside the case, forcing the warmer air inside to find any avenue of release, rather than creating negative pressure and risk choking. I put my PC's on my desk for display, in cooler rooms, so if I was building in the O-11, I'd actually exhaust through the back and the rear and bring air in from the bottom with high flow rate fans and in through the top in a push/pull configuration. I'd actually take the top off of the case and mount the push fans on the outside. Push pull intake through the top in a cool air environment will give optimal cooling perfomance to your top radiator. I'd be leary about exhausting through the bottom. There is limited clearance and warmer air rises, so you'd have two obstructive forces working against air release.

@ENTERPRISE https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/450928-back-to-top-support-topic/

For sure, @J7SC_Orion brings up probably the most important facet of a push pull configuration ... that all fans are the same and that they are all run on the same controller. Push/Pull isn't necessary, but it's one of those efficiency things for me. And it happens to come along with a pretty nice aesthetic. Thing is, that you have to have a case large enough to accommodate one or multiple configurations depending on what type of rig you are building. PC radiators, by design, are obstructive and impede airflow. If you use air flow fans (high CFM and RPM) you risk the air moving too fast and 'bouncing off of the rad fins and seeping through the open air seems instead of trapping the air and using static pressure to dissipate the heat and force the air through the fins. Pushing air through the rads is the popular choice, and allows for a bit of design freedom when also wanting to mount reservoirs, distro plates or other design mechanics to the other side of the radiator. But for pure cooling effects, have fans on the opposite side pulling through the air that the other fans are pushing allows for a much more efficient operation, allowing for more air to move both through the rad and into the case. The thicker the radiator, the more push/pull becomes an attractive option. I've always been a proponent of positive air pressure in a case, so I'd traditionally not pay much attention to the specs of the exhaust fans, but the theory crafting on positive vs. negative and equalized case pressure is still debatable. Now that I build in open air chassis', I concentrate more on the efficiency of radiator cooling and less on the internal pressure of the case.

What's going on in the market right now is indicative as to why boards like EHW are needed. Gamers and enthusiasts have always been market fair to gamers and enthusiasts. It's almost like a brotherhood or a family where not only do we wish to sell our goods and to be fair, but we also harbor this innate desire to know the outcome of how our products and equipment ended up serving our buyers. That's just something you can't get with Amazon or eBay or any retailer really. I don't know how many times I've sold a high end GPU or a PC case where I didn't follow with "send me a pic of your new rig" or something. I, for one, look forward to the new EHW Marketplace and returning to the way it used to be. By enthusiasts for enthusiasts

After reading through a lot of the forums today (catching up, new here), I found myself longing for a scroll up button or feature. Most forum architectures like Xenforo or VBulletin have have add-on features that will give the reader a floating button or arrow that will allow them to scroll automatically back up to the top of the page. Comes in handy when you are reading a lot of long threads

It's hard to ever go wrong with Noctua fans. They were/are the elite of the static pressure fans. I would have been a much bigger Noctua fan back in the day had I understood their affinity for the color brown. They were never the best looking fans to me, but it's hard to argue with a fan that create static pressure in the 7 range. Anything over 3 is going to really displace some heat. Granted, all static pressure ratings are published at max fan speed, but anyone building a machine to push it to it's limits needs to know what that rating is at max speed. For everyday, heavy load gaming or rendering, I try to find a middle ground between what I know will work the best and what fits the aesthetic I'm looking for. I'd advise anyone looking to build hardcore, overclocking and heavy load rigs that they are going to push to the edge to look at Noctua and Arctic. I'd consider them the best of the best for static pressure. For exhaust, I always try to marry high air flow rate and RPM with the aesthetic I need. While lower static pressure rated than I'd like, my next build will be with Lian Li SL120's. I'm completely enamored with their brilliant daisy chain design. To be able to hard connect fans together like legos, without wiring, leads to so many build options. The design allows you to control, or have the motherboard control, 16 fans through one header. They are expensive as f*** though, not much unlike Noctua's best offerings.

Amazing thread, thanks to the OP This thread contains high quality information for building water loops. I'm a complete lover of complex and dynamic water loop challenges, opting most often for dual loops and most often in cases that allow tubing to flow through the back of the case as well. I love the optics of mixing hard bending with fittings bends and have just gotten into straight glass w/fitted bends. Reading through this, there's only 2 things that I think I can focus on that might help. Through my trials and tribulations of building and water cooling, I learned over time the importance of learning how to distinguish between air flow fans and high static pressure fans. The more complex the water loops, the more reliant on your radiator fans you'll be for them to cool water that is generally flowing over a greater distance than it would in a simple loop. I tend to build in cases that allow for push/pull radiator configurations to maximize the airflow component of the cooling process. Use air flow fans for exhaust and intake where radiators are not located, but always use high static pressure fans for your rads. If your fans don't have the static pressure to compress the air and force it through the radiator fins efficiently, it will do a disservice to the beautiful complex water loop you just designed. Second, no matter the fluid I use in the end, I always water test my loops with UV Clear Blue. Using UV Clear Blue, you only need to look over your connections and loop with a UV flashlight to check for leaking. Any leaks will glow big and bright blue for you to see. Then I flush and use the fluid I want to build with. I love think tank and information sharing threads. Thanks all

Recently started my next build in a Raijintek Enyo open air chassis. Just got it back from the paint shop, had all of the main components powder coated orange. SLI is dead I know, but I'm still going to run it in 2080ti SLI because I love the aesthetic and I love building dual water loops.

As an enthusiast builder, the death and support declination of SLI is one of the harder realities that I've had to deal with. Analytically, I'm not even quite sure that I can see the benefit of moving away from a dynamic that was so popular to so many, to the very base that supports these manufacturers and game developers. From a strict financial analysis perspective, it's easy enough to understand the dramatic cost increase that accompanied the technology packed into the Turning and Ampere architecture and the resulting need to get out of one card what you could traditionally surpass with two cards in SLI. I get the accomplishment, I do. What I don't understand with the decrease if not total death of SLI support, performance analytics aside, is how they so quickly killed a dynamic that was never born strictly of performance. Not only do enthusiast builders enjoy the aesthetics of SLI/Crossfire, but they enjoyed that they could pair it with a performance boost. It was never about one or the other, it was about the marriage of having the flexibility and artistic/creative freedom in your build and being rewarded with increased performance. NVLINK was an incredible advance in SLI performance. They could have built and sold more cards by supporting and advancing it. Their business relationships with game developers could have and would have greenlighted a continued support for SLI and Crossfire in games. As a gamer, I'm fascinated by the performance achievements of the RTX 3090. It blows my mind. But as an enthusiast and a builder, I'd still rather sacrifice a little bit of performance for the creative freedom to build without restriction. I love the new vertical mounting options, but Raijintek just authored a full size tower case with a dual vertical SLI bridge. I just think killing SLI kills a lot of what enthusiasts loved about building. It wasn't always about performance.

Hey EHW community, Paradigm here, longtime multi-core gamer and PC build enthusiast. Was happy to stumble across this board as I read through what has become muddy waters at the 'other' board. It was actually a mention over there by @UltraMega that led me here. I was never a mega poster on the other boards, I'd always preferred to read the insights and musings of other enthusiasts and tech aficionados, choosing to post only when I felt I had something relevant or additive to say. I posted several build logs and was mostly involved in conversations that focused on building and water cooling analytics and theory-crafting. But as others have said, the waters on some other boards have become muddy and I am happy to see the focus and obvious vision here in just the short time that I've been browsing. It'll be nice to have some substantive conversations to keep my mind off of the ridiculous state of hardware right now. I was right in the middle of a custom Raijintek Enyo build when the GPU and CPU markets went to a place where gamers and enthusiasts never want to see them go. There certainly isn't much service being done right now for the diehard and lifelong supporters of the industries that have fallen prey to the scalpers, bots and miners currently controlling the market. But I look forward to being a participant in the vision that is EHW. Look forward to meeting everyone in the course of time. Peace - Para