A Computer GuyPretty sure you can't weld (copper tubing) it to plexi or acetal block tops. It would be interesting to know if you can weld it to nickel plated copper block tops without damaging the nickel.

Of course not, you'd still need a barb or fitting in the block and probably pump as well, which kill the "advantage" of welding (bending tube is not that hard compared to welding )

trsttte(bending tube is not that hard compared to welding )

Especially soft tubing. :roll: Super easy, barely and inconvenience.

A Computer GuyI'm not sure of your point here. Regardless of CPU you want to have some idea of the real wattage (that fits your usage) so you can pick the appropriate cooler that can dissipate that amount of heat or you might get your performance throttled.

What I meant was if it was designed for an AMD CPU that AMD rated at 125W then it would be more than fine for an AMD CPU that's rated for 20W less than that. It actually came with an R9-3900X that my stepfather had in his build but he absolutely hates RGB lighting so I traded him the Wraith Spire that came with my R5-3600X. It had no RGB and I was using the RGB Wraith Spire that came with my R7-1700 so it had never been used. I recognised the Wraith Prism as just the original Wraith cooler with RGB on it and knew it would work very well. The R9-3900X is a dodecacore and I'll probably never have one of those anyway because I'm primarily a gamer. At the end of the day, I've been using it for about 1½ years without issue.

A Computer GuyI think there was at least three models of Wraith cooler that came with Ryzen CPU's if my memory serves correctly? I could hear them all when they needed to ramp up under medium-high loads. Not the end of the world but....
Most of the time I don't hear my NH-C14S but when I do I know my CPU peeked over 75c for a bit.

Oh don't get me wrong, I know that boxed coolers have their drawbacks but there were actually two kinds of Wraith cooler design. The first had a big 120mm fan with curved blades (think Cooler Master Sickleflow) and it was relatively quiet. The second one was identical except that it had a smaller fan with straight blades and it sounded like a jet engine. I actually have one that was never used in my original Phenom II X4 965 box. I've never used it because the original that came with my Phenom II X4 940 still works perfectly to this day. I got the same crappy one with my FX-8350 but was still using my original Wraith. I ended up using it in a build for my mom and when I heard it I was like "WTF IS THAT?!". It didn't seem to bother her at all but I knew that I was right to just keep using the one that I already had. The Wraith Prism however is a premium cooler and it is whisper-quiet, even quieter than my original Wraith. The quietest air cooler that I'd ever used was a Cooler Master Hyper because it uses two 80mm case fans that run in a push-pull configuration and it almost never needs to ramp up because of this.

A Computer GuyIn contrast for liquid cooling depending on your setup you can fix your rpm of your fans and pump to quiet levels and never hear them ramp up letting your liquid run warmer during the higher workloads. Alternatively you can base the fan speeds on the liquid temp providing a smoother gradient of control especially when the CPU is popping up and down in usage.
FYI I'm not saying air coolers are bad, I'm saying liquid cooling gives you more choices in controlling fan speed and noise. Of course this comes with a higher cost and higher build planning requirements.

I completely agree with you there. I didn't say that liquid systems are bad, I just think that for most people, they're not worth it. I mean, we're seeing kids using AIOs in their first gaming builds and they don't even know how to properly overclock to begin with. That ~$100 that they're spending on it is often needlessly pushing them down one video card tier. Alot of them wear headsets to play team-based online games and so even if the air cooler was a shrieker, they wouldn't hear it anyway with a headset on.

A Computer GuyLiquid cooling isn't for the risk adverse. Having said that I also keep an air cooled spare PC that I use for gaming. Ended up actually needing it once after I tricked my motherboard in committing seppuku with PBO. You can read about it hereif your looking for some entertainment.

I'll read it, but I doubt that I'll find it entertaining because back when I bought my Phenom II X4 940, I also bought a flagship motherboard for it. It was the MSI K9A2 Platinum, one of the few boards that could support Quad-CrossfireX. I paid as much for it then as you'd pay for an X670E motherboard in today's dollars. It was a real beauty with its four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots and copper heatpipes:

It had a 1-year warranty and it's power distribution system failed after no more than 15 months. I never even got to load it up with HD 4870s like I wanted to, I only had 2. I contacted MSi saying that I didn't want a replacement but perhaps, since this was their flagship AM2+ motherboard, that they'd give me a discount on a replacement. They essentially said "too bad, so sad" and I was SOL. I know how much it sucks to lose a motherboard so I'd probably be more likely to feel bad for you than anything.

I did get MSi back though because I told them "Ok, if you won't do anything about this, I'll make you lose far more money than if you had even replaced it, let alone just give me the discount on a replacement that I wanted. I work at Tiger Direct and I guarantee you that ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, XFX and EVGA will all be a bit happier because not I, nor a single customer of mine will EVER get ANYTHING with the MSi brand on it ever again." and by my calculations, their profit loss from me never recommending an MSi product to my customers would have been in the tens of thousands of dollars over the following year. Since then, I've never bought another MSi product and never will.

A Computer GuyThat estimate of "many hundreds of dollars" sound a little low but it depends how much you need, where you source your parts (looking at you EK), and how much aesthetics contribute to your individual build (looking at you JayzTwoCents). Don't forget there are recurring costs (liquid replacement) and time costs (maintenance). Liquid cooling isn't all about performance but also incorporates aesthetics and style. (and for some bragging rights I suppose) AIO's kind of take the joy out of building a liquid cooled rig in my opinion but reduce the complexity and cost.

Yeah, being a guy who built his first PC in 1988 (a 286-16), I've never really been about the aesthetics. I mean, sure, I like RGB lights as much as the next guy but I've always seen PC parts as "things that go inside your case and you don't see them" because those glass panels are relatively recent. For the longest time, a PC looked like its case and that was it. I even questioned the graphics that XFX put on my HD 4870s. I mean, sure, they looked cool but when I was using them, they looked like the black side panel of my case. :laugh:

As for bragging rights, yeah, I can kinda see that but I'm far more likely to brag about how I managed to not waste any dollars in my build. That's why you'll probably never see a GeForce card in any of my rigs. I just can't justify them when, at the same price point, the Radeon rquivalent is almost always faster. I used to tease my coworkers about how my Phenom II X4 940 / HD 4870 rig could run Crysis better than their Intel/nVidia combos and I still had hundreds left over. Yes, I am THAT old. :rockout:

A Computer GuyThere are some practical and impractical realities to what you suggest. Sticking a torch in your case isn't a good option to solder some joints.

No, but you can cut them to the right lengths, assemble them inside the case without soldering so you know what needs to go where, solder them on a workbench and put them into the case as one piece. Get that crazy steampunk look going on, you know you want to! :roll:

A Computer GuyYou're not going to find PC CPU and GPU water blocks at Home Depot so you're talking about a fairly good amount of fabrication work and time is money.

Well, of course you wouldn't get the water blocks at home depot. You'd buy the blocks from places like Canada Computers, Newegg or Micro Center first and then just go buy a piece of pipe with the correct diameter at Home Depot. I have a pretty complete tool & die set so I could even thread the pipes to whatever was needed to screw them into the blocks. I was just talking about getting the piping from Home Depot, not the specialised parts. This is also completely assuming that someone wants custom cooling so bad but has so little funds that they'd actually resort to some kind of Hacksmith job like this. :roll:

Avro ArrowWell, of course you wouldn't get the water blocks at home depot. You'd buy the blocks from places like Canada Computers, Newegg or Micro Center first and then just go buy a piece of pipe with the correct diameter at Home Depot. I have a pretty complete tool & die set so I could even thread the pipes to whatever was needed to screw them into the blocks. I was just talking about getting the piping from Home Depot, not the specialised parts. :roll:

Now your cheating. You didn't mention anything about threading & welding! :laugh: Threads on blocks and reservoirs are pretty shallow, not sure how well that would work without orings and gasket surfaces.

cvaldesYeah, and you would need the right tools and more importantly enough real world experience to do this successfully, like 5-10 years of regular welding/soldering work.

You wouldn't necessarily have to use copper or solder because now they have plastic water pipes that you can glue together.

cvaldesThis is similar to the frequent "just fire up the soldering iron and fix it yourself" inane responses that pollute PC hardware Q&A forums.

Sure, except for the fact that those posts are serious and mine was meant to elicit a chuckle. Do I think that it's possible? Sure I do. Do I think that it's worth the trouble? Of course not. I don't know how you managed to get triggered by something so innocuous but it says a lot more about you than it does about me.

cvaldesGuess what? Most of us do other things for a living, so we don't actually spend enough time hands on to weld our own custom loops for our PCs. And how many people here are willing to put their awesome welding skills on the line and possibly risk thousands of dollars of PC components?

So what, you think that I don't do other things for a living? If I were rich, I'd probably have an R9-7950X with an RX 7900 XTX by now. If I were unemployed, I wouldn't be averse to buying video cards below level 8 if I could buy them at all. You're making a lot of weird assumptions, like taking what I said as if I was being completely serious. My name isn't Hacksmith, I just think that it would be funny if someone did that. Maybe I should also point out that I'm the one who thinks that liquid cooling is a complete waste of money for most people so what makes you think that I'd bother with all of that?

cvaldesI love these sort of Rube Goldbergian suggestions. Sooo connected to reality.

What, just because you don't know what's out there means that it's not reality? I wasn't aware that you knew everything about everything (and that's probably because you don't).

Maybe you're one of those people who sees that I'm somewhat new to the TPU forums and assumes that I'm some noob. After all, there's no way that I'm a respected member at Techspot and there's definitely no chance that I'm a highly-decorated Tom's Hardware member who has been there for over decade, eh? Clearly, I've also never been a member of the HardForum or Hardware Canucks either because nothing exists outside of the TPU forum and never has, eh?

People like you make me laugh because nobody who has actually been around for a long time would read my posts and think that I didn't know what I was talking about. Only people who don't know better do that.

ThrashZoneHi,
Copper does give a cool steampunk look :cool:

I'm literally in stitches here. I expected that people would laugh and not take it seriously. I mean, sure, it could work, it would look really steampunky and it would be pretty much invincible but some of these people think that I'm actually advocating doing it. At least you got the chuckle out of it that I was aiming for. :laugh:

A Computer GuyNow your cheating. You didn't mention anything about threading & welding! :laugh: Threads on blocks and reservoirs are pretty shallow, not sure how well that would work without orings and gasket surfaces.

Hey, if you're threading the pipes, you only need teflon tape to seal it! As for the pump and reservoir, just get them from a pet store that specialises in aquariums! :roll:

Get those GPH numbers UP, yo!!!:rockout:

Avro ArrowHey, if you're threading the pipes, you only need teflon tape to seal it! As for the pump and reservoir, just get them from a pet store that specialises in aquariums! :roll:

Get those GPH numbers UP, yo!!!:rockout:

Don't forget fittings provide some surface area (flange) to the blocks providing support so connections won't crack threads.