Watercooling flowrate/performance question
 

Ello...

How much of a dent on cpu cooling performance will it be to have the northbridge and graphics card watercooled as well?

I guess having the two extra blocks in the loop will reduce the flow rate without making a significant impact on the temperatures of the nb/gfx, but will that cause a significant reduction in the cpu cooling?

Will this mean I'll get better performance having a dedicated watercooling setup for just the CPU, having the northbridge/gfx passively/air cooled, or will i not notice a drop in cpu cooling performance having a northbridge and graphics block?

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, hard to explain what i mean

Cheers,

Telkman

Welcome to ProCooling!

There are two factors that will impact your performance: the added heat from the NB and GPU, and the flow restriction, from these two blocks.

Usually, you can minimize the impact on flow with a low restriction block, such as DangerDen's, especially their GPU model. The actual impact on your CPU temp is going to depend on the block's design.

As for the increased heatload, it depends! The latest video cards (NVidia GeForce FX excluded) have a relatively low power emission, but just enough to raise your CPU temps by a degree or two. OC'ing it will raise the heatload.

As for the NB, again, it depends! The latest NVidia NForce2 does run very hot, especially if it's overclocked. You can bet on a couple of degrees there too.

Overall, your cooling solution should be able to handle the extra heat, unless you have a very small heatercore in which case, the CPU temp might again, go up a couple of degrees. Usually, you can maximize the efficiency of the core with dual fans, turned up a little higher (if you've got them running low).


Good luck, and measure your water temp!

Unless you're desperate to water cool your graphics card, a lot of people have been very happy using one of those zalman heatpipe coolers. They run passively and can take some load off your watercooling loop.

Theyre also cheaper than most GPU blocks.

8-ball

Hehe, was trying to decide between the two :D

But Watercooling is more fun!

So, to recap, cooling these extra devices is going to (a) add more heat to your loop, and (b) decrease flow.
These may or may not be an issue depending on (a) how big of a radiator/heater core you have and (b) how powerfull a pump you have.

I bet you can guess what my next two questions are going to be.

What radiator do you have?
What pump do you have?

None at the moment - redoing whole setup.

The problems will arise as i thought, but from what bigben says it'll not be as big a problem as i thought :] will still affect my choice of radiator/pump etc anyway ;)

Get a GPU block that doesn't have two much crap blocking flow and you'll be fine. I didn't notice any difference in CPU temps by adding mine, but I did notice a big drop in noise and a nice new overclocke :)