Build or buy?

Paulw

Serephucus wrote: »

I'm envious. This is one of those times were I'm tempted to buy a similar build just for bragging rights.

I wanted the Intel Core i7-3960X 3.30GHz S2011 15MB but it was just slightly out of my budget.

One thing I'm considering (for next Christmas) will be to replace the PSU and probably go SLI (depends on what cards are around then).

I'll take some picts during the build and will post up when finished.

Thanks again for the advice from the great people in here. It certainly influenced my decision on many parts.

Paulw

Question about cooling (H100) and the 500R.

My idea for cooling, using the top of the case

======== (radiator)

---

(case)
vvvvvvvvvv (fans pulling air in to the case)

Then at the back of the case, having that as an extractor fan.

Sound logical??

Serephucus

Paulw wrote: »

Question about cooling (H100) and the 500R.

My idea for cooling, using the top of the case

======== (radiator)

---

(case)
vvvvvvvvvv (fans pulling air in to the case)

Then at the back of the case, having that as an extractor fan.

Sound logical??

Not at all!

What you want is:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Airflow
=============== Case
======= - ======= Fans
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||||||||||||| Radiator

And then use the rear exhaust as an intake. That's the way I had my radiator (RX360) set up, and this was after trying every configuration.

Paulw

But, by your logic, you're pulling warm air from inside the case (heated by GPU, memory, etc) up through the radiator.

My logic is pulling outside cold air through the radiator in to the case.

Hmmm, trial and error I guess. I'll try my way, run a few benchmarks, then try your way, and see which performs best.

I'm probably going to leave the CPU as standard for a few weeks, and then may overclock it. I see it's easy to get it up to 4.6GHz and very stable.

nesf

Paulw wrote: »

But, by your logic, you're pulling warm air from inside the case (heated by GPU, memory, etc) up through the radiator.

My logic is pulling outside cold air through the radiator in to the case.

Hmmm, trial and error I guess. I'll try my way, run a few benchmarks, then try your way, and see which performs best.

I'm probably going to leave the CPU as standard for a few weeks, and then may overclock it. I see it's easy to get it up to 4.6GHz and very stable.

The problem with H series is that for optimal cooling of the CPU you want to pull air in like you describe. The problem is that this raises the air temperature inside your case and interferes with cooling on the GPU and other components (the latter is less important).

In general you want to lower air temperature inside the case if you can, this is why you see a lot of watercooling people recommending having the fans above the H series pulling air out from the case rather than blowing in.


We're only talking small differences in temperature at the CPU depending on which way the fans go anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it and just go for the cooler temperature inside the case to keep the fan level as low as possible on the GPU to keep noise down.