obviously over the next couple of years we're going to be building a ton of sick
water cooled gaming rigs using rtx 3000 series graphics cards like this one
but while in the past we were able to use the old rule of thumb which is about
one 120 millimeter worth of radiator per
heat generating component in the system i don't necessarily think that the rules
of it should work necessarily apply to
the rtx 3000s particularly the power
hungry and enormous rtx 3090. so today's
video is going to be us taking you along for the journey of some work that we
would have had to do anyway figuring out exactly how much radiator we need for a
water cooled rtx 3090 we're going to
start with a slim single which probably
ain't going to work and work our way all the way up to well realistically
whatever it takes just like i'll do whatever it takes to transition to our
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before we can water cool it though we need to figure out how well the system performs when it's just air cooled so
for the testing we're going to be using this ASUS strix rtx 3090 you might
remember it from our is sli actually dead video it
basically is so yeah let's just chuck it in here and find out how well she goes
our fan config in this case is a bit overkill if i'm honest uh we have three
fans in the base that are just blowing straight up into it and three fans up
here and three they're blowing up there nine in total it's a bit ridiculous
the same time like you know you want best case scenario for your card so
we've got our test set up here just a very simple time spy extreme we're going
to enable looping and let it go for 30 minutes
it's been 30 minutes just 32 at this
point and what oh my god you piece of crap why is
there no monitoring data yeah i have to do it again well see you tomorrow
okay testing's done it looks like we don't have any issues with thermal
throttling whatsoever so hovering right around 1800 megahertz and
let's see here but come on
what a beautiful card i haven't been this excited to take something apart for
a really long time this is my first look at the inside of an ampere card and what
a beauty i'm going to be using the ek quantum
vector today to water cool it here's the back plate
oh that's actually really nice damn look at that
oh that's just so nicely machined the real star of the show here yes water
blocks 175 that's enough to buy yourself
a pretty decent GPU but you know you've already got 30 90. so who cares
everything should be cnc machined i was hoping that we'd get a see-through one
this is kind of a pre-production block so we don't have you know
the things you might expect it to include like instructions
this is all that i've got it's a little pdf that includes where the thermal pads
go and that's it that's all we get probably
going to be fine
all right all the thermal pads are on
finally get to just apply some thermal paste
get it all over here oh wow
huh all of these mounting holes don't quite line up on the block because of
these two capacitors right here yeah this is bad so should we
yes oh
oh garlic okay we should
we should have the clearance now but hopefully by the time you know actual
real people get this they don't have to do that even with a
water block on it the thing is still huge yeah massive shout out to ek by the
way for sending us over one of their first vector strix blocks for the rtx
3090 from ASUS um
it did come with some growing pains in terms of installation
they actually hadn't accounted for a couple capacitors here so we had to make
our own clearance for them but now that it's on theoretically i think we should
be okay so this is as simple as let's fire it up and get going yeah power this
puppy up we're gonna need not one not two
but three eight pin pci express connectors
and then i've gone ahead and installed the plugs down here and we're gonna throw some fittings on here and build
ourselves the dirtiest water cooling loop that you
ever did see i mean not literally dirty it's going to have clean water in it but just
kind of guts spilling all over the table style obviously NVIDIA's last few
generations of graphics cards have thermal throttle that about 80 degrees
so effectively that you can't really use temperatures to determine if a cooling
solution is adequate nowadays you have to just monitor the boost clocks that
the card runs at to see if it's reaching its full potential so this air cooled
rtx 3090 from ASUS represents the numbers that we actually already ran on
this exact card because there are variances from one to the other and
that'll tell us how much radiator reaches the threshold of the air cooler
and then how much radiator we need to if there is any more headroom exceed it
for convenience we're using one of these pump reservoir combo units these really
are the fastest way to fill up a loop and get all the bubbles out of it
because the water goes directly into the inlet of the pump and you've got this
little anti-vortex thing down here in the bottom that helps the bubbles make
their way out of the liquid one thing to watch out for is modern GPU blocks like
CPU blocks can be directional so this particular one has the inlet on the left
here so the water flows down into the cold plate and then it actually splits
and flows along two different paths to help with flow restriction boy when we
build an ugly loop we build an ugly loop that's not that bad Linus this sag is
something else that's pretty bad card looks curved
that's okay though because you know you can make yourself feel better with a
refreshing drink from lttstore.com hey there it is all right to keep our
results consistent the pump is going to be run at full speed all the time and
then our fan for the radiator or radiators is going to go to the system
fan header and we're going to configure it in the BIOS so that they're all
running at about i don't know what's reasonable like 1200 RPM i think is a
good balance between noise and cooling so we'll go with that look at all those
bubbles in there you got to get them out see now it's grabbing that water oh this is
great we were fighting with smart fan mode with all these different temperatures which by the way is very
cool and you know different fan rpms but you can just turn it off that's not a
drop down it's a check mark and you can just set it 50 which gives
us around 1100 RPM on this fan which is
pretty quiet like but then the main reason that you go water cooling these
days is of course a for looks and b for quieter operation if you don't want it
quiet don't water cool i mean it's gotta where is it look at the cooler on this
thing like so yeah that's what we're gonna settle
on it's pretty crazy to see an rtx 39d even at idle running at 32 degrees
celsius damn dang and that's even with room temperature
water that we put in here because we didn't want to wait forever for it to heat up and reach equilibrium
good luck little radiator okay i'm rooting for you buddy i'm gonna take
lunch we returned from lunch to find our system black screened and unresponsive
thankfully our data logging still worked and we discovered that our GPU shot up
to 87 degrees immediately after the test started which is obviously not right
even with an inadequate radiator the water would still need time to heat up
so upon further investigation we discovered
that in ek's mad rush presumably to get us one of these blocks ahead of retail
availability they the block is great but
they appear to have made a small boo-boo and sent us two millimeter rather than
one millimeter thermal pads so here's the one they sent us against a one mil
what that did was actually prevented the GPU from making proper contact you can
see we've done a test fit now and everything's doing great with the one
mils so we just need to remount this and take another crack at it ow
it's really hot
that's not quite as bad but the tanks on the sides of the radiator
i'm surprised we changed our test methodology long story but we're using
fur mark and letting it reach equilibrium then logging for five
minutes and it's like turboing completely to two gigahertz and
maxing out it 66 degrees
in fact what's weird is like the back of the GPU we put some tape on it to deal
with the reflectiveness of the of the back plate there
so the GPU itself is actually running at around the same temperature
as the back of the like back plate crazy
that RAM on the back of the card must get freaking toasty maybe we shouldn't
be that surprised though i mean we've seen a 1080 ti and what an 8600k on a
single 8700k on a single 120 millimeter radiator
that's not to say though that we think this is ideal let's see how much better
we can do with a better rad
to say our results from the thick single were a disappointment would be an
understatement we got basically the exact same temps even though we amped up
the thickness of our radiator although if you think about it it does kind of
make sense because we are adding some more surface area but we're also adding
more restriction to the airflow so you tend to need higher RPM or higher static
pressure fans to get the most out of thicker rads actually here's another
thing i didn't notice until i went to do that b-roll shot showing the relative
thickness the high-performance thicker one
actually has kind of like a built-in shroud so you can see there's more space
between where it screws in where the fin stack is
so the difference in thickness of the actual cooling element is not as much
you can see it also has a much more dense fin arrangement it's possible then
that a more powerful fan could have improved our results with the thicker
radiator but not to the degree that we'd be getting temperatures that i'd be
happy with on water cooling so let's move on to a
dual 120 millimeter radiator this is also of the dense fin thicker variety
come on pump you can do it half an hour into our dual rad i gotta
say i am blown away like i knew it was gonna perform better two fans is
definitely better than one but wow we
went from 66 degrees down to 48
degrees that's almost a 20 degree drop
just by adding a little bit more radiator surface area so without testing
the triple i can already say that this is probably going to be the sweet spot
for performance and noise just because i'm not expecting a big
difference in performance this time around though doesn't mean i can skip out on testing the triple what you get
with an overkill-sized radiator in addition to potentially lower coolant
temperatures is more headroom for optimizing your system for example if
you've got restrictive grills on your case a larger
radiator can help compensate for less airflow in the same way you could just
turn your fan speeds down if you wanted your system to operate more quietly
finally of course there's the f word future proofing
if you've got a larger radiator and you do decide to add another component to
your loop down the road it's more likely that you'll be able to do so without
changing out your rad as expected we only dropped about four degrees this
time telling us that our sweet spot really is a double radiator but if we
wanted some room to grow or we knew that we were going to be giving up a bunch of
our airflow to something like a restrictive fan filter then a triple
would be a great bet for an rtx 3090. this is crazy because
that means that doing small form factor machines with a high performance CPU
and an rtx 3090 is basically going to require either a dual and a single or
two triples and remember too that the scenario we're testing here assumes that
our radiators are going to have access to fresh air sometimes they're going to
have a mixture of fresh air and case air
in fact like you see in a case like this
one where there's kind of like a gap between the back panel and the fans
where it can kind of mix what comes in through the grill and what's already
present in the case so
now we know just like we all knew that i was going
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