I like to build silent systems. You don’t need to watercool anything, but people want to for various reasons.
For me, its cool factor (as in factor), the ability to push the card without worrying about heat, and the reduced volume. I have an itx sandwich build that’s got a 6900xt and it runs 100% silently, except for a bit of coil whine, thanks to the custom loop.
Remember when 300w GPUs were the flagship? Pepperidge farm remembers.
While that’s true, you also have to factor in reservoir, pump, tubing, etc… And all that does take up space. It can get quite difficult in small cases, but its definitely doable.
Bear in mind that this is an AMD card. Their PCBs are stupid huge with tonnes of wasted area. My 4090FE lost about half its length when I put a water block on it, but with an AMD you should expect it to get at most a third shorter.
I have a PC case full of Alphacool stuff and a have an ASUS Prime RX 9070 XT I got yesterday at Microcenter for $599. I looked on Alphacool’s website and the Taichi is the only one as of now, but they have a forum that ask what consumers want and I suggested my model. So, if more people ask for a certain model, it may come quicker if they see the demand for certain ones.
Just to update that I have not found anything in terms of more waterblocks, either from Alphacool or other brands. I did see that rumor of a “ultimate” version of the 9070 xt, but that was one rumor and I haven’t heard anything since. So we are definitely still in a wait and see type of situation.
If anyone finds a block and wants me to update the main post, please feel free to ping me here.
This is the first time that living in the US has been an issue for me being into pc building. Would love to be able to send my 9070 XT into alphacool so they can make a block but that’s an EU only thing…
I think external rads are the way to go on an ITX or mATX build. I just think it looks cool af, too. Especially when it’s done up as a wall decoration or a desk piece.
What about Performance PCs? I know they do a bunch of different kinds of fully custom work, and I’m pretty sure they have a fab shop with CNC machines. Not sure if they make waterblocks or not, but it might be worth sending them an email inquiring.
I just recently got in to custom loop water cooling with my recent 9950X/9070XT/X870E build, but have had my old 4770K/GTX1070/Z87 build on an AIO since I upgraded from a 770 to a 1070 and changed the case back in 2016 (I think I was on a stock cooler before that).
My old PC holds a great deal of sentimental value for me, so I’m trying to think about how I want to repurpose it. I’ve been wanting to get something that I can use as a dedicated transcoding machine and something that I can just send workloads like that to to run in the background, so to speak, while I’m on my daily driver PC doing other stuff.
I’ve recently been looking into older Xeon processors, like X99 era, since I can run a 64 - 88 thread machine at ~4.2 Ghz without any overclocking for under $300. There’s one seller that’s offloading a ton of X99 mobo/E5 209X/~128GB DDR4 bundles for ~ $250. I’ve actually been thinking about just buying a server rack, then getting a couple of U2 - U4 server chassis to put one of those bundles and my old Haswell build into, then running a MO-RA IV radiator on the rack with a vertical fan setup. My old PC will probably end up just being used as a CPU to run a NAS on, but it can handle at least 8 SATA drives without having to use PCIe SATA cards. And both of these systems are old enough and cheap enough that I could play around with them without having to worry about potentially breaking something super expensive. They’re both from around that Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, etc. era where overclocking achieved massive performance gains and temps were a feat to wrangle into order.
All of that aside, though, LiquidHaus has a really cool gallery of pictures of systems they’ve built or worked on, and they’re big on external rads, so I like looking through their website for inspiration lol.
factor), the ability to push the card without worrying about heat, and the reduced volume. I have an itx sandwich build that’s got a 6900xt and it runs 100% silently, except for a bit of coil whine, thanks to the custom loop.
