I’m thoroughly impressed with the service life of my first AIO liquid cooler and felt like I should write about it somewhere. This Coolit ECO with the big 2400mm radiator was purchased roughly around 2009-2010. Now it’s cooling my new Ryzen 1700X.
SOCKET ISSUE: With the new AM4 socket I resorted to zip ties for mounting the cpu block.
PEFORMANCE: During stability tests the limitations of this old liquid cooler with 1/4 tubes became evident. I could get my 1700X stable at 4.075 ghz within the safe voltage range, however the cooler couldn’t keep up. Normal use worked fine, but when I ran Prime95 the cpu would crash from heat around the 20 minute mark(the sensor was only reading 74-75 C, so I didn’t stop the test myself). This kind of stability is important because I’m a video editor. Crashing during big renders would be bad.
Anyway, after lots of testing I confirmed a flat 4.00 ghz is the best this old cooler can handle. The CPU temp peaked at 70 C during a 45 minute stress test with Prime95. Also, my 240mm radiator is running a push-pull setup with coolmaster fans.
OTHER THOUGHTS:
Do AIO liquid coolers usually last this long? My Coolit has had plenty of physical abuse. For the first five years I hung it outside of the tower case for better cooling. If your AIO is older? I’d love to know.
Also, it’s time to start thinking about a upgrade with a real open loop system. I thought about re-using the radiator on this thing, but it’s aluminum and the fittings are 1/4 barbs. Unless I used a matching aluminum block, there would be corrosion issues from what I read. Starting fresh with something like Swiftech seems like the smart move.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think…
this alone might be the cause of the crashing. I am not a stability OC tester by any means but I have heard more than a few times now that Prime95 is pretty far out of date and not really a good testing tool, something to do with pushing too hard are voltage spikes. As an alternative I have seen OCCT testing suite mentioned, though i am sure there are others too. Worth a look into the claims against Prime95, it is old.
That said 74-75c is fine but I would not want to go much further that 80-85. Sounds like you have it locked though stable.
Not from what I have seen, that is a hell of a run for an AIO.
Thanks for the tip about Prime95 Zibob! That would explain the temps not being that high… I will definitely compare results with OCCT testing. For temps I’ve heard at 80C Ryzen will start to throttle itself.
I got Prime95 in my head after watching AMD Rep. Robert Hallock recommend it in a Ryzen overclocking how-to video ( #SecretsofRyzen ). I took everything he said in as gospel.
I may not be right, just have heard it about. I am no authority on any of this.
EDIT: I knew there as another good one, just could not remember, Aida64 is the name. It may end up all of them giving the same results, if so I am wrong and carry on with better knowledge.
Quite impressive yes. Those pumps are built to last pretty much forever though. Not sure what kind of pump is in your kit but the Asetek things come from the enterprise anyway, sooo… they should be reliable.
Problem in the “cheap” AIOs aren’t the pumps though. It’s the tubes that dissolve over time.
Alright, OCCT running the “Large Data Set” is no joke for stability testing. It catches any errors really fast and pushes hard as well. The built in monitor is also really good at watching the CPU voltage… better than HWInfo alone, although HWInfo is what OCCT says it’s using (OCCT might just have a faster refresh rate… not sure).
My seemingly stable 4.075 ghz survived about 90 seconds in OCCT, lol. After lots of tests and voltage tweaking I’ve arrived at 3.975 in OCCT for a stable everyday overclock. Like I found with Prime95, heat under-load is the limiting factor here. At 73C and above my 1700X chip becomes unstable, exhibiting errors or just crashing. Here are a bunch of similar examples discussed on reddit.
Ryzens Max Temp becomes a moving target as you overclock it. The higher the CPU frequency, the lower temp it can tolerate and remain stable. At stock it might be 80-95C, but overclocked my chip needs to stay below 74C.