Watercooling max heat dissipation

Is there any rule of thumb for how many watts you can dissipate in a watercooling radiator?

I know the answer is not as simple. Iirc I found a datasheet for a 360mm radiator for up to 320watts at delta 10°C and 2.5K rpm fans.

But is a delta 10°C good for say a 30°C room? This leaves the cpu and gpu to get cooled by a 40°C water, which leaves them really 30°C of usable delta T between die hot spot and water.

I remember some of my thermodynamic lessons, But I cannot find detailed enough datasheet for the components I’m looking at…
If the scientific approach fails I come to you for your experience.

How many watts can you pass through two 360mm or a single 360 with dual 180mm fans?

I’m looking to make a gpu box with probably a threadripper or epyc and hopefully 4 gpus. Have already 2 300watts cards. Guess I need to consider external cooling if I want to add 600 watts or more.
I’m aiming somewhere between 1kw and 2kw really and finding the correct case is a nightmare.

Looking at silverstone rm51 (single 360mm 180width) silverstone (dual 360mm) or fractal torrent (single 360mm 180width and single 360). If you have other considerations I take it.

This is for a workstation not a training rig. it doesn’t need to run full blast for days straight.

60-100 W per 120 mm fan mount is a common assumption, depending on noise tolerance, ambient temperature, and loop characteristics. ~65 W/mount from ~25 °C Ta is pretty reasonable with current gen AIOs and avoiding the rad dominating system noise.

The lower the ΔT the less efficient the heat transfer and thus the more the rest of the loop has to be speced up. Personally I’d go more like Twater = Ta + 15-20 °C.

I don’t know of any comparative measurements between 120 and 180 parts but, in general, n + 1 fans outperform n smaller fans and larger diameters are more effective at lower flow resistances. So my null hypothesis would be 2x180 or 180s on MORA 360 is probably disadvantageous.

I wouldn’t particular bother as that amount of power’s easier with external rads. Don’t forget the HVAC to hold the room to 30 °C and electrical circuit allocation. Sometimes it’s easier to run the rads outside.

RM51 and Torrent are both inadequate to 10-30 120 fan mounts and Torrents are notably poorly suited to water cooling. V3000 Plus’s probably the most suitable rad option here. But compare to 3-6 external 560s, 2-3 1080s, or internal-external hybrids.

Thank you for your fast answering. I’ve just looked at the v3000 plus and amazed by how many fans you can fit inside a case.

You made me change my perspective and I think starting internal and upgrade to hybride. Starting from a “small-ish” case. I think I like those silverstone may be rm52 with two 360s

If I understood you correctly, I should really expect to dissipate from 60w up to 100W per 120mm, leveraging a “high” delta T 15-20°C. In a 30°C room it would bring the water near 50°C, leaving ~25°C to cool the die.
Is a 50°C water considered hot in a watercooling scenario?

Electric allocation will be easy as I’m on 220V and know what I’m doing.

About the external cooling, going for a 1080 with 9 fans should bring me between 600 and 1k watts, would going from a 45mm 60mm change a lot?
I guess the fans static pressure is the biggest factor here. What should I expect for “not too loud” fans? Not crazy server fans but not noctua silent ones. Always in a 30°C room.

Out of curiosity, have you seem thermostat for watercooling to pass the water through the internal radiator if it comes back from the external cooling at more than say 50°C?

If servers are anything to go by, 80 and 120mm fans are the sweetspot, 140 begins to lose pressure, 180 is abysmal.

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I’m running quad 180s and they move a ton of air through the radiators, I can get a delta t on the cpus vs ambient of ~30C @700 watts while staying virtually silent.

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I wouldn’t expect much from the second rad in series. Work through the ΔTs to see why.

It’s often a bit challenging to find specs but loop parts are primarily rated for 60. But sometimes 50. So mind the parts selection.

I’m not aware of anyone opening up an AIO and installing a temperature sensor to see how it runs. Fan control based on water temperature is common in custom loops.

Recall useful operating points are to the right of the stall region and thus more a function of P-Q curvature and zero head airflow than static pressure. There seems to be next to no data on how rad thickness affects noise-normalized cooling ability but the few bits I’m aware of suggest not much.

NF-A12x25 G2 and NF-A12x14 G2 are nothing special. Almost the same performance’s available from fans that are around half the price (Vento Pro 120 PWM and Toughfan 14 Pro for rads) and there’s a bunch of lower cost options at 90-95% the noise-normalized airflow. Putting in more rad can be more cost effective than premium fans.

Essentially, yeah. But, formally, not so much lose pressure as fail to provide noise-normalized airflow increases commensurate with increase in impeller size. So standard affinity applies. If you can run n fans then the largest ones that fit are probably the most useful by a small margin. But if going down a size offers n+1 fans (or (n+1)² instead of n²) that’s likely more effective.

Why not in parallel?

Thanks for the clarification, Do you how the thickness affect absolute power dissipation in a non noise-normalized experiment? Would the same fans at high rpm make more noise but allows better cooling?


Comino Grando Server

When you look how comino does it, they use a single thick radiator with some thick fans. They use 3 x 140mm fans at 3k rpm for the silent one and 6.2k rpm for the performance one. Max 6.5kwatts.


Comino Grando Workstation

The workstation has normal 140mm at 3k or 5k rpm at max 2.5kw.

They have interesting performance charts in there datasheets:

*Server

*Workstation

Would the thick server fans being loss noisy at 2k watts compared to the thin ones at full blast?

And the fine print under both of them is “All the data is a rough estimation and provided only for informational purposes, please contact Comino team for clarification.” with the surrounding marketing material claiming both that there’s no thermal throttling and that additional cooling is needed to remove performance limitations. If you do a 70+ dB(A) ram through a rad, yeah, you can get a bit more out of it but the solutions I’m aware of for ~65 kW/rack require cooling units ~1.5x the volume of the rack. Plus plumbing and ducting.

The DIY, single server version of this is an external loop.

I honestly think that you’re looking at this too much like a math equation and not dynamically enough. It’s not just your radiators that affect thermals; CPU IHS’s, TiM, water blocks, mounting pressure, etc. all play a part as well.

Also you are correct in that static pressure is more relevant for radiators, but anything can be brute forced with enough RPMs. You should check out Der8auer’s videos on these monster 9 and 12 fan radiators that he actually uses.

Try as we might, there is no rule of thumb for water cooling heat dissipation. The resultant capacity is heavily influenced by a variety of factor considerations including quasi-static intake air (sink) temperature and water temperature, radiator dynamics (size, thickness, fin density), flow rate, and fan speed, to include displacement and static pressure. Most values are empirically derived (i.e., tested) and not calculated.

The biggest impact to water temperature is, of course, thermal load. The loop water temperature will increase over time for a given thermal load as the air-to-water delta is driven higher, allowing for more heat rejection. Recall the rate of heat removal is a function of the difference in temperature between the temperature of the point of load and the cooling medium (temperature of intake air) for a given induction rate. The reason the water temperature increases is because this additional delta is necessary to create the condition necessary to balance heat in and heat out. Make sense?

Increasing either cooling medium (water) flow rate and/or fan speeds will reduce these deltas for a given load. Given the flow resistance of the loop for such small diameter passageways, increasing flow rate is difficult and typically reaches a point of diminishing returns well before additional airflow becomes a limiting factor.

Matching fan type (size and static pressure) is paramount when considering fin density for the radiator used. While higher fin densities typically provide additional heat rejection, this must be matched with a relatively high static fan pressure to be effective.

I would say 30C room temperature is OK but would recommend you get this down to at least 25C, if not lower.

A watercooling loop no-load to full-load delta of 10C or less is considered ideal. Systems above this limit are typically considered undersized and can be compensated by adding more radiator surface (and more fans) or simply increasing fan speed. At some point the fan noise becomes unbearable.

The other thing to consider is the increase in loop pressure. If you fill the loop with say, 20C water, seal it, and then drive it to 50C the change in pressure is going to be significant. Cycling this pressure has the potential to degrade the sealing capacity of the loop, usually at the connection points, leading to leaks over time. As well, higher water operating temperature will tend to increase losses to atmosphere but is less of a consideration for tubing of this type. Tygon will absolutely leach water over time at these temperatures at a fairly significant rate.

When I design a watercooling solution, I aim for no more than a 10C delta using fans at no more than 1500RPM. These considerations pretty much drive everything else. At full load, 50C water operating temperature makes me cringe. Keep this below 40C, preferably no more than 35C.

Hope this helps.

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Just to give you an idea of how this works, here’s a chart that shows performance for my system. Changing radiator size or adding more radiator or changing fan speed, for example, would invalidate these results and require re-analysis.

I plot three point:

  1. No-load (i.e., system is off with temp - being the water temp - the same as room temperature… assuming we’re at equilibrium to start

  2. Idle: loop thermal inputs while system is idle - need to know your heat dumps into the system in watts

  3. Load (or full load for a given workload): doesn’t really matter what load although the highest load is best to understand maximum equilibrium for the loop

Measure Water Temps vs. Load are plotted and a linear regression analysis is done to find the best fit equation. It should be in the form of:

T_final = T_initial + (X * Power)

X is the co-efficient we seek. Remember, this is configuration DEPENDENT.

Here we calculate X at about 0.027 degC/W. In other words, AT EQUILIBRIUM for a given load, the water temperture will increase 0.027 degrees Celcius for every additional watt (W) of load. As you can see, I actually only loaded the CPU, and not the GPU. I find that the CPU is the highest load and when gaming the CPU + GPU is appreciable (actually, less) to just the CPU at full tilt when encoding. You’ll need to consider your use cases as well.

If we flip this we get W/degC, which is very useful. Here we have 37.7 W/degC. What this means is that every additional 37.7W of load will increase the water temperature AT EQUILIBRIUM for a given load by 1 degree Celcius.

The processor (or GPU) temperature is then calculated from the water temperature, being a function of the junction temperature of the load. More thermodynamics… blah, blah, blah… but now we’re getting into the weeds and beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say, good mounting pressure and a good thermal paste are about all you can do here. Oh, and also more thermal mass, so pick a waterblock with lots of metal and preferably made of copper (silver if you can afford it, hehe).

Thermodynamics is a suit of mine. Much more to explore if you care but these are the basics.

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I agree. Have to start building your design understanding somewhere, though, and right now it seems to me this thread’s in the process of recognizing some of the total system complexity.

One implementation bound is sqrt(RPM) in fin to air puts a limit on how much RPM can help. With the Liquid Freezer III Pro I’ve been working with lately, for example, there’s not a lot of Granite Ridge response past 1000 RPM. Wouldn’t expect more than -2 °C or so from putting S12038-8K on instead of P12 Pro.

There’s an abundant amount of measurements showing rads aren’t really all that resistive (often around 75% of unrestricted noise-normalized airflow) but the assumption static pressure is a primary predictor of these operating points persists anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Depends. The lower the water ΔT the greater the amount of rads and thus total installation footprint, so a +10 °C ΔT constraint’s setting up to implement a pretty inefficient loop. That’s been historically feasible in enthusiast circumstances but the higher density rack design stuff I’m aware of seems pretty much to fix server return temperature to 60 °C, targeting like 30-40 °C inbound.

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Which one should I look? It’s really hard for me as he only have german auto-generated caption on his videos

Thanks

Do people implement vents to mitigate that?

Yeah helps a lot, thanks

Thanks a lot that perfect. Out of curiosity whats is your loop?

But that will only give me thermal capacity isn’t it? (and what about a golden one? :wink: )

Probably Roman’s well, not quite ad for the MORA IV 600. It’s in German and so far as I know he’s a native speaker. If you go way back he probably has something on the MO-RA3s as well.

Usually airspace in the reservoir handles it if the fill ports are fully sealed.

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Yes the MORA was what I was thinking of, thank you :slightly_smiling_face:

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CPU: EK-Quantum Magnitude sTRX4 D-RGB - Nickel + Acetal (RGB removed and EK-Quantum Magnitude Accent - sTRX4, Nickel added)

GPU: EK-Quantum Vector² Master RTX 4090 D-RGB - Nickel + Acetal (no RGB)

Rad: Alphacool NexXxoS UT60 360mm Radiator

Fans: 6x Servo (OEM) Gentle Typhoon AP-14 @ 1450RPM – high static pressure with relatively low noise, still the best IMHO, circa 2015 (good luck finding these)

Fan Controller: Lamptron CM615 (this system in installed in an old-school Lian-Li PC-75B)

Sensor(s): Alphacool G1/4" Eiszapfen Temperature Sensor Plug - Deep Black

Pump/Reservoir: 2x Laing D5 installed in EK D5 Dual CSQ Pump Top - Acetal - Black, EK D5 Dual X-Res Link Adapter, EK-MultiOption RES X3 with 150mm Tube

Barbs: EK-Quantum Torque 12/16mm - Black

Plugs: EK-Quantum Torque Plug - Black

Tubing: EK-Loop Soft Tube 12/16mm

Fluid: Distilled water + inhibitor of your choice

Current non-OEMy version’s the Vento Pro 120 PWM. Absolutely slays other than the bizarrely high minimum PWM speed (so use DC).

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