Would you say, it would be necessary or better to get/make an water cooled system? I currently ran an HD 7970 without watercooling. It got very hot, as you might know. Recently I got an watercooled GTX 980 TI, which isn't getting higher than 50-55° C. But I want to buy the new Vega 56, because the Power draw (as I read from Wikipedia) is lower and it gets more GFlops in FP32. Now I'm struggeling, if I should get an watercooling system (or just an Waterblock) for the Vega, when and if I'm gonna buy it.
And yes, as you might can read, I'm new to BOINC. Was into Crypto mining before. :)
Also following you because your post are very interesting :)
Thanks for the compliments. =)
You should only need watercooling if you are running your cards above stock settings, such as when overclocking and overvolting. Otherwise, the stock fan should easily be able to keep the GPU from overheating even at full load.
I have no experience with the HD 7970, but @vortac is an expert in those as his entire research operation is centred around watercooled rigs running several HD 7970 cards. He may be able to offer some more insight. =)
Thank you for the answer :)
I wouldn't OC the cards because it would consume too much power.
I looked at @vortac post with his quadro HD7970 watercooling. Lookes pretty nice. Thank you for the hint :)
Hello @jexkin and welcome back to Gridcoin! Watercooling should be considered for multi-GPU rigs (can be very difficult to aircool, unless you intend to build a mining rack in your basement).
Watercooling is also useful if your mining rig is going to be placed in the living room or anywhere else where constant noise might be an issue (water will practically reduce operating noise to zero, while allowing massive overclocks).
I dont think water cooling is needed, but I do live in the UK where it never really gets hot (if you are hot here, open a window!).
Overclocking GPUs doesnt work well for BOINC projects, though you can get away with a little bit, and CPU overclocking quickly consumes a lot of power so it isnt ideal to go too far either.
Yeah, I live in Germany. Even with window(s) open, it can get really hot in my room. That's why I thought about water cooling the GPU(s), so that my room doesn't heat up that much and not that fast.
I don't or won't OC the GPU(s) currently. Maybe some day, when I'm more into this theme.
Thank you for the answer :)
Your room will heat up at the same rate with, or without, water cooling. =)
Hot GPUs draw more electric power. Therefore, watercooled GPU will always draw less power than the same GPU cooled with air. Simply because watercooled GPU will always run about 30-35 °C cooler. And for every °C that the card runs hotter it needs approximately 1.2W more power to handle the exact same load.
More details here:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GTX_480_Amp_Edition/27.html
Watercooling a PC doesn't make the room less hot, the water is only the (way better) heat transportation medium, the heat gets transported to the radiators and then it gets blown into the air.
Energieerhaltungssatz
So, as far as I didn't misundertand something:
Watercooled GPU(s) would make sense, if you want to consume less energy? For example: I live in Germany, power cost is 0.3$/kw. I don't mind about that. But less power consumption would be for sure good. Would you recommend to buy waterblocks, just for the fact, that the electrical bill wouldn't be that high? I know, "do what you want. If you can afford it, go for it" or something like that will most likely your answer. But, asking never hurts :D
Germany here too. Watercooling is more power consuming because for air cooling you use a bunch of fans and for water cooling you use the same amount or even more fans - and the pump. At least - for a good custom loop, not these all in one 120mm single radiator jokes.
The only upsides of a good custom watercooling loop are better gpu/cpu core temperatures and (if you can afford a lot of radiator capacity and high-end fans) a more silent computer - because the fans can run slower. And a way better inside look. ;)
I have an Thermaltake Core X9. I think, I have enough space for some radiators :D
I made these calculations: If I had 2x480 radiators and 8x120mm fans (Calculated with 15W per fan) it should consume 120W more, only the fans. I don't really know how much the pump would consume. I calculated about max. 50W. Maximum: under 200W more. If @vortac is right (or techpowerup) and a GPU is consuming about 1.2W more per °C and the water cooling might get 35°C less heat than an aircooled GPU (Sorry for sentence. Might be very confusing.), it would consume up to 42W less per GPU. Let's say I would have 6 HD7970's. It would be up to 252W less with an watercooling system. If the 2x480 radiators can handle the temperature, I don't really know.
I don't know if this makes sense. Might be not, but well, I tried xD
EK Vardar fans are recommended for radiators. They consume only 1.44 watts of electric power:
https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-vardar-f3-120-1850rpm
2x480 radiators would be able to handle 6 HD7970s, even with overclocking.
Pumps require about 10-20W. One 20W pump is enough to power the loop with two radiators and 6 HD7970s.
All in all, watercooling is much more power-efficient than aircooling, especially for multi-GPU rigs. Only obstacle is the high initial cost of watercooling equipment.
That's somewhere correct and somewhere a naïve fallacy (Milchmädchenrechnung) because we talk about using the Hardware with Boinc and that means a permanent 100% full load - exept you wan't to earn less GRC then you can. ;)
Rule of thumb for radiator space is 120mm radiator space per component + 1x 120mm + 120mm per overclocked component for a PC that has an average (max. 16h/day) usage.
Unfortunately there is no rule of thumb for a 24/7 100% usage.
Water cooling your computer won't make your room cooler; if your computer uses 500 Watts then that's like having a 500 Watt heater in the room regardless of how you cool the CPU & GPU.