Trying Water Cooling for First Time - ASUS ROG Strix LC 120

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New Mini ITX build using NXZT H210 windowed case, which can take a decent sized air cooler, but I decided to try a water cooled cooler instead for aesthetic reasons.
The system has been getting warm, although we do still have the option of adding an extra front intake fan.

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[FunFunFun]

I experience a random air bubble rattle for 10 minutes during startup. I changed to an ASUS ROG Strix LC 120 RGB water cooler last year from another water cooler due to the same issue. Now, I am moving to a fan-based CPU cooler. Do you still have this ASUS ROG Strix LC 120, and have you had any problems with it?

[iCandyFlip]

I think it makes more sense to install the AIO sucking cold air through the front into the case than blasting the hot air through the radiator and out of the case...

[GrandmasterPoi]

Next step: put your motherboard into mineral oil bath :D Silence is guaranteed!

[grenvillephillips]

During the winter months I use an AMD FX-8350 to supplement the heating in my room - in warmer weather the supplied cooler is so loud I am surprised AMD thought it adequate.

[roberthalk]

I installed my radiator sandwiched between 2 fans. One pushing air thru the radiator and the other pulls the air out the back. This works pretty well

[BTRZ]

The only AIOs worth getting are the 280mm and 360mm versions. If you don't have room for those, or a super big Noctua D15, I can recommend the smaller Noctua U12A.

[xinox]

I have the same Aio cooler, and to say im not so pleased with it either. But now i changed the fan on the radiator to a Noctua NF-F12 iPPC-3000 120mm PWM with much higher stat pressure.

[matrixmodulator]

3:35 this is not good placement, look how the radiator must be placed to avoid issues with the liquid in the tubes.

[ccoe]

Interesting take I dismissed water cooling a while back, when I was purely focused on getting an air cooler as I needed to build a PC as quickly as possible before my old one caved in. Previously I always thought water coolers had to be joined together therefore risked leaking however I now know they are all in one generally unless you have something custom built. Now I went with a Scythe Fuma 2, which for my 5700g was going to be more than enough as I had no plans to overclock. Then... I discovered bit by bit that overclocking *could* be rewarding if you were lucky enough to get stable silicon. In fact, because I do a lot of compiling but also play the occasional game (compare this to when I was growing up where I would have a bag of games which I would play from waking to sleeping..) any performance uplift, if stable and free - might aswell be utilised. So I've started with the built in features of the motherboard just to see what I could get - and sure enough 4.6GHz didn't crash after compiling a whole day's worth of stuff I came to the conclusion that I would try to learn more. First concern is always to keep the lifespan, so I also tried Precision Boost Overdrive with moderate settings which worked well. All this with auto voltages. However I had a go at graphics overclock. From +200MHz boost, to +300MHz everything was running well. However I do recommend getting a spare partition and using OCCT which stress tests the CPU and GPU, as +300 was giving me errors. But - I gave it +25mv and bingo - after 15 minutes, no errors. I haven't tried more as I want to balance the system. The final adventure was RAM. At first I was sceptical that anything would work over stock speeds. I was at 32Mb/sec with single channel (I can't afford more yet!). The RAM turned out to be rare Micron F die - with literally about 3 reddit articles and hardly any reference, not even mentioned in the DDR4 overclock wiki or whatever it is.. So I decided to do manual. I left voltage auto (apparently it might take 3.80v wheras a lot of sites say 4 or 4.5 I think it runs on less). Anyhow by upping the speed a few notches I got to just under 3600 stable. 3600 crashed but I increased the latency a by 1 and got it up to just under 3800. Then I increased by 1 more and I got it to 3933 which it stays at now. 4000 didn't show the display but then... I didn't try any other voltages. But even with 2 more on the latency my memtest usb stick says I have 39Mb/s - so a nice uplift. Supertuxkart likes all core it runs at generally 60fps on the integrated graphics gpu, around 50ish with PBO, compared to about 41fps with 3200MHz DDR4, combined with all the other overclocks. But the biggest difference is Cinebench which would reflect on compiling too. Scores of over 15600 are possible with all core overclock, 14, 800 with PBO. Compare this to 13, 300-13600 stock speeds stock ram. So yes, all small improvements but improvements welcome. I reckon if I put a 240 AIO in, I can bring temperatures down and it'll boost for longer on PBO mode making that mode more useful, in the meantime it reaches 4.85GHz on my air cooler so it should help it boost for longer periods. That's the thing - if you download ryzen master, do "Core optimiser" Screenshot or take a picture of the results (negative offsets for CPU voltage) - put this in Curve Optimiser on the motherboard BIOS and you can reduce voltage which helps the scores. I used per core but if you do all core for older motherboards you may have one setting for all cores to try. It'll do a stability test. Once everything is stable you can come off windows again and use Linux. You can just do it manually but it was easier to leave it an hour and for it to give me some idea what undervolting could be achieved. So in my research I saw that 1 fan 120 AIOs tend to perform similar to air coolers. 240 or 2 fan 120mm AIOs like the Kraken x53 or the Artic Freezer II could perform a couple of degrees better than a Noctua DH15 or even better in some cases. I imagine if your case can fit it a 3 fan model will perform significantly better in some (not all cases). So given that I'm very tempted just to try it as my case won't fit a bigger than 155mm tall air cooler, but only has 2 120's on the top so a 240 AIO would give me superior cooling. The other thing is time to reach max temp is seconds for an air cooler but minutes for an AIO, so if you're doing short bursts you should notice that you will get better performance with AIO even with 1 fan. For longer durations a bigger radiator is better. All interesting and I'm even tempted to start a channel and demo these things!

[leovanlierop]

You should have done a double cooler in the front sucking air. And yes, air cooling is still the best, but water cooling often looks better!

[hellokirakidsshow]

Please mount the cooler at the top of the case. Mounting the way you've done it will grant you sub par performance and will reduce the lifetime of it. This is because of the air bubbles that will form in the tubing. The fan block has space designed to accommodate the bubbles and not make it interfere with the loop. You might have had bad performance bacause of this. Watch gamers nexus video on it for more info.

[krazypeople]

A high end noctua NH-D15 & bequiet! dark rock pro 4 will be on par with most 280mm AIOs and some 360mm AIOs.
If you are running a 10 series intel chips you will want to stay away from AIO's as the CPU will raise the temperature of the liquid well beyond 60C which is the point that air will begin to permeate into your closed loop. Most AIO's have 90% liquid and 10% air so introducing more air into the system can be catastrophic.

[AndrewBryantPianoTuner]

Yep and you tried a lemon and got ripped off my babs, water cooling is massively better than standard heatsink and fan

[badlordboris]

from experience you will run lower temps sucking through the radiator rather than blowing out. I tried both ways and had about 10deg C difference.

[MrBiky]

Comment for the algorithm to ingest.

Water coolers aren't as sexy as heatsinks (especially the bequiet! ones). Add to that the fact that water coolers have more moving parts (cooler _and_ water pump) so they won't last as long and are more expensive and you can't replace AIO's pumps like you can in a(n even more expensive) custom loop and you've got yourself all the downsides without any upsides (custom loops require maintenance, so don't get me started about that). Thermosiphons, like the IceGiant, seem like an interesting addition to very hot chips, like Threadrippers that are as durable as heatsinks, but have better cooling performance (but IMO aren't as good looking).

[afrog]

"removed away" as opposed to removed closer, hehe xD

[themroc]

Hi Mr. Quids! You know a video I'd like to see and I can't find anywhere? Someone who knows about security an tries the Parrot OS home edition (not the pentesting edition) and goes through their suite of preinstalled software to assess how useful any of it can be to a security-conscious average user, as this seems to be the target demographic for that version of the distro, and it's not software I am familiar with but I am curious.

tip: if you try to download their KDE version you will see they have a warning that there is an upstream bug from KDE on konsole and that they are waiting for Debian to implement the new version.
There is a simple workaround by writing in the full path to konsole:
go to System settings > Applications > Default Application > Terminal Emulator
Select "select different terminal program" and write in "/usr/bin/konsole "

[sam_]

Great video, but shame on Asus what they recently did

[Dan.a.k.a.bradpitt]

Watch on of the hoses come loose and sprays water all over lol

[AndrewBryantPianoTuner]

Single rediater massive mitake, end of video really as it will fail!