Gregory Owett wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2019 11:44 am
Hi Everyone,
I am in the case of Daniel, I want to build a machine in a box Cooler Master HAF 932 advanced existing because the amd FX 8150 processor, that I had, is KO.
On a MSI X470 Gaming Pro, I want to put an AMD Rysen 9 3090X, and an MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus OC graphics card.
As RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR4 2 x 8 GB 3466 MHz CASE 16. With a cooler Corsair Hydro Series - H100i Pro RGB.
All this, for about 1,500 euros.
What do you think of this configuration? Can it work properly?
Thanks for some advice!
Water cooling is stupid IMO. You need to be drawing 200W+ before water cooling is even worthwhile. Anything under 200W should be air-cooled no problem, especially by high-end air coolers.
The $100ish (USD) air coolers can cool up to 250W power consumption (although water-cooling is way better at this point). At least, there are plenty of people putting 250W TDP machines on air (aka: how many hardcore server setups are on air, in tiny 2U cases... that you know of?). Air is perfectly capable at ~250W or less TDP. BTW: The AMD Ryzen 3900x is expected to use
170W worst-case
Now if you had plans to reach 200W+ or 300W power consumption (say... are you going to overclock severely ?), then maybe you wanna go water cooling. But if you're sticking with basic system, just keep it simple with air cooling.
A good, high-end air cooler is the Noctua NH-D15. It will
never leak, its pump will never fail, and algae will never grow in its water. Because air-coolers are just a simple metal heatpipe connected to a simple fan. They're practically bulletproof and dead simple to use. Water coolers have lots of issues you can run into (and if it decides to spring a leak and leak all over your system... well... you won't be happy).
Water Cooling is necessary in the highest end builds because of a steep overclock, where total-system power consumption hits over 500W average (GPUs + CPUs are all overclocked and need serious cooling)... and if you stuff a case with 2x or even 4x GPUs the air flow begins to suffer. So yeah, water-cooling has a place but you have a bog-standard computer design there. There's no reason to use water in your situation.
And if you ever decide to use water-cooling, it should be an All-copper water system to avoid galvanic corrosion, with a large, external (and reliable) water pumps, and an easily accessed reservoir for easy-maintenance. Your "cheap" $100 AIO water cooler is going to be difficult to maintain, has an undersized pump that is prone to failure, and has a copper+aluminum mix that has galvanic corrosion issues.
Don't get me wrong: the Asetek AIO water cooler (of which the Corsair Hydro is just a rebrand of) is a modern engineering marvel. But its tradeoffs are rather poor compared to quality air-cooling designs. And its a maintenance nightmare because all of its parts have been miniaturized. I'm glad that a company is out there trying to make water-cooling simplier and easier for everyone, but I don't think their design is recommend worthy quite yet.
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You just gotta spend some time thinking about air-flow when using an air-cooler. You want cold-air blowing into the system through the front, rising due to the PSU fan at the bottom, and then air distributed between the GPU, RAM, VRMs, and CPU cooler. Finally, the computer should exhaust all hot-air through the back and top of the case. A single, powerful, stream of cold air to cool the whole system will be more reliable
AND cheaper than any water cooling system. You just gotta put some thought into it.
Make sure all your fans inside the case work with this air-flow, and you'll have a cooling system that lasts for 10 years, easily. Use Water cooling, and you will be lucky to make it to year 3 before maintaining something. (Ex: fluid refresh the biocide / anti-corrosion juices inside of the water)
What do you think of this configuration? Can it work properly?
Anyone building their own computer should run
Memtest86 for 24-hours (maybe 48-hours if you're paranoid) before installing Windows. If you're building your own computer, you are going to be using your own QA work.
Computer QA is guess-and-check for the most part. Stick parts together, and they'll probably work. Modern parts have software that auto-configure pretty much everything. But you should test for hardware failures.
If you assume a 1-in-a-billion chance of failure, you have 256 failures in 32GB of RAM (remember: 32GB == 256 Gigabits). Silent-bitflips in RAM is one of the most difficult things to debug, so an "isolated" test like Memtest86 (which launches its own OS) is best for the job.
I don't have a methodology for testing hard drives / SSDs unfortunately. But RAM should absolutely be tested, and tested for 24-hours straight.
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The most important thing is you are buying "out of spec" RAM. JEDEC standards are only 1.2V at 2666 MHz. But the RAM you're buying will be run at 3466MHz at 1.35V. However, AMD Ryzen
loves fast RAM, so you should do everything in your power to overclock the RAM. To run at 3466 MHz, you will have to configure the BIOS to use "XMP settings".
Its super easy to do, but I recommend testing the RAM if you do this. It never hurts to be too careful.
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Don't forget storage (I recommend NVMe SSD. HP Ex950 is quite good and cheap in the USA, but I hear its harder to source in Europe. I don't know what Europeans should buy instead). And don't forget the Windows Tax