Gadgetory

excellent what's up guys here on Paul's Hardware I like to try to spend equal time between water-cooled systems and non water-cooled systems because I know water cooling is fun and entertaining but it's not something that everyone is into why don't you find yourself in this situation you have built yourself or are in the process of building yourself a very nice high-end air-cooled system may be featuring the highest end graphics card least on the consumer level currently available like a GTX 1080 got it all set up in like a awesome build like this one back here behind me and then you realize you know what I want more I want to try out water cooling but maybe you're a little bit too afraid to connect all the fittings and do leak testing I want to maybe overclock a little bit more or maybe you just want to silence your system and get a little bit cooler well ek may have devised a solution for you by combining their predator series of all-in-one liquid coolers now available in 280 millimeter size by the way with a prefilled GPU block with quick disconnects that means you can take the quick disconnects and loop the GPU into your CPU loop and get yourself a GPU and CPU cooling solution without having to like fill any reservoirs or leak tests or you know do the fittings or any of that kind of stuff maybe that takes some of the fun out of it for some of you guys but for others it makes it a lot less worrisome and it also gives you the ability to say get an all-in-one CPU cooler right now and then maybe expand it to a GPU and CPU loop in the future but I have done today is set up an air cooled system which again is right there behind me I'm going to be testing that at stock and also run some over clocks with the air-cooled setup and that's featuring the GT X 1080 gaming Z here from MSI as well as a 59 30 K and then we'll pop in the ek predator solution and see what kind of difference it makes here are the specs for the system I've set up I was originally going to use a fan Tex m2 pro case but did not have enough vertical space on the radiator mount at the top so I went with the corsair 760 t instead which has plenty of room up there power supplies the EVGA g2 750 watt 240 gig HyperX savage SSD and msi x99s kale rip does 516 gig memory kit at 66 and intel core i7 59 30 k-6 core cpu and for the air-cooled setup at least a tenner max ETS t4 TB CPU cooler and then of course the graphics card the MSI GTX 1080 gaming Z GPU and if you're confusing this with the gaming X it is a little bit different it has a fully custom PCB and they've also added added an integrated led logo on the back of the card itself on the back plate which is a pretty cool place level logo actually looks pretty nice let's take a look at our first set of test results first though since for some reason it decided to be 104 degrees here in Diamond Bar even though it's September geez alright so first off I wanted to point out that I have removed the top cover for this system so it does have exhaust on the top even though we're going with the air-cooled setup right now so what I've been doing is running a Unigine valley on loop as well as the i-264 system stability test I'm sorry that I'm recording the screen right now let's take a look at the results so air cooled this system has actually been doing really well hasn't had to spin up the fans too much or anything like that GPU is actually peaking up to about 2,000 50 megahertz out of the box that is up from it's out of the box boost clock of 1911 I have been running the Ida for system stability test just with the CPU stress going on it's for almost 20 minutes now actually over 20 minutes now as well as of course the engine valley benchmark so that's doing the GPU whereas the system stability test is doing the CPU so if both of those going on there should be a pretty good amount of heat building up in the system CPU however has only gotten up to about 58 degrees max on the core actually I'm sorry 59 degrees max as I'm checking right now which is very not bad in the least then as far as the GPUs temperatures it actually got up to about 70 degrees Celsius at one point but after the fans ramped up it ended up averaging around 60 degrees Celsius so very nice as for the CPU it's running at 3.6 gigahertz on all six course that's again just the stock frequency out of the box for a 59 30 K and 50 degrees Celsius again was that maximum core temp so temperatures are definitely not that bad let's check out sound though this is kind of anecdotal but I do have my shotgun mic set up and here's a listen next up we have overclock results so basically I've dialed in a four point four gigahertz overclock on the CPU pretty standard straight up OC in that regard it is at one point two volts one point two two volts to be more specific and running a four point four gigahertz on all six CPU cores giving me CPU temperatures at around 81 degrees C maximum although they did level around out around in the mid 70s which is a little bit better that is a pretty big jump though that again went from 58 degrees C with not overclocked up to 81 C so that might be an area where we can see some benefit from going with a liquid cooler as far as a GPU I did first establish a faster fan curve that's usually what I do in overclock so fan curve in this instance is running at 75 to 80 percent versus the stock where it was running at about 50 percents that's giving us GPU temperatures are actually a little bit cooler than before 65 degrees C peak temperature so definitely some help from that the extra bit of fan rotational speed that we have in there and I'll give you a noise test here in just a moment here's overclock settings plus 25 on the available extra core voltage 107 percent on the power limits CPU GPU core clock is it plus 80 points and the memory clocks it plus 350 now what that overclocked has given us is basically an operating speed of about 21 mm 114 which is actually pretty damn nice especially for these GTX 1080s is actually probably the fastest stable dt x 1080 that I have run and the stock that's been given to me so good job msi with this gaming z graphics card here's a quick sound test once again though again everything is under load everything is overclocked so here everything is still staying fairly quiet however we can definitely tell with the additional rotational speed of the fans they are creating a bit more noise you know it also is making a decent amount of noises here Oh snoring down there take don't make fun of me snoring looks like my warranty is voided all right so everything is installed there's definitely extra tubing which I had to sort of route back down under here and around here and I actually put a velcro piece in there just to sort of hold stuff back in a way for when I put the side panel on but other than that I have parted on everything works and there are no leaks and I have noticed however there is now a significant amount of GPU sag like like check that out clearly things are not level so I actually have an idea this is something that I've thought of a while back and I've never actually tried but here goes I've tied the bit of fishing line to the top of the case and right down here somewhere and there it is the most ghetto GPU sag mod ever you don't even notice it do you okay look not even like completely level mostly level it looks looks pretty level as long as you don't like pay attention to the fishing line alright I've now been running the stress test CPU stress test for actually over 20 minutes now and I kicked in the GPU test just recently as well have it say everything seems to be pretty stable and even though I have overclocked the GPU just a little bit more added another 10 points to it so I'm at plus 90 on the GPU clock offset plus 350 on the memory and then I also have manually forced the CPU fan header since I have that's what I have the ek predator connected to to 65% speed because what I found was especially when I was doing just GPU tests if it's only connected to the CPU header that these beads wouldn't improve so I've actually set up speed fan to do that what that has ended up giving me is GPU frequencies upwards of 2120 165 was a peak that we hit although 21:52 seems a little bit more standard that is averaging out around 20 140 21:39 56 C was the peak temp on the GPU itself which is significantly less than the peak temperature when it was air-cooled average temps only about 51 degrees Celsius which really isn't that much cooler again than with the air cooler on there however again we are running at a higher frequency so that is nice as well but of course hopefully also we have less noise being generated with this as well CPU temps maxed at 76 degrees Celsius on the package which is a little on the warm side but averages were more around the 60 to 70 C range and again that is still with 4.4 gigahertz overclock and that is good 10 to 15 degrees less than what we had with air cooler at least if you're looking at average temperatures this system was already pretty quiet when I had an air cooled can you guys tell difference now of course now there are also fans up on top those are ek Vardar fans and now with the side panel open just to get the interior noise that's fairly quiet all right guys let's wrap things up here the ek predator XL c 280 has done a great job for me as far as getting things a little bit cooler maybe a little bit quieter in the system and also give me the opportunity to actually install what is effectively a full custom loop without having to handle some of the perhaps more difficult aspects of actually installing a full custom loop also it's expandable which I really like so on the plus side for this product we have that it is definitely cheaper than investing in a full custom loop uses all standardized ek high-quality parts with G 1/4 fittings and of course it has great performance at least from what I've seen today now you could of course service this loop if you wanted to and in fact I even had to my initial installation of the GPU block wasn't quite as secure as it could be and I had to actually remove that reinstall it if I had done a full custom loop removing the GPU and then tightening down the radiator the block on it or anything like that would be challenging whereas I was able to just undo the qdcs pull it out tighten some stuff down pop it right back in I also want to point out it stays nice and quiet thanks to a quiet pump and play ek Vardar 140 millimeter fans now on the cons side there's definitely a few things to point out one is that if you're comparing this to a full custom loop yeah it's inexpensive but you're still going to be spending three to four hundred dollars on the predator as well as the GPU block add-on with the full everything set up the way you saw me do it today going all air cooling is definitely going to be a cheaper solution but that kind of goes without saying when it comes to most water cooling solutions I also want to point out you need a pretty decent size case for this setup again I had to swap to this case due to the 68 millimeter thickness for that radiator and pump combo up on top just in order to be able to fit it all so once I got all this tubing in here there is a pretty decent amount of tubing there so having the extra space to be able to kind of tuck that back away get it out of sights or at least not have it just looking like a jumble of cables in there it's definitely nice to be able to do beyond that you might notice that I have a pretty decent amount of GPU sag that is due to the additional weight of the block the weight of the tubing here and the fact that some of the rigidity of the board with some of the stuff that MSI put on there to keep it rigid this is gone now I'd remove it to put the Block on so if that's something that irritates you and this may be unique to just my situation you might consider a support for it or something like that and lastly if you're doing this specifically to get the benefits of a custom loop without having to go through all the installation procedures of a custom loop you do still have to do some of the more technical type stuff such as removing the GPU cooler adding thermal paste and thermal pads and everything and getting that out put that back together which is not a huge deal but something that some folks might be a little bit more cautious about approaching themselves and I should also mention based on actual results you saw the actual performance gains you might get by going from really high-end air cooling to high-end water cooling might be pretty incremental as you saw I was only able to get maybe 25 mega Hertz more out of this GPU with it being stable granted there's other benefits besides just the performance but if you're doing this connecting to get a huge leap it might be minimal some closing notes to add would be this is a 280 millimeter radiator radiator at the top handling both the CPU and GPU which are both pretty high-end and that's a pretty decent amount of heat I was kind of expecting maybe a little bit lower temperatures here but I was kind of comparing it to other water cooling steps that have at least two radiators so whereas 280 millimeter seems to be pretty adequate for this I would be a little bit more hesitant if you're going with the 240 millimeter EK predator for example you might seriously consider adding another radiator to that because that will keep the overall temperatures and your loop down and probably get you a better cooling performance especially if you're comparing it to the air cooling also you should seriously consider which fan header you plug this into when I was initially running some tests and I was doing a GPU load with no CPU load since the CPU temperatures weren't increasing it wasn't increasing the speed of the pump and the fans at the top of the system which meant that my GPU was getting much hotter than I'd like it to be that's why I ended up using speed fan to manually control the speeds of that unit up on top and then of course there was my backplate solution I decided to reuse the msi backplate from the gaming z because it's nice and has the light-up LED logo that ended up working for me but your mileage may vary depending on what GPU you actually have and what back plates on there of course EK makes back plates for these as well that you can buy separately but a and added expense and that's all for this video guys if you enjoyed it hit the thumbs up button and let me know down in the comment section you can comment on things and argue about whether or not you think this is a good solution for people to use on their computers and of course in the description there are links to these products where they are available for sale as well as my store where you can purchase trips like this one and mugs and PEG glasses to help support my cause thank you very much for watching as always and we'll see you in the next video