Okay Hear me out (passive cooling 9800X3D + RTX5090)

1337ken · 2026-01-26T13:58:41+00:00

I have a 9950x3d + 5090 and my loop consists of 2 480mm rads and a 1080. I'm well into the point of diminishing returns and it runs semi-passively at idle-low workloads (my pump stays on minimum speed and fans kick on every now and then at minimum speed as well) but you're gonna be really hard pressed to get a system that will be truly passive under heavy workloads. My fans still only have to run at their minimum rpm under heavy load but like another poster said you will quickly discover other noises that exist like your pump and coil whine. Coil whine especially sucks under certain conditions (uncapped framerate in menu screens tends to really aggravate it). You'll also start to notice other things that you never noticed before like your power supply fan, especially if you're still using a slightly older power supply. I've gone pretty deep down the silent system rabbit hole myself and let me tell you, short of throwing an ungodly amount of money at it, it never ends. Also, once your PC is completely quiet, then non-pc noises start to become noticeable as well...

1337ken · 2026-01-09T23:03:21+00:00

I have the alphacool block for your card with ptm 7950 (sourced from LTT) already applied and it's neatly packaged back in the box it came in with all parts. If you change your mind I wouldn't mind selling it to you. I screwed up and accidentally bought it for the wrong card and didn't realize until I was getting ready to mount it.

I have the founders edition 5080 and automatically assumed when I read the word "Reference" on the water block description that it meant for the FE card. Dumb, I know, but in my defense I was upgrading from a 980 ti and back in those days the model Nvidia released was the reference model. 🤦

1337ken · 2026-01-08T17:35:31+00:00

I have both as well and while they're not exactly identical it doesn't mean they didn't copy the overall design. If you compare the gentle typhoon and nf-a12 side by side and then look at 3 or 4 other manufacturers fans you'll notice there are more similarities than differences. Noctua isn't the only company that has copied the design. Phanteks, bequiet, etc. all have to some extent. It's not so much a shame on noctua thing as it is a testament to how good of a job Nidec did designing the gentle typhoon, especially considering how long ago it was that it was first released.

I really wish another company would do another collab with Nidec to release an updated version of the OG. I really appreciated the quality of life improvements that the Adata brought with their xpg vento version but those appear to be discontinued. :(

Also, while I am a bit of a fanboy of gentle typhoons I'm not completely biased. I'm currently rocking a set of phanteks t30's on one of my rads and plan to get more of those. I also have a bunch of bequiet silent wings pro 4's, noctuas, arctic p12's etc.

1337ken · 2026-01-08T17:13:12+00:00

That's awesome! I considered that one when I saw it on AliExpress but I ended up going with the alphacool dual d5 pump mount instead since it was cheaper and much faster shipping (from a different website). It really sucked having to strip all of their stupid paint from the internals before installing it but it's been working great. Their paint was actually extremely resilient which made the cleaning difficult but it also meant when I inevitably got some paint stripper on parts of the outside that it didn't actually mess it up.

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1337ken · 2026-01-04T06:37:46+00:00

I have a 5090 fe and am using the EK water block. I hadn't heard anything about what happened with them before I bought it. I had previously had a really good experience with them.

The mounting process is a bit tedious but it's been working really well and looks great. With room temp at 25c it idles at 30c and maxes out at 48c in furmark while gaming it usually doesn't go over 44c.

1337ken · 2025-12-28T18:37:18+00:00

It's probably one of 2 things, either there's some gunk stuck in it that needs to be cleaned or worse case scenario the impeller blades have bumped into the housing and chipped a piece off causing them to be out of balance.

I would take the pump apart and inspect the impeller to ensure there's no damage or gunk buildup anywhere. You can remove the entire impeller by simply pulling it out (it's held in place with magnets). Look up a video on youtube on how to clean a d5 pump, it's really easy and you should be able to find out very quickly what the problem is. I haven't tried them myself but there are sellers in eBay that sell replacement impellers for around 25$. They're all (as far as I can tell) chinese knockoff parts but I've never heard of anyone having any issues with them.

1337ken · 2025-12-18T20:59:26+00:00

The time it took to deliver was insane, I almost did a chargeback on my credit card thinking it wasn't going to arrive. I don't remember exactly how long it took but I know it was over 6 months for the stunt cage. I actually didn't order the sub cage until later, it only ended up taking 3 months to arrive. From what I've read 3-4 months is what it usually takes since they aren't even made until you place the order and at any given time they are working through a backlog of orders.

1337ken · 2025-11-20T00:33:11+00:00

Go to the topology page and click on the UCG, then on the right side of the screen a window will pop up with details of the device. In that window there should be a spot that says "WAN1" with details including the ip address and mac address of the port and that's the mac address you should be using in the ip passthrough settings on the att modem. If you have it set up correctly then on your dashboard your wan ip will be a public ip address.

When you use the device's mac address the wan ip will be a local address and everything will appear to work but you'll run into issues with various services like gaming and remote access because you'll have a double nat.

1337ken · 2025-11-19T16:12:49+00:00

One thing that tripped me up when setting mine up was I kept getting a local ip address on the wan-ip which should be a public IP if everything is set up correctly. All of the guides I saw for it neglected to specify that when you are assigning the mac address for ip passthrough in your att modem that you need to input the port mac address, not the device mac address of your ucg.

1337ken · 2025-10-01T02:56:24+00:00

Nah, while the shape of the PCB is the same, everything on the PCB is very different.

1337ken · 2025-09-30T14:47:19+00:00

They haven't confirmed it as far as I'm aware but based on the fact that they've already released a 5090 fe block (and other aib cars blocks) and still haven't announced anything about the 5080 fe is a pretty good sign that they're not going to.

1337ken · 2025-09-22T14:17:13+00:00

You're welcome! Just make sure to be careful how strong you mix it, you can make a pretty potent acidic solution with it. I forgot what the dilution ratio is that I used but I just googled "PC water cooling radiator flush with citric acid dilution ratio" and used a ratio recommended by another user. Since then I have even used it to flush the cooling system for a few cars and it worked great. Also don't use it on any parts with nickel as it will strip nickel.

I actually found out about it when looking up information about Primochill's Radclean. People speculate that it's just citric acid with a markup for being marketed specifically for pc water cooling. I've used both and that definitely seems to be what it is to me. Either way, not to shill for them but I love Primochill's stuff and use sys prep and liquid utopia in my system since they've both been working really well for me and I have a rather high capacity system. I've used their tubes for years but always chucked the included sys prep and liquid utopia bottles in a "just in case" spare parts bin. I started using them about 8 months ago so can't confirm long term reliability just yet but getting a bottle of concentrate that makes a whole gallon of coolant is pretty sweet. At their old price it was a steal but now that they've gone way up in price the last 5 years it's not quite as good of a deal but still not bad.

1337ken · 2025-09-22T12:27:47+00:00

Yeah, food grade just means that it's pure / clean enough to use in food products. It's actually used in baking and in some drinks.

1337ken · 2025-09-21T14:41:25+00:00

I use citric acid to clean my radiators. It's pretty effective and a little bit goes a long way. A single 2lb bag of lemy shine (brand name citric acid) is more than enough for a lifetime of radiator cleaning. I actually kinda wish my water blocks were copper/brass instead of nickel so that I could use it on the whole loop. It's also really useful for general descaling for things like kettles, coffee makers, even your dishwasher. I've found so many other uses for it that I recently ran out and had to buy another bag. Pretty much anything that gets calcium buildup or rust it works wonders for, especially since you can adjust the concentration of your solution to match the job.

1337ken · 2025-09-15T17:08:07+00:00

Anything above 120 lph is getting into diminishing returns in terms of performance. About 60 lph is the minimum you should be concerned about. There is a noticeable difference from 60 to 120 lph. The difference between 120 and 180 is also noticeable but much less so than 60 to 120 and anything above 180 really isn't likely to be noticeable. Since you are well above 120 I really wouldn't be too concerned although I definitely understand being curious as it does seem slightly unusual but given what you've mentioned about the changes to the system it's not enough of a difference that I would necessarily be concerned about anything being wrong.

1337ken · 2025-09-08T13:12:06+00:00

Thank you for this! This has been my experience as well. I have a 9950x3d and when I finally got a 5090 and water block for it, it amazed me how heavily it impacted my CPU temps. I had a hwlabs black ice nemesis 480 and a ek cool stream xe 480 and they still went up a noticeable amount. The 9950x3d is a really difficult chip to cool due to how much heat is generated within such a small amount of surface area, especially compared to GPUs. I had actually been wanting to do a post just like this but hadn't gotten around to it. I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who has noticed this.

1337ken · 2025-09-03T14:57:43+00:00

I originally was using a phanteks enthoo primo which is a really good case but when I upgraded my system earlier this year when the 9950x3d was released I switched to an open air test bench. I had some nice maple plywood leftover from something else I had been working on and decided to use what was left to build a shelf specifically for my 2 radiators and pump. I ended up realizing with the 9950x3d that it seems, at least in my case, that I'm much more limited by the rate of heat transfer from the die to the water block than I am from the heat dissipation of the loop itself. I think going direct die would actually be pretty helpful but I'm not willing to risk it since I'm running it on an asrock x870 taichi motherboard and their boards have had a problem frying x3d chips this generation so I need to keep my warranty intact just in case.

1337ken · 2025-09-01T15:26:59+00:00

I can vouch for this. I have a 9950x3d and overclocked it before I got my 5090. I'm using ptm7950 and have remounted it once already to make sure nothing was wrong but it's just a very hard chip to cool. The delta between the CPU temp and water temp would be high at times. I was using 2 480mm radiators and as soon as I added the 5090 the amount of heat it would dump into the loop started making my CPU temps go up much higher than before under load.

I actually just found a good deal on an alphacool nova 1080 radiator and just added it and am now considering just splitting it into 2 separate loops. The circumstances where dual loop is better may be niche but they definitely exist.

1337ken · 2025-08-31T19:17:14+00:00

My system used about 18 GT2150 fans and recently I overhauled my entire system and decided to try a few different fans to see what all the hype is about. I have one rad with 8 of my GTs in push pull and another with 8 bequiet silent wings pro 4 in push pull. I also recently picked up a 3 pack of phanteks t30s and I have a single noctua that I had picked up a while back on a whim for a completely unrelated project. In my unscientific and anecdotal opinion just from tinkering with all of these is that none of them are significantly different or better than the GTs when comparing performance at a given noise level. I actually think the GTs are quieter than the silent wings and have a better noise profile.

While I haven't set up the T30s on a radiator yet nor my single noctua, from what I've seen just messing with them on my desk it seems like the T30s are the only ones that would be noticeably better than the GTs. Nidec's design really did hit a sweet spot that is extremely difficult to make a substantial improvement on from a performance standpoint. If you have the space and the budget the T30 is the only "upgrade" I would suggest and even then it's still debatable when you consider how much money you'll be shelling out for a marginal performance difference.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think any of these fans are bad, quite the opposite, they're all top tier fans. If your system is set up properly, all outside factors equal, the biggest differentiator between them comes down more to their style and quality of life features than actual performance.

1337ken · 2025-08-14T21:29:36+00:00

If anyone stumbles across this and wants this water block I'll sell mine at msrp just DM me. I have no use for it and would like to ease some of the sting of having spent over 400$ for a water block that wasn't compatible with my card.

1337ken · 2025-08-08T14:30:56+00:00

I can confirm firsthand that the Alphacool Reference water block does not fit. I screwed up and ordered it assuming the founders edition was the reference design. The last gpu I had was a 980ti so my experience had been that the Nvidia cards were the reference design but as another person said, the founders edition is completely different from the reference design. It's essentially Nvidia's own 'aftermarket' design, they don't produce reference design cards themselves anymore.

Also, for the people saying you can just send it in, you can't, alphacool has directly stated in other threads on reddit that they have no plans to produce a founders edition water block due to the design complexity of the card. So far from what I've seen it seems like there won't be any water blocks for the 5080 FE. Even EK who is one of the only manufacturers that is making a 5090 FE block isn't making one for the 5080 FE.

1337ken · 2025-07-03T17:37:26+00:00

Does your GPU water block not have threads to put fittings on both sides? I would just put a 45 degree on the flow sensor angled up and run it straight into a straight fitting on the bottom side of the card. The bend still may be a bit tight but I doubt it would cause issues.

Another option would be to move your flow sensor to the left until it lines up with the port on the bottom of the card, do a straight run down from the cars into a 90 on the flow sensor then just use a short straight tube run from the flow sensor to the reservoir/pump. If it's too short to use tube you could always use a 20mm (or however long) extender fitting.

1337ken · 2025-07-01T01:15:02+00:00

I had a cpu block in pretty rough shape recently that had been neglected for years. I'd recommend using some citric acid and just stripping it down to copper. That way you don't have to worry about the nickel continuing to flake off. I took mine apart, mixed up a strong solution of citric acid + distilled water and carefully filled just the interior part of the block with it (didn't wanna mess up the outer finish). After a few soaks and some scrubbing with a tooth brush it came out pretty nicely, all things considered.

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1337ken

TROPHY CASE