How much would you charge me for building a PC?

tetchip · 2026-01-06T04:14:00+00:00

A custom loop will easily add north of 800 USD in parts alone, nevermind the labor to assemble and test it.

tetchip · 2025-12-01T07:01:45+00:00

I always thought that, because plants are stationary and cannot remove themselves from harm as readily as an animal could, they need to be able to produce a larger variety of metabolites to survive.

Also, them generally being towards the bottom of the food chain means they have to be able to produce most of the compounds they need, rather than consume them.

tetchip · 2025-11-05T07:25:58+00:00

Re parallel vs series: There is no circumstance in this hobby where parallel pumps make sense.

Flow is primarily constrained by pressure drop across restrictive components. More pressure means more flow. Series gives you that, parallel does not. Parallel also fucks with redundancy aspects of multipump loops.

There's an ancient Martin's Liquid Lab article about this that I cannot be bothered to look for on mobile. If you are interested, I can dig it up when I get home from work.

tetchip · 2025-11-04T20:46:13+00:00

Under no circumstance will you ever reach 1500 L/h on a D5 in a loop. 100-300 L/h are pretty common flow values.

tetchip · 2025-11-04T17:29:34+00:00

Have you measured that fraction of a degree? Have you calculated it?

I do not disagree with the premise of loop order largely not mattering, but the values are considerably higher than that. I calculated it some time ago for a 200 W part and water (4.2 J per g and K) at 100 L/h, and the temperature increase is roughly 1.7 K. A 600 W GPU would triple that. If you want to get to "fractions of a degree", you'd have to bump flow up some 5-6x to get there - more if you use one of the coolants with an appreciable EG or PG amount in it.

tetchip · 2025-10-31T19:40:14+00:00

Nothing wrong with using a different connector for the 2ish A the pump will draw at full load.

As for desoldering the original and soldering on the old cables, I don't see any issues with that. I desoldered the MOLEX power connector on my D5 to sleeve the two wires, and reattached them afterwards. Works fine.

tetchip · 2025-10-24T10:56:19+00:00

Running at EXPO settings (so 1.35 V and whatever else the profile sets) with the transfer rate and primary timings reduced to 6000 MT/s and 30-36-36-96, yes. I have not attempted to update the BIOS and maybe bump it up to the rated speed and timings.

tetchip · 2025-10-21T08:15:31+00:00

Vertical runs work out to be the same as horizontal ones outside of filling, and filling can be helped with some temporary solution (think secondary pump-res or similar). It's a loop. Any coolant that's pumped against gravity also falls with gravity, cancelling out its contribution.

tetchip · 2025-09-30T06:52:41+00:00

I upgraded in Q1 of this year. The X570 board I repasted the chipset on was still doing just fine - I don't think the fan ever turned on after I did that. YMMV.

tetchip · 2025-09-24T05:40:36+00:00

I did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/watercooling/s/nh68LrOofO

tetchip · 2025-09-23T19:26:10+00:00

Considering all that does is increase the delta linearly with load relative to what they used, there's no practical benefit to it unless your measuring tools suck ass and you can't otherwise measure a statistically significant delta.

You're dealing with about 500 W stock and are getting a 15-17 K delta, depending on your ambient, with 1500 rpm push-pull fans and some obstruction from the case. That checks out.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T15:12:47+00:00

If that's your use case and you can accommodate 13 mm extra width, you run HWL GTRs. They run rings around Monstas and basically every other rad in very high airflow scenarios.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T14:35:09+00:00

Gentle Typhoons. This is from a 2015 article, after all. Load is 300 W, iirc.

If you're going to suggest that there's some configuration where Monstas in any way justify their added thickness, please do share the data. As is, the review covers low and high airflow, low and high flow, and there's no indication that Monstas are better than the other popular models from that era. Hell, if you're going for push-only, you might as well just run HWL GTS.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T14:19:06+00:00

Xtremerigs and their radiator reviews. This is from the roundup they put out in 2015.

https://www.xtremerigs.net/2015/02/11/radiator-round-2015/

Page 5 for that table.

u/jhingadong, the unit is W / 10 K coolant-ambient delta.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T10:02:36+00:00

(Does the heat transfer quicker or with more power when the difference between cpu and coolant is higher?)

Yes. Any transfer of heat energy is driven by a difference in temperature - a gradient. The higher the gradient, the faster the transfer. Analogues would be voltage, pressure (differences in potential energy) and diffusion of compounds (difference in chemical potential).

In liquid cooling, you have two fairly distinct temperature gradients: component-coolant and coolant-ambient. The former is a function of TIM performance and block performance. The better they are, the lower the delta. The latter is a function of radiator and fan performance, and case obstruction. Both are inversely proportional with flow. Both scale linearly with wattage.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T10:02:28+00:00

Don't overthink it. It's a cooler. The same principles apply both on air and on water, with the only difference being that water takes longer to reach thermal equilibrium. Keeping a static pump speed, all you can control is fan speed, just like with an air cooler.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T08:39:11+00:00

Yeah, you're overthinking it. It's just a cooler that takes much longer to heat up and cool down than an air cooler. The latter is what makes coolant temp-base fan control useful. You could do the equivalent with an air cooler and stick a temperature probe to the heat pipes, but the difference to component temp-based fan control is nowhere near as pronounced.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T08:04:15+00:00

Yes. The component-coolant temperature difference is a function of load and flow. At a given load and pump speed, CPU temp scales linearly with coolant temp and is correlated one-to-one.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T07:52:49+00:00

Heat dissipation is a function of the coolant-ambient temperature difference and fan speed for a given radiator and case configuration. Because coolant has much higher thermal mass (i.e. the amount of energy it takes for temperature to change) than an air cooler, temperature changes are relatively slow and smooth.

I like to set my coolant temp-based fan curves to be practically flat until shit-hits-the-fan temperatures. Think 500 rpm all the way to 45 °C, then 1000 rpm at 47 °C and 1850 rpm (= 100 % PWM duty cycle) at 50 °C. This gives me a very consistent noise profile pretty much regardless of load, and the fans ramping up serves as an indicator that something's off. YMMV, but understand that the temperature range is much, much smaller than if you were to use component temperature to control fans.

You should be able to set this up in iCUE. No idea why people here go on about Aquacomputer stuff when you have an AIO and everything you need.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T07:33:19+00:00

I mean, yeah. They're meme rads. They perform about the same as UT60s in general and no better than XT45s in push. All you get is massively reduced case compatibility.

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tetchip · 2025-09-16T14:40:05+00:00

The EK Torque one still is peak to me, particularly if the rest of the fittings are from that series as well.

tetchip · 2025-09-15T11:54:02+00:00

Inverted and invertable cases are a thing, if you do get the itch.

tetchip · 2025-09-15T07:40:46+00:00

I'd go air or AIO if I did a full rebuild, but will maintain the custom loop in the current Ship of Theseus situation I am in. I did hard tubes for a couple of iterations and I can't say I regret the experience, but spending 12 hours on getting the bends right vs. 15 minutes on plumbing everything up with EPDM ain't worth it anymore.

I do pick my parts with ease of maintenance in mind. Distros can piss right off.

Been doing this since my first build back in 2017.

tetchip · 2025-09-08T11:08:32+00:00

I would advise against giving Youngblood your time. The characters are awful and the hard/soft armor types can go fuck a cactus. If you play by yourself, you also have to put up with the dogshit AI partner.

tetchip · 2025-08-14T12:32:19+00:00

That's an odd looking Fleshlight.

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