Hello,

I'm a complete newbie to water cooling so I don't even know if it is possible to do what I want.

I don't know if you are better off getting separate cooling for everything or getting some big cooling solution.

I'd like water cooling for the a motherboard with a haswell CPU hopefully they'll have something with 9 slots like this http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... id=3434#ov
I'll probably end up with a couple of 780 GTX cards - chances are they'll be 3 slots each based on what I've seen
I have 4 spindle drives and 2 SSD drive connected to a lsi 9265 - 1 slot
1 Creative Sound Blaster Z - 1 slot





My priorities are in the following order
1 quiet and reliable
2 no maintenance
3 simple

I probably missed some details needed to answer my question so feel free to let me know what I need to fill in.

I'll need a different case as I'll need something for xl-atx. My current is the following which I love for the drop slot on the top. http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product ... ct_name=CM 690 II Advanced (USB 3.0 version) I'm not sure if any cases are more suited than others for water cooling but would appreciate any feedback there as well. I realize that my choice of cases for xl-atx motherboards will be limited.

I currently have a scythe ninja for my CPU which has been nice and quite but I'm curious if I could make my system even quieter. The hard drives generate a good amount of heat but the video cards generate an incredible amount of heat. I can't use SLI as I don't have enough slots on my motherboard because of the 2 and 3 slot coolers on my 580 cards combined with the SAS controller and the sound card - it leaves no space between cards so they overheat in SLI.

If you want to try watercooling out of personal curiosity or you want to do some heavy overclocking, the go for it, its very fun part of building and testing a PC, but if this are your priorieties,

Aircooling in most cases will be quieter, i never seen a quiet pump. Reliable, aircooler has less part, its pratically just a fan, while on the water cooling you will have the fan or fans, the pump, the rads, resorvoir etc, even on prebuilt, you will still have more parts and the risk of introducing water to an electric ambient, the risk of rust and leaks over time... etc.

Prebuilts like Corsair H100i are nice, but big air coolers like Noctua NH-D14 / Thermalrigth Silver Arrow are up to par with it, and less noise, less moving parts, less risk of failure. So if you want to go with watercooling without going too deep, check Swiftech H220 Compact Drive II Plug-and-Play Liquid Cooling System, its a prebuilt (not 100% maintaince free), but you can grow on it, you can later add rads or introduce your GPUs, motherboard heatsinks, etc, its performance is much better also than any prebuilt on the market.

With that said there are tons of people that go for it, and are happy, its a hobby in its own, and they have great success, but the for me its more for performance and overclocking heavily than Quiet/reliable setup. Now if you already entering watercooling, why not cool the gpus with it also, you already introduced the pump noise, might as well have the gpus cooled by the water loop, and avoid the extra fans on the each gpu and the heat inside the case that the gpus will generate, would be better to have the heat being dissipated by the rads where you can have 120mm fans that wont interfere with the width of the cards, and this will open almost all standard cases, as you wont need a huge case, as the gpu would not be triple slot. A mobo like Asus Maximus VI Extreme coudl fit twin GTX780 + dedicated LSI card + dedicated soundcard, still on ATX factor, with a fractal design define R4 and just open the moduvents on top to add the rad, the R4 will also have enough space for all your hdds. On the event that you will want a case with more space, then look into Antec P280 Black Super Mid Tower Computer Case (has space on top for 240mm rad and supports XL-ATX mobos) or Fractal Design Define XL R2 (similar to the R4 just bigger and supports E-ATX and XL-ATX mobos).

Good to know. I really thought water coolers were supposed to be quieter. I don't want to overclock, I just want really quiet and to have SLI video cards that are quiet. I love games like Crysis 3 but they tend to really crank the fans on the video cards and they still run HOT.

A good watercool setup will be cooler than the best air cooler in the market, but on the prebuilts like H100 have similar performance to what are the best air cooler (thermalright silver arrow, Noctua ND-14, Prolimatech Genesis, etc). But quieter and reliable, i would still go for air.

Thanks again. I meant to say quieter. Since I don't overclock, I guess there is no need to me to over complicate things although I might go with video cards that have artic coolers on them as they seem to be in the same sound arena and they are by far the hottest thing in my system. Both numbers are pretty close sound and temp - but in SLI they really do throw some heat.