Mike S wrote:
My buddy wants to use a water cooler to keep his cpu and graphics card
as cool as possible. Can anyone recommend a model that works well. He's
not concerned about cost. TIA

In the old days, you'd shop for all the parts, hoses, barbs, pumps,
reservoirs, rad with fans, hook it all together, fill, bleed the air out
and pray there were no leaks.

Now, the commodity liquid cooling are pre-assembled units. A
"short loop".

To match that, there are some cases with space to bolt a rad.
So maybe one rad gets bolted to the top of the case, blowing
upwards or something. You need a bigger case, to support this
kind of cooling.

If you just wanted to cool a CPU it would be pretty easy.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rs,4181-2.html

This is an example of a huge block for a video card, that covers
GPU and memory. It obviously only covers a few video card SKUs.
You can also get water blocks just for the GPU, but then you probably
want RAM sinks and a bit of airflow for the RAM.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ling,4975.html

This is an example of a factory water cooled Frontier Edition
card. This would probably go for $2000 used if you could find
one. This is to show an integrated solution that the manufacturer
thought was sufficient to prevent throttling. The card underneath
this, has no RAM chips showing. All the RAM is HBM stacks inside
the GPU package area. The end of the card is voltage regulator circuitry.

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...-Cooled-Review

A site like this is good for window shopping, and will
give you additional search terms for your Googling.

http://www.frozencpu.com/

The forum on Extremesystems, had a forum per "cooling type", but
the sticky at the front looks pretty old. I don't know if
you'd find enough materials there to piece together a
solution or not.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...Liquid-Cooling

You need a lot more information to start a design, and
you still have to find some good recent comparison articles.

On older cards, the mounting holds on the cards followed
a kind of standard. You could say, make a cooling solution,
put four arms on it for the bracket, and drill three holes
in each arm. And that pattern would handle "small/medium/large"
GPU designs for one company. But with some of the recent
video cards, they could be breaking that pattern. And
satisfying designs with HBM/HBM2 memory next to the
GPU can be difficult, because the HBM coming from the
stack suppliers, aren't exactly the same height. This is
causing nightmares for even the manufacturing of air cooled
cards by the big companies. Let alone someone doing a
custom cooler.

So you'd start by taking inventory of the hardware, looking
to see how many dual-140mm-fan rads you could fit and so on.
And decide whether you're going full custom, buying components,
filling and bleeding, or alternately, using two integrated
kits that are already filled and ready to go.

Once you've removed all the fans in the case by doing that,
you have to go back and review the VCore heatsink and see if
it needs some assistance. And look around for other heat sources
or sensitive components, that will need retrofitted cooling
because you switched to water.

Just a few days ago, I saw a *power supply* with liquid cooling.
And it was expensive too. Ya talk about dippy concepts. I want
one to go with my solid gold toilet in the bathroom :-)

Paul