#6.... no. Adding a couple oz of water isnt going to help much at all.
#9. Fans arent/cant be set it and forget it? Whos running on the ragged edge of temps for normal activities that cranking a set of fans, lowering temps a few c, will resolve? There are also fan controllers which will work based on temps.
On # 6 . . . Please read again.... nothing was said about coolant temps..... it's mostkly about noise and you can certainly observe fan speeds and record as we have. And it's not a couple of ounces of water, it's 10 ounces and a surface a surface area of 16+ square inches. Why does surface area matter ? Think about the 90 - 130 watt CPU that water block is only able to keep at 75C with its tiny surface area versus the 300 watt GPU that water block is able to keep < 40C.
1. You have to be using the proper tools. If using P95 which is virtually useless since Sandy Bridger. Yes it doesn't matter significantly as P95 will maintain a relatively constant load and yes a reservoir will have limited impact. But remember,
as was said, the radiators remove ONLY about 60% of the calculated heat load. The other 40% comes from the fact that a) your system never sees the max heat load because **in the real world** and **using real applications / games** the heat load is not constant. A large 250 ml reservoir has a substantiall surface area and it acts just like an air cooler radiating heat from its surface, as is your tubing, radiator shroud, block surface area and everything else that is warm to the touch inside the PC ... the PC which has the interior case air volume exchanged with fresh cool air
several times per second.
2. Again in the real world, your system sees periods of light and heavy loads. Watch your CPU temps under RoG Real Bench ... they vary significantly. Run Furmark and watch the curve .... mine starts out at about 26C GPU temp and rises slowly to 44C at which point, under the synthetic non-real world load, it reaches equilibrium. But in the real world, when paying a game, the load varies substantially. You can see the same thing with Intel XTU load curve, the CPU temps follow up down up down up down. With no reservoir capacity, the coolant temps change in response to CPU / GPU temps very quickly and the temp curve is very jagged. With a large reservoir, those peaks and valleys are smoothed out resulting in smaller variations in CPU / GPU temps. As a result, the fans whos speed is controlled automatically (a point you seem to have missed) changes very little
No reservoir ...... 65-75-68-72-70-70-64-76
w/ reservoirs.... 68-72-70-70-70-70-67-73
In both cases the average is 70C (ignoring thermal radiation from reservoir surface) but in one case the changes in fan speed can be heard, in the other not at all.
In addition, a reservoir acts as an air trap for any off gassing within the loop, an air bubble trapped in a loop can otherwise significantly impact performance.
On # 9. this is 2107 not 1991. Been building PC's for 25 years and every box that leaves here has been set up to "set it and forget it". The fans in our test box were set on the day I built the box and 3 years later, I have not touched them since. Cooling is not just about not frying the PC components, it's also about making the user environment bearable. And that involves minimizing sound. Siting at the desk, using your ears, you can not tell the system is on. Using the fan control utility that comes with the motherboard, I have the system set up as follows:
CPU & CPU OPT Header => Pumps 1 and 2 .
Pumps are set to run from about 40% to 100% of full speed. I set up a temp / speed curve using the software provided and forgot about it.
C
HA_1 header => Fan Control PCB No. 1 => (6) fans on 420 radiator
Fans are set to run from 350 rpm to 1250 rpm. I set them to shut off when temps are < 30C, they climb thru various speed / temp setpoints to 75C and > 75 they go to 100%. In response to temp changes, they ramp up to curve speeds over 12 seconds, and ramp down over 100 seconds to expel heat from the coolant after load disappears. I set up a temp / speed curve using the software provided and forgot about it.
C
HA_2 header => Fan Control PCB No. 2 => (4) fans on 280 radiator
Fans are set to run from 350 rpm to 1250 rpm. I set them to shut off when temps are < 30C, they climb thru various speed / temp setpoints to 75C and > 75 they go to 100%. In response to temp changes, they ramp up to curve speeds over 12 seconds, and ramp down over 100 seconds to expel heat from the coolant after load disappears. I set up a temp / speed curve using the software provided and forgot about it.
C
HA_3 header => Fan Control PCB No. 3 => (6) Case fans
Fans are set to run from 350 rpm to 1250 rpm. I set them to shut off when temps are < 35C, they climb thru various speed / temp set points to 70C and > 80C they go to 100%. In response to temp changes, they ramp up / down to curve speeds over 12 seconds.I set up a temp / speed curve using the software provided and forgot about it for about a year until I made a tweak, not touched it since.
At idle, all my fans shut off... and I don't have to do anything ... when system is under load, fan speed is raised in proportion to the load. This is simple stuff, and I don't know why this is being seen as a foreign concept. I don't care about the "ragged edge of temps" because my system never sees it. What I care about is silence. There's no realistic need for a "fan controller" when superior technology exists that has more options, is free and which most certainly can be "set once and forgotten".
The system uses (6) thermal sensors, accurate to 0.1C, which detect:
coolant temps in / out of 420mm rad
coolant temps in / out of 280mm rad
Ambient and interior case air temps
and displays them on a 6 channel digital display in a 5.25" bay at front of PC.
Can take CPU temps down to , 70C at 4.7 Ghz and the twin GPU temps down to 39C, but at that point fan speeds under stress testing exceed 850 rpm and I can hear the fans... So to avoid buying 30 foot cables and stikcing the PC in another room where I don't have to hear it, I am quite happy with 75C and 44C. All accomplished without a thought or lifting a finger since day # 1