Socket 2011 Workstation

[Luscious]

Hi Tom!

I was hoping I could get your valuable input on a project I will be starting in the coming months (sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong place). I know you've looked at the E5 Xeons and are familiar with the case I'm looking to use for this water-cooled multi-purpose workstation. Here's the parts list:

• CASE NZXT Switch 810
  
• MOBO Asus Z9PE-D8 WS
  
• GPU 3x Asus GTX680-2GD5
  
• PSU Corsair AX1200
  
• CPU 2x Xeon E5-2687W
  
• BOOT SSD 2x Corsair Force GT 240GB
  
• STORAGE SSD 2x Corsair Force 3 480GB
  
• RAM 8x 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866
  
• SOUND Asus Xonar Essence STX
  

The processors I plan to cool using a 120.3 in the roof using six Noctua NF-F12's in push/pull. The GPU's will be cooled with a 120.2 mounted in the bottom and a 120.1 mounted in the front, again push/pull. Water blocks are EK supreme HF. The bay res will be a white 4-port EK connected to a D5 pump using 1/2"ID Tygon tubing filled with EK premium coolant.

Now for the question: I'm using a total of 3 rads and 5 water blocks to cool roughly 900W of heat - will a single pump/loop be able to work with that much load or should I put the CPU's on one loop and GPU's on another? Should I spend on a 2nd pump? And if I do have dual loops, how well will a single bay res work with a dual loop as opposed to using a 2nd bay res?

Thanks in advance, and keep up the great work!

Cheers

 

[att]

One pump is defos not enough for 5 blocks, but there are pump tops / res's that allow you to run several pumps (D5s are no exception) as one unit. I know Bitspower make one, and I think i've seen an XSPC bay res dual-top somewhere as well.

Also with the amount of rads you're stuffing into the switch, I'd doubt you'd have any room to put extra pumps around the place (where the hard drives were), so really I'd say your only option is to use the dual pump bay res.

Or you could just get a Caselabs.

P.S. Someone's got some money to burn... STORAGE SSDs?!

 

[nothingspecial]

Personally I don't think the Switch 810 is the right case for all that gear. I'd be looking at the Silverstone TJ07, even if it means dropping the storage SSDs. Gives much more space for big rads too.

As for the loop itself, that's not my strongpoint, but if you do want to go dual loop, XSPC make a bay res which you can mount two Laing DDCs to, which seems sensible. Specialtech even sell it as a bundle.

 

[frozen]

I don't see the reason for having 3 680s. They've been completely nerfed for compute tasks. Wait for the new quadro line and get one

 

[Luscious]

@alfredthetomato @nothingspecial

Thanks for the feedback guys! I'll most likely need to go with a bay res + dual pump setup - there's really no other way to fit two pumps in there without making spaghetti out of the tubing, and I want to keep the interior neat.

@frozen

It's more of a future-proof investment for me at this point, and from what I've read about the issue so far, it's the CUDA clients that need updating to work with the revised architecture, which I'm sure will happen. It won't affect 3-way SLI for gaming, and it'll actually let me connect 3 monitors to one card very easily. Also, I don't think it's possible to get water-cooling for Quadro cards, never mind that for the price of one top-end Quadro card I could buy EIGHT of these.

Cheers

 

[hmmblah]

Moved to Liquid Cooling