Well. I guess it’s a risk I’ll have to live with… 
We can’t all be smarter than the engineers who do this for a living… 
Thermal paste can be re-applied You know and if a card breaks by being used as intended it can be RMA’ed.
BTW - water cooling isn’t without risks either.
You’re a strange guy…
You’re essentially saying that everybody who’s not doing what You are is doing it wrong… 
Mkaaay… 
its a’ight. 
Haha… I couldn’t even be bothered the OC my cpu’s anymore too much maintenance. Turning on his PC is a 20 step checklist.
Well, I could nowhere read that 
Everyone as he/she likes according to his/hers personal likings , right ?
I look forward to all those mods - just to see how creative folks are. But I´ll probably invest my time more into playing than concerning about aesthetics 
Air-cooling is a no-go:
AIO’s are a no-go:
Bottom line:
I can’t spare time either (kids, work, etc.) so I just buy stuff that’s “good enough” and replace it if it fails… No custom loops or spreadsheets involved…
A post was merged into an existing topic: RTX 30 Series are Made for the 8KX!
Fits better over there, I think…
‘Custom’ water cooling loops are really best done, very simple. Sure, you can buy compression fittings and such, but zip ties, barbs, and a good set of flush cutters work better. After that, it’s just those nice plastic QDC fittings - which are actually exactly the same as what are used for another industry - and those are essentially a specialized hydraulic fitting.
In the end, so called ‘custom’ water cooling loops are much simpler than their reputation suggests, and just allow you to ‘choose’ better components. Same as building a ‘custom’ PC.
Problem with air cooling is at 350W per chip, with a need to minimize temperatures for overclocking, we are at the limits of what works reasonably well. For those who know how, water cooling will actually be more convenient than air cooling.
Also, it would be wise for everyone to sharpen up their skills. Next generation beyond this will benefit hugely from chilled cooling, just to beat the thermal resistance of the waterblock.
Add another generation or two after that, and we will be running water through holes in the chips for about 3x the TDP.
The final technological evolution in computer cooling may well be liquid metal running through plated holes in silicon chips.
@DrWilken It’s not that the thermal paste can’t be re-applied, it’s that the technique is getting fundamentally unreliable, and the pressures required to mount such heavy heatsinks is starting to put the chips at risk every time the screws are tightened. If things loosen up, they have to be redone. Too cowardly, and not all of the chip’s surface is contacting the heatsink. Maybe it just fails when you don’t have time for maintenance. Too foolhardy, and a very loud, very expensive, snap, will be heard.
I have had enough of playing with those kind of risks.
Build it once. Build it right. Resell in two years.
You completely missed the point… 
You’re saying You don’t have time to mess with bad solutions yet You have plenty of time to “do it right, once”…
What I’m trying to say is that lots of us do other stuff than just tinkering and gaming and we might be “OK” with all the, apparently subpar, solutions that the big guys create for us…
That’s all…
I still have my almost 20 Year old Stage 1 Gentoo install running, but it’s not because I love the work it presents but rather because I don’t feel like migrating to something simpler, once… 
My experience with maintenance has been exhaustive. On the hardware side, spending 20% more saves me >>200% maintenance, every time. On the software side, in hindsight, I think I might have spent about three years developing ‘ubiquitous bash’, to not have to deal with such things as converting a VritualBox machine to Qemu, or ChRoot.
This time around, there will be a substantial number of cases of the heatsinks falling off the GPUs. And it will be much worse on the CPU side.
I still have my almost 20 Year old Stage 1 Gentoo install running, but it’s not because I love the work it presents but rather because I don’t feel like migrating to something simpler, once…
Congrats. Stage 1 Gentoo though? These days, I just breeze through the Gentoo setup process with my automated scripts… aren’t we downloading Stage 3 these and building up from there?
Anyway, good luck taking that approach with an MSW machine. There is something to be said for the dependability and versatility of Linux. Which ultimately goes back to my point. Doing it right means it doesn’t have to be done again later.
If you do value quality construction though, and don’t want the hassle of building it yourself, let me know. I will be building a machine that may have such features as consolidation to a single 12V rail with a protected lithium float battery (all 5V and such from a PicoPSU), and 10 series aluminum extrusion framing.
You could be my first customer.
Point was, I have never reinstalled it, just recompiled for other CPU’s several times.
I’m probably not the right one…
We’re going a bit of topic here…
Chill cooling will lead to condensation and in the worst case short circuits.
I’d rather go with immersion cooling if the need ever arises, which is not exactly user friendly. Also just like with chill cooling, waterblocks become superfluous and hence there will be no resistance induced by them.
But the more pertinent question is, what are the acceptable colors for this upgrade cycle and which components harmonize the best?
i’m thinking fuchsia and yellow in nice polka dot patterns and variations over it
Not every car that looks sporty is a sports car, but every sports car looks sporty. Does that make sense? It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but form follows function. Yes, there are things you can infer about a video card’s performance from the way it looks, unless the video card vendor is just dressing it up, which is possible but not likely. Check out the low-mid-high end offerings of almost any manufacturer and and they look “cooler” the more they are worth, as a rule of thumb.
Immersion cooling does not push the power density quite as high as water cooling, much less chill cooling. Heatsinks between the chips and oil still have significant thermal resistance, and even with phase change immersion cooling, the chip packages themselves have thermal resistance. There were some academic studies done a long time ago that predicted this trend towards coolant fluid eventually running through the chip.
You are right to point out the condensation and other ‘consumer’ hassles. There are ways to deal with that, such as water cooling within immersion cooling, or filling part of case with expanding foam (assuming all the hot stuff is watercooled). Eventually, top end hardware may become more of a package deal, sold more commonly like gaming consoles are, with all the magic inside the set-top-box, but as a regular PC running MSW/Linux.
Meantime though, the point stands that aesthetics must give way to pragmatism, as our machines push the limits of existing cooling technology.
Good luck getting the cooler off of these FE’s. Looks ROUGH to do without damage. I know you’re likely to go AIB anyway though
Personally, I know I may not be in the majority here but I think the looks do matter. It’d be one thing if they were just meh, but most of the AIBs outside of asus TUF and zotac look like they were designed by a 13 year old. Just like with a car, it matters to me!
I’d say RGB lighting is exactly that.
Thanks, but you obviously do not know who I am. No doubt some YouTuber will figure it out, and I am sure I will have no problem following the directions.
That said, I am indeed leaning AIB, unless I can prove that I will be able to get an absolute top OC boost clock out of the FE card.
My preference would be for a FE 3080 20GB, but nVidia has said that they won’t be making one of those. I hope AMD forces them to change their minds.
A car makes sense because you drive in it every day and lots of people see it. For a graphics card, who is going to look inside your case while it’s running face down?