water or air cooled video cards

Hi all..I'm shopping for a video card to handle many GPUs....some are water cooled, which I've never heard about....does anyone here own a water cooled video card ?

Originally posted by woadman
Hi all..I'm shopping for a video card to handle many GPUs....some are water cooled, which I've never heard about....does anyone here own a water cooled video card ?

You want an air cooled one for your system.

Your system isn't water cooled and doesn't need to be water cooled.

Personally I don't think it needs upgrading at all, but if you are set on buying
a new GPU then you do not need an over-clocked water cooled one.

Your system will bottleneck somewhere else before that power could be fully utilised.

Water cooling is for extreme enthusiast builds.

It's fiddly, risky, expensive, and in anything not being pushed to the limit, excessive
and unnecessary.


You haven't specified as yet... What is your current GPU?

Originally posted by woadman
Hi all..I'm shopping for a video card to handle many GPUs....some are water cooled, which I've never heard about....does anyone here own a water cooled video card ?

I agree with fooglefudge. If it fails there's a risk you'll have a water leak inside your computer and that is one of the worst things that can happen to electronic equipment. You can get an air-cooled graphics card without compromising on processing power. Water cooling is for mad people who push overclocking to its limits.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I agree with fooglefudge. If it fails there's a risk you'll have a water leak inside your computer and that is one of the worst things that can happen to electronic equipment. You can get an air-cooled graphics card without compromising on processing power. Water cooling is for mad people who push overclocking to its limits.

I agree with FeepThought. But the really mad over-clockers submerge their rigs in LN2,
for five to ten minutes of super power glory...

And then a full system rebuild.

Kinda like drag racing or formula 1.

Originally posted by googlefudge
You want an air cooled one for your system.

Your system isn't water cooled and doesn't need to be water cooled.

Personally I don't think it needs upgrading at all, but if you are set on buying
a new GPU then you do not need an over-clocked water cooled one.

Your system will bottleneck somewhere else before that power could be fully utilised.
...[text shortened]... mit, excessive
and unnecessary.


You haven't specified as yet... What is your current GPU?

my graphics card came with my Dell xps8500 , bought at the end of 2012. It is AMD Radeon HD 7570. I just ran NOVAbench test on it and it scored 247. It said 3D frames per/sec was 719. I'm not sure how many GPUs and memory is on it. The reviews say it is only mid-range capabilities. At the time, Dell was selling their ALIENWARE systems, which had all the higher end graphics. Possibly the Radeon R9,295x2 would be a good replacement ?

I'm sure if you ask the dumb blonde in the shop, she'll know more about it, especially about going down under water and coming up for air, or getting her T-shirt all wet. Do you really want water-pipes running all around your box? It's not a pleasurable experience, I can assure you, especially after my last year - I'm an expert in bad water running all around my box. Happy shopping, and don't over-exercise the ol'e credit card. 😀

Hope that brought a smile.

-m. 😉

Originally posted by woadman
Hi all..I'm shopping for a video card to handle many GPUs....some are water cooled, which I've never heard about....does anyone here own a water cooled video card ?

No, mate, what you want is oil-cooled. All the cool, rad kids these days go oil, it goes so well with their gold-plated sound cables.

Originally posted by woadman
Hi all..I'm shopping for a video card to handle many GPUs....some are water cooled, which I've never heard about....does anyone here own a water cooled video card ?

Is this still for running SETI, or is it for games? The best cards for SETI are not necessarily the best ones for games.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Is this still for running SETI, or is it for games? The best cards for SETI are not necessarily the best ones for games.

well, I've had second thoughts about SETI. There are some strong arguments against the viability of their program. Also, I've decided to keep the price around $200---$250 range. thanks again for your input...

Originally posted by woadman
well, I've had second thoughts about SETI. There are some strong arguments against the viability of their program. Also, I've decided to keep the price around $200---$250 range. thanks again for your input...

I wouldn't recommend replacing your graphics card unless it's broken. Hardware tends to function best when it is coupled with other things of the same generation.

Originally posted by googlefudge
I agree with FeepThought. But the really mad over-clockers submerge their rigs in LN2,
for five to ten minutes of super power glory...

And then a full system rebuild.

Kinda like drag racing or formula 1.

Yes, sorry about that, the keys are next to each other and I didn't proof-read my post.

Originally posted by woadman
my graphics card came with my Dell xps8500 , bought at the end of 2012. It is AMD Radeon HD 7570. I just ran NOVAbench test on it and it scored 247. It said 3D frames per/sec was 719. I'm not sure how many GPUs and memory is on it. The reviews say it is only mid-range capabilities. At the time, Dell was selling their ALIENWARE systems, which had all the higher end graphics. Possibly the Radeon R9,295x2 would be a good replacement ?

To be honest, that's a pretty decent graphics card. It's got 480 cores and I don't think you'll get anything much better for the amount of money you're talking about. Also Kazet has a very good point. The only problem with your card is no double precision arithmetic. This is not something that will worry you unless you actually work in high precision computing. According to Wikipedia it'll hit 640 Gigaflops.

I have an HD 7970 (irritatingly the machine's in storage at the moment), it'll hit a teraflop double precision, or 4 teraflops single precision. I needed it as the company I worked for at the time was doing a viability study on these things. I tested that by writing some OpenCL code and found that in practical code it's more like 80 Gigaflops double as memory load/stores slow it down too much. I managed to get it to hit full speed by writing some pointless code that did one load/store and about 50 pointless maths operations on what the processing units had in memory. So how much you can accelerate general purpose code really depends on the application. If you give them the right problem they are great. If you don't have the right problem for them you may as well use the CPU, it's a lot less grief.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Yes, sorry about that, the keys are next to each other and I didn't proof-read my post.

That's ok, I assumed as much.

It wasn't a serious post 🙂

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
I wouldn't recommend replacing your graphics card unless it's broken. Hardware tends to function best when it is coupled with other things of the same generation.

ok probably sound advice...I'm not really doing anything high-end graphics wise..

Generally when I give advice to people about buying computer gear, and to be
fair they are almost never looking for a gaming machine, I tend to recommend a
minimum spec in terms of computing/graphical power and component quality.
And then beyond that recommend focusing on the stuff that will actually make
a difference to their day to day experience of using the computer [laptop or PC]

Good keyboard, good mouse/touchpad, and good screen.

You will likely spend thousands of hours a year [low estimate] staring at you computer
monitor. And having a good quality one with a decent resolution/colour gamete/size
makes such a difference.

Unless you are playing high end games, or are handling large image or video files,
you are extremely unlikely to notice the difference in performance between a
decent midrange system and a top end one on regular tasks, beyond the start-up/load time.

You WILL notice the difference having a good comfortable ergonomic keyboard/mouse and
high quality screen makes.

I don't know what you currently have on that front, and if you are happy with them I
wouldn't recommend changing them.

But if you are going to improve your overall system, and you are not going to be
doing high intensity applications that will actually stress you already pretty good hardware,
that is where I would recommend looking for upgrades.

I have bought 3 of these, 2 for my machine and 1 for my fathers:

http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/dell-ultrasharp-u2412m-led-monitor-24-u2412m/

If you want fast 'twitch' fps gaming performance it's not the monitor for you.
But for a value machine with great picture quality and resolution its really tough to beat.