AIO vs Custom Loop Water Cooling?

[gillmanjr]

I wanted to get some opinions on this forum before moving forward. My system is below in my signature. I am currently running a Corsair Hydro H115i AIO for CPU cooling but I have been wanting to try a custom loop for a while now. The reason I haven't moved forward is mainly because of the cost.

I'm wondering what kind of a performance gain I could expect going from a 280mm AIO to a 360mm custom loop (hard piped). I would definitely go with Corsair's Hydro X series cooling components since I already have a ton of Corsair RGB components and several Corsair controllers installed for RGB and fan control. I guess my basic question is, would this be worth it in terms of a cooling upgrade or would it mostly just be for the aesthetic of a hard piped setup?

 

[Intel_man]

Hard tubing is for sure mostly a cosmetic thing. Soft tubing will perform just as well if not theoretically better because you don't have as much 90 deg bends, although in most computer use cases, it doesn't matter and the thermal limitation is never because of the number of bends in your tubing.

Custom loops are typically better because you can spec better pump, rad, and waterblock than the AIO, and if you want expand-ability with water cooling your GPU and CPU together. Performance difference on the CPU side is not likely going to be significant but you can pair the thing with a GPU waterblock and that would be substantially better.

 

[gillmanjr]

Hard tubing is for sure mostly a cosmetic thing. Soft tubing will perform just as well if not theoretically better because you don't have as much 90 deg bends, although in most computer use cases, it doesn't matter and the thermal limitation is never because of the number of bends in your tubing.

Custom loops are typically better because you can spec better pump, rad, and waterblock than the AIO, and if you want expand-ability with water cooling your GPU and CPU together. Performance difference on the CPU side is not likely going to be significant but you can pair the thing with a GPU waterblock and that would be substantially better.

Yes adding a GPU water block is really my end game and reason I want to go down this route. I want to do that to make my system as quiet as possible. I'm really leaning towards doing this because I just figured out that I would not need to add any additional Corsair controllers in order to get full RGB and pump control if I were to install a Corsair XC7 CPU block and the XD5 pump/res. I already have everything in place for that. I don't even need to buy anymore fans. But I would need all the hard piping, fittings, and tools to do the installation. I wouldn't buy the GPU block right away because my current RTX 2080 is a very poor overclocker (like the worst on the market) so I will probably wait until the RTX 3000 series release to buy a new card and then add the block for that.