After 10 years with a Skylake Core i7 and a GTX 1070 I was due for some upgrades. For the GPU I got a Radeon RX 6800XT with 16 gigs of VRAM. While it’s already a bit dated it’s still twice as good as my 1070 according to Passmark benchmarks. For the CPU I got an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. It has a score that’s over seven times my old Skylake.
But there was a problem, isn’t there always? The new GPU is about 75mm longer and needed the space that was occupied by my reservoir.
After I had the parts it quickly became apparent that I either needed a bigger box or I needed to think outside it. Literally!
It’s not lost on me that I’ve basically put the towns water supply and pumping station directly above it’s power plant! I probably won’t get that city planning job I was hoping for but I think it looks awesome!
At first I had kept the small radiator but I noticed that my water lines seemed warm after a little gaming. Then I realized that with the new GPU being air cooled and dumping the heat inside the case the radiator at the exhaust was doing the opposite of what it was supposed to be doing!
Finally after draining, removing the second radiator and doing another leak check things were back on track.
When I started liquid cooling it was mostly because I liked the way it looked and it made for a quiet PC that never had to ramp up the fans to stay cool. Well that’s no longer the case. The 9950X is a fire breathing beast with almost double the TDP of my old CPU. I don’t see how it could be air cooled without throttling.
So is it crazy cool or just crazy? 
