Question about Coolers vs. Heat Sink (New Computer)

Outsider418 · 04 Mar 2018

Good afternoon, all.

My gaming computer went the way of the dinosaur, so I am building a new one. I am still figuring out what parts to put in it, I haven't bought any parts yet.

My friend suggested getting an after market cooler for my CPU (Intel i7 8700). The case (full tower) comes with three fans (two 140mm intake fans and a 140mm exhaust fan. I am adding four more fans, two more 140mm fans up top and two 120mm fans on the bottom.
My friend also suggested having two video cards since I game and watch Netflix at the same time: A gaming card and a multimedia card. If I have that many fans in the machine, could I just use the heat sink that comes with the chip, or with the extra video card, would the after market cooler be ideal?

Thanks for your input.

Masterchiefxx17 · 04 Mar 2018

That will be a lot of air flow. What sort of case are you planning on using?

You won't need two graphics card for what you want to do. One will suffice. Something like a GTX 1070 should handle both tasks with ease. Granted both are at 1080p.

A 8700 cannot be overclocked, so the stock cooler should be fine, especially with the airflow you plan on having.

essenbe · 04 Mar 2018

I agree, 2 graphics cards is not necessary and not needed. Spend the money for 1 really good card. Many games don't support SLI/CFX plus the 370 chipset only has 16 PCIe lanes, which means you would be running both cards at 8x instead of the normal 16x even if you ran them as 2 separate cards.

Steve C · 05 Mar 2018

Your computer should be able to fly with all those fans! I focus on building quiet PCs so I use a noise insulated case and large slow moving case and CPU fans.

I last used a Nanoxia Deep Silence quiet case http://nanoxia-world.com/en/products...ilence-series/ and quiet Noctua cooling fans https://noctua.at/en/products/fan

AS185 · 07 Mar 2018

If you have space at the top, I recommend on buying an water cooling kit for the cpu. I have Thermaltake 3.0 Water Ultimate on my AMD 1950X and idle temperatures are in 31~35 degree's Celsius. Maximum load temperature that I have noticed is 63 degree's Celsius. My cpu isn't overclocked, so the temperature's will differ once overclocked. Either way, with that many air fan's that your planning to install, you will have ton's of airflow within your chassis.
Which video card's are you planning to purchase? I have 2 Geforce 1080Ti's and I'm blown away into space

You could buy 2 Geforce 1070's and enable SLI. From my understanding, you can be certain, that whichever 2 Geforce 1070 or 1080/Ti you buy, you have will have a good peace of mind. If your looking to buy a graphic's card that you'd like to change in 3 to 4 year's or possibly more, I'd go with SLI Geforce 1080Ti's.

essenbe · 07 Mar 2018

If you game at 1920X1080, SLI 1080 TI's does not make sense. 1 1080 TI will push any game at very high FPS. Heck, 1 will push 4K at 60 FPS. Plus, remember, no matter what your OSD says your card's FPS is pushing, in reality your monitor's refresh rate is all you are really seeing. Whatever your monitor's refresh rate is, that's as many times per second it can refresh. It's a hardware limitation. If you are playing on a 1920 X 1080 60Hz monitor, 60 FPS is all your monitor can physically do, even if your OSD shows your card is putting out 200 FPS. That is why you hear so much about screen tearing. Then you have a lot of games that do not support SLI.

munk1955 · 07 Mar 2018

Hello Outsider418.....I don't have any recommendations about the GPU's you are asking about but from what I have just read you have gotten some very good info from some very knowledgeable people.

Now I myself have built many PC's over the years and have extensively studied the aspects of how many fans to use inside of the case.

You don't need anywhere near the fans you are considering.....With that full tower I would water cool it with a 2 fan(120mm) radiator and make sure the fans are blowing the hot air to the outside of the case(Exhaust) and then you only need to match that up with 2 more fans for the intake and you will be fine.

So this way you don't need another fan for the CPU.

And I don't know about everybody else but if your PSU is bottom mounted what I always do is flip it so the fan is acting like another exhaust fan.

Good luck on your new build!

PolarNettles · 07 Mar 2018

That is way overkill for cooling an i7-8700 that's not overclocked.

I have an i7-8700K, which is a 95W TDP chip compared to the i7-8700's 65W TDP, and I only have one 180mm case fan and one 120mm CPU fan (plus the stock GPU and PSU fans). And I have a tiny, cramped micro-ATX case.

In theory, if you have one GPU, using the GPU video decoder hardware while gaming would takes cores away from the 3D processing but I haven't been able to determine how much. Task Manager says decoding a 1080p Netflix stream takes 20% GPU resources on my GTX 1070 but from my understanding that percentage is based on time utilization and not in core utilization, so that may not correspond to a 20% fps impact. If someone has 2 monitors hooked up then maybe they can run a bench to check the effect Netflix has.

DeaconFrost · 07 Mar 2018

Call me crazy, but I don't see the point of watching Netflix while playing a game. Sounds like a boring game! Anyway, your computer, your usage. Ignore anything this friend tells you in the future. You shouldn't need an after market cooler if you aren't overclocking. If you decide you want one, spend $25 or so on a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 model that fits your processor's socket. The video card should be able to handle playing Netflix while playing a game.

Outsider418 · 08 Mar 2018

Thanks so much for the input guys!

The case I was looking at is a Corsair Graphite 780T full tower. I am a little nervous about liquid cooling and overclocking which is why I was looking at so many fans and getting a i7 8700. I went full tower for the purpose of SLI, but I never found it necessary, but I had been getting suggestions about dual video cards. I play World of Warcraft a lot, so I watch Netflix if I'm grinding. Watching Netflix while raiding will get you killed quick :)

Thanks again guys!