Short_Circut

ok quick update. Decided to remove the top cover and let the fans freely flow with no restrictions, ran heaven again. This time however, coolant temps stayed pretty within the ~10C window of ambient, eventually peaking at around 20C above. CPU and GPU temps however were great though. So now I guess this leads to the whole aesthetic vs. performance scenario. I won't lie having the top panel removed does make things look pretty unpleasing, but I guess if it makes temps more in line with what it should be then that's fine. I did end up purchasing a 280 which is set to come in 4 days so we'll see what happens with that

hmm those are some nice points thanks. Do you think a 280mm rad would work? Would like to at least use my 140's without putting them to waste. In light of this I decided to use the Cpro to monitor temps at different parts of the case and run heaven. I had set probes at right in front of the CPU block (so in between the rear exhaust and one of the rad intakes), one around the pump (so below another rad intake) and one outside to measure ambient. Average CPU power was ~40W and GPU was ~290W. Temps didn't start off too bad on a completely cold boot. Looking at the results though.......yeaaaa almost a +20C delta coolant temp over ambient with just a GPU load is not looking like the best of things. I'm gonna try and run a gaming scenario with both and load and see how catastrophic things really do get rip

Ok, so I finally decided to switch things up from air/aio cooling to full water cooling. Almost all my parts are hydro x (XD5 pump, XC7 cpu, xr5 360, 6 QL fans) apart from the gpu which is from phanteks. After finally building my updated rig I decided to check temperatures. So I was dissappointed to see that the temperatures were not only higher than on air, but also unecessarily higher. While before I was getting ~60C on CPU (i7-9700k) and ~55 C on GPU (strix 3090) (both were undervolted) with the liquid setup I was seeing both CPU and GPU hit ~70. So I ended up taking off the panels and stress testing again, and lo an behold the temperatures were what I was expecting it to be. CPU hit 50's ish and GPU settled around ~52-53 which is not bad. However, once I put the side panel back on expecting the temperatures to rise up to prove my potential theory, I noticed they did not really change all that much apart from maybe a degree or 2 (but nowhere near the 70 mark I was hitting), so now I'm confused as to what is causing the super rise in temps. If I game with the panels on, then temps soar high. If I remove the panels, stress and then put the panels back on, temps seem to be better Idle temps arent too bad, GPU sits around ~30C and CPU around ~40, but what surprises me is the coolant temps. They seem to idle around ~37-38C and under full load they can get up to as close as 50 C My current setup (o11 dynamic xl) has Pump --> GPU --> CPU --> rad (mounted on top) --> pump. I currently have 2 QL 140's as bottom intake, 1 ql 120 as rear intake, and 3 ql 120's for the rad. I tried experimenting with switching between intake and exhaust, and found that intake gave better temps so stuck with that I'll try and give benefit of the doubt and wait at least a couple of days for things like thermal paste to get up to speed and whatnot, but I am really confused as to what is going on (particularly with coolant temps). I feared it could've been a cpu/gpu mounting issue, but those times where the temps were perfectly fine seem to indicate otherwise?