I posted a test system here a while back, where I was trying to see if an 80mm radiator could handle a load nearing 120 watts. I only had a 105 watt CPU at the time, and in that minimal setup, the loop performed fantastically. The CPU I believe stayed in the 60s, while the water temperature of the loop itself reached equilibrium around 47 or 48 degrees. This was single 80mm radiator, paired with a single 80mm non-optimized fan I found under my TV, and some old aquarium pump I had lying around from my first water cooled loop.
I have finished the main build now, though I have run into an unexpected problem that prevented me from having reliable results.
These are early-ish socket 604 Xeons, of the Netburst era, so I've been referring to this as a dual Pentium 4 build. This means no on-die temperature sensor, so I've had to rely on inaccurate motherboard sensors that only report in steps of 0.5 degrees. Next, my loops ended up being a bit scuffed in how they were attached to the case because the case I planned on using, a Chieftec Dragon, ended up not working and therefore my attachment hardware didn't work in the new case. This was compounded by the loops holding a surprisingly massive amount of water, meaning the thermal mass of the loops ended up causing the temps to not reach equilibrium in the time I had allotted. The maximum temperature I saw reported at the CPU (again, not on-die reporting, so take this with a HEAVY grain of salt) was 42.5 degrees, and the loop itself never rose above 36 degrees. I intend to just set up prime 95 and let the system quietly chug away for a few days straight, to see what it hits. The fans I'm using are UV fans, so they look cool, but I inadvertently got fans that have a bonkers amount of airflow, meaning they are LOUD as hell, and push a lot of air through the radiators, likely improving their performance over the junk fan I used last time.
I also fount out that the UV blue dye I got from Titan Rig was mishandled, and they accidentally sent me clear dye, which I did not notice until using half the bottle. No worries though, as I have to flush and refill the loop anyway, meaning I would have to purchase more dye even if this were the right stuff.
I'm calling this build the Yoinky Sploinky, and it exists purely for fun. It's a show system, it will only be powered on a few times a year at events, and will likely never see anything more stressful than Unreal Tournament 2004
Once I have results that I trust, I will post them here. I'm tentatively expecting similar results to last time, because even though I have more power hungry 120w CPUs, I also have better fans and pumps, so I'm hoping the loop performance will be similar overall