A Lesson in Cooling

I have now built 3 successful hackintosh machines. Each of them I have used an RX580 graphics card. It’s cheap, buying used on eBay, it can drive two 4k monitors, and it works in the builds with no fuss.

https://i.redd.it/mv4fzsh5qh631.png

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I’m not much of a gamer but I play a couple titles here and there. I had attempted to play a game and watch a movie on the other screen, but it locks the machine and shuts down. “ah well” I always said, a bit too much to ask of a graphics card in a hacked system.

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Fast forward to my latest build.

Gigabyte z390 Designare

Intel i9-9900k

Sapphire Radeon RX580

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4 2666

Samsung 970 EVO 1TB - NVMe PCIe M.2 2280

CORSAIR HYDRO Series H150i PRO RGB AIO

Lian Li PC-O11DW Computer Case White

3 of be quiet! Silent Wings 3 120mm, BL064, Cooling Fan

IOGEAR Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter

CORSAIR RMX White Series, RM750x, 750 Watt, 80+ Gold Certified, Fully Modular Power Supply- White

Rosewill RNX-AC1900PCE, 802.11AC Dual Band AC1900 PCI Express WiFi Adapter/Wireless Adapter/Network Card

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The particular RX580 I had bought sounded like a prop aircraft preparing to take off whenever it was under load, it drove me a bit nutty. So, the solution I came up with was:

- NZXT Kraken G12 - GPU Mounting Kit for Kraken X Series

- NZXT Kraken X52 240mm - All-In-One RGB CPU Liquid Cooler

- NZXT Internal USB Hub – (Only had one USB on the MB)

Once installed the GPU Die temp was 28C at idle and around 40-50C when stress testing. But most of all it was QUIET.

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The surprise came when I started pushing it. Setting game graphics to higher settings… and yesterday, for the heck of it, I put up Netflix on one screen and a game on the other… No problem at all.

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…and the moral of the story. Cooling makes a lot bigger difference in day to day tasks than I had expected.