Watercooling is better; the cards will be about 40/45 degrees instead of 80/85.
But I chose not to go for watercooling and went for aircooling stead.
First reason was to save money... watercooling might be 1000 euro extra.
Second reason is I wanted to be flexible in changing GPU easiy in future.
I have 4 x 580 's and they produce a lot of heat... I have a big case and a lot of fans.
The temperatures during the benchmark were 85/80/77/71 ºC
It is not too bad.. Only in summer it is real hot summer in the working space... But that is only a few weeks a year,
(and then.. In fact... I should not be working during the summer holiday and go to the beach
)
The noise of the machine is not too bad, but I had all existing fans replaced by more silent ones;
surprisingly it doesn't make much more noise then my oldest PC. The H100 watercooler for the CPU makes the most annoying sound, because it is not a steady sound .
The 580 I purchased where the classified version and if I rember it correctly they have a better aircooling architecture then the regulars.
So, it is possible with aircooling and having the cards close to each other and I do not regret having it done with aircooling.
Although watercooling will give you more speed if you want to do overclocking.
These are the specs:
4x gtx 580 3gB classified
Enermax Fulmo GT ( case) with a lot of fans:
- Silverstone AP181 180mm ( 5x fans: 4x left panel + 1x front )
- Scythe Typhoon 1450Rp 120mm ( 2x fans top panel)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 120mm ( fan right panel behind cpu)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 140mm ( 5x fans: 2x for hdd front +2x bottom+ 1x rear)
- Scythe Kaze Q12 ( fan controller )
Edited
I had to skip skip a few from my first config and now have 9 fans. This is the finally use of fans:
- Silverstone AP181 180mm ( 3x left panel )
- Scythe Typhoon 1450Rp 120mm ( 2x fans top panel)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 120mm ( 1x fan right panel behind cpu)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 140mm ( 3x fans: 1x for hdd front +1x bottom+ 1x rear)
- Scythe Kaze Q12 ( fan controller )Enermax Maxrevo 1500W ( power unit)
Intel Core i7 3930K ( processor )
Corsair Hydro H100 ( processor cooling)
Asus Rampage IV Extreme ( mortherboard)
Corsair Vengeance 32Gb ( 8x4Gb memory)
2x Samsung 830 128Gb ( raid 1 of 0? SSD )
Western Digital Caviar Black 1Tb ( HD )
W7 64bits
In my signature you can see I have a second machine... I just added two Titans and a few fans.
The case was big enough to add them... They are also very close together, but it works fine.
This one has 950watt PSU and so far I have no problems. The temps are also about 80/85 degrees.
And the noise is pretty low compared to the 4*580, but then, the fans in the 580case are with more and turned on faster.