Aurora R8, 2080Ti Liquid Cooling DIY upgrade

Oh yo~~~ Thank you for replying! I plan to place the radiator/fan under the graphics card, there is some space for hard disk use. Seems like the 240mm radiator is fit. That black vertical support can be removed.

Hi my friend, I found another 120mm solution from your link:

EVGA HYBRID Kit for EVGA/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti XC/XC2/FE, RGB (400-HY-1384-B1)

 I think Alienware 2080Ti uses NVIDIA reference PCB. Does this work? Thank you~~

Thank you guys so much for the information! I will pick one from Alphacool or EVGA. Let's have a try and see how it goes. Thank you ~~

Here is another 120mm AIO:

Take a look at the NZXT Kraken G12 and Corsair H55 combo with the RTX 2080ti.      

Lots of info on how to mount it on the card on the internet, here is a video 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kem57M3hCoo

Tesla is likely correct on the Dell card being an MSI Aero clone which is a reference card.

If that is the case, the MSI Sea Hawk 2080ti uses the Corsair H55 cooler and radiator.

The Sea Hawk is based on a reference card similar to the MSI Aero rear blower design

Check and see if the Dell RTX 2080ti in your machine is 10.5-10.6 inches long, if so then it is based on the Aero design.

Once you figure out how to mount the GPU cooler on your card, then you face the task of mounting into the Alienware chassis.  There is mention on one of the posts about the front bezel on the Aurora having venting built in and no bezel mods should be required.    Good luck.

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-GPU-and-CPU-Liquid-Cooler-PSU-Case-Swap-Upgrade/td-p/6137280

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-GPU-and-CPU-Liquid-Cooler-PSU-Case-Swap-Upgrade/m-p/6184411/highlight/true#M18588

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-GPU-and-CPU-Liquid-Cooler-PSU-Case-Swap-Upgrade/m-p/6244660/highlight/true#M21319

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/Aurora-R7-liquid-cooling-unit/m-p/7221814/highlight/true#M8306

My question is.. where are you going to plug the radiator fan, and pump? There’s two connections that need power.

You can always purchase y-split cables for the board fan headers and/ or molex power connection to your PSU. Sometimes there could be 3 connections that need power. You can see that in my post here where a hacked GPU to add in a water cooler AIO resulted in 3 power connections to drive (radiator fan, pump, VRM fan)

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/Experience-of-Buying-an-Aurora-R8/m-p/7355951/highlight/true#M12028

I originally purchased an r8 with a cooling fan on the processor. I tried to replace the fan with liquid cooling. But the fan speed readings in Alienware command center were erratic and not accurate. (I ended up returning the Alienware with cooling fan)

What AIO cooler did you install in the previous R8? Regardless, you would see 2 readings in AWCC: CPU fan and top fan. CPU fan will be stuck to 100% because AWCC will switch to read from PUMP_FAN header which you can treat as a 3-pin non-PWM header.  The top fan reading will be the one that seems weird because AWCC seems to be configured to only read the tach value of the stock fan and send PWM pulse based on it. To worsen it is that the erratic calculation of fan speed and the controls will change based on your case temps. This can happen even with fixed fan frequency where in > 50C case temps, I am sometimes hit with AWCC slowing down my fan when I set it to > 70% compared to a fixed value of say 60%. I observed that this seems to impact only my Noctua fans (A12x15 PWM, A8 PWM, A9 PWM) but not my Corsair ML120 Pro. So on this point I do agree with you that AWCC can indeed become wonky when different PWM fans get swapped in.

I assume the same would happen if you put a water cooled heat sink on the GPU.. I just purchased a i9 9900k with 2080ti r8. And I love it. But the GPU gets hot. I need to find a way to keep it cooler. There is 1 single 4 pin spot for a fan. I might get a fan that point it directly on the GPU. (Kind of like the fans you see pointing on ram)

Does it getting hot affect your usage in any way? Room becoming too warm? Or the fans going jet takeoff mode? Have you tried adjusting fan curves before looking into hardware tweaks? I think adding that fan will do nothing to cool down your GPU. I've tried adding a fan lying flat on the casing floor pointed at the GPU, placed it at the rear to such air out... it did nothing to cool down a RX580 which is just a 185W card. Your 2080 Ti is a 250W fire breathing dragon, that has only 1 fan sucking in air and spewing out its lava breath ala blower style out the back of the R8.

I've managed to cool down my card using liquid cooling:

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/Experience-of-Buying-an-Aurora-R8/m-p/7352232/highlight/true#M11643

The question is whether a similar solution works for the 2080 Ti. I'm currently able to run stress tests on my card when it draws average 160W @ 60C. Regardless if you use a Kraken like what I did, or bought a hybrid cooling card from MSI or EVGA (PSA: FTW3 will not fit in the R8), you're still using the same 150mm radiator as I am but trying to take away 60-70 J per second. As I see it, my radiator + fan config is already at its limit so the 2080 Ti even with liquid hybrid cooling using the smallest pump + radiator option is still going to raise temps into the 70s.

The way I see it, Dell never designed the R8 to have these top of the line CPU + GPU without sacrificing thermals or acoustics. Dell kept sweeping its GPU heat issue under the rug, no indication of having a liquid cooled solution for it when gaming workloads are so GPU intense. And especially disappointing that they chose to release the R9 today with the same inner chassis as the R6/R7/R8.

Wow. I didn’t realize the r9 just released. What a kick in the balls. I’ll have some debating to do on if I should return my r8. It looks like the r9 has a liquid cooled power supply option. Um, and that’s about it.. But it does have an upgraded case as well.. If the r9 had a liquid cooled rtx option, I would have already submitted my return. 

As for the cooling side of things if I decide to keep my r8. Did you say that the fans did or didn’t fit on the push/ pull on the top, and front of the r8?  Is there another spot on the front of the new r9 for a fan ? Also, if that extra AIO is used on the MB will command center read that fan speed? If one of the fans happens to **bleep** the bed, can any fan replace the broken one? Or does it need to have a specific dell supplied fan?

I apologize for all of the questions here. 

I paid 2900 with two years dell support. (Not sure if that’s hardware warranty as well) i9 9900k, 2080ti, 1tb SSD+1tb HDD, Disk drive, 16gb ddr.. So I got a pretty good deal. If I went with r9 I’d be paying $500 more. For what? Better case/ psu cooling.

I recommend using auto trim removal tools to take the top off, see photo: 

Welcome to the club! I thought one of those really skinny and long screwdrivers might have made it but I could be wrong. I ended up removing the processor cooling assembly (mine is liquid cooled) and took the entire pump-heatsink-fan assembly out to swap out my fan. @r72019 has a really great idea. Instead of re-using the screws, go get some machined 6-32 1.5" screws to mount the fan so that the next time you won't have to go through the same thing again.

If you are going to remove the liquid cooler or any cooler actually, off the CPU, you'll need to use alcohol to wipe away the existing thermal paste and reapply. The thought of doing that made me pause for a few days before I mustered enough guts to do it. Probably best to go with non-conducting TIM if you're not too confident. There are some people @Anonymous who has surgeon fingers that can handle liquid metal TIM, and then there's butterfingers like your truly.

I am attempting to remove the heat sink cpu radiator fan. But cannot find something that is small enough to fit through the fan hole, and big / long enough to reach the screw. 

Any ideas?

Does the top part of the case need to come off? Or is there enough room to pull the whole bracket out with the fan and radiator. It’s still going to be difficult to remove the screws once it’s out?

Okay thank you. 

Hopefully the fans work. And no mishaps in AWCC after installing the ML 120 pro. 

I might try and see how the fans run first. And check and make sure the auto cooling feature , and other smooth line work with these corsairs. 

Does the top part of the case need to come off? Or is there enough room to pull the whole bracket out with the fan and radiator. It’s still going to be difficult to remove the screws once it’s out?

Unfortunately the top part of the case needs to come off. The radiator is mounted to the bracket from the top and the bracket is part of the case.

https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/us/en/04/alienware-aurora-r8-desktop/alienware-aurora-r8-service-manual/procedure?guid=guid-c7b83b7f-ace5-457e-b464-686f183093bf&lang=en-us

Once it's out, the screws are easily removable by angling your screwdriver or using a flex line adapter to the screwdriver.