Just In is a new segment showing something interesting that I recently created or bought. As one of the ever-present broke college kids (as the expression goes) don’t expect these articles too often though, unless you want to send me new tech to test haha.
Just In 2-12: PC Watercooling Gear
-Am I crazy?
Call me crazy; however, watercooling has always intrigued me. People who have built elaborate systems cooled by water and overclocked to extremes while running much cooler than air is rather awesome. I have not had the chance to actually meddle in watercooling myself until recently, though for the past few years it has been something I’ve wanted to tinker with and learn more about.
Well, this year I decided to read as much as possible and dive right in. After reading numerous guides on the Internet, I decided that I knew just enough to be dangerous. I then hit another stroke of luck when browsing the HardOCP forum where another member was selling a complete watercooling loop that just so happened to be compatible with my hardware, and for a great price. We negotiated a bit and before long I had a watercooling loop winging it’s way to my door.
The watercooling loop included:
- A Swiftech MCP655B pump
- XSPC Rasa CPU water block
- EK FC-6970 GPU water block
- 360mm (3 x 120mm) Radiator
- Blue colored tubing
- a bunch of fittings, screws, and adapters to mount the radiator to the back of the PC which I ended up not using.
I then spent a few days getting some odds and ends together including a Silver KillCoil, zip ties (Oh, how I love zip ties! What can’t they do!?), thermal paste, and Distilled Water. Regarding the distilled water, after reading and asking around my assumptions turned out to be true; distilled water is distilled water and there is not much anyone can do to mess it up so going with whatever is cheapest is the best way to go. I then picked up a gallon of distilled water from Wal-Mart for 83 cents, a heck of a lot cheaper than some of the premixed watercooling fluids! If you’re interesting, the Distilled water was in the same section as the rest of the drinking water and it has a purple cap.
The main watercooling components came before the other various odds and ends. Despite not having everything to get the loop up and running, I was too excited to not play around with the shiny new hardware so I mocked up what I wanted the loop to look like as you can see in the photo below.
The tubing was not actually bent, it just looks that way from the camera angle I suppose.
In all my reading about watercooling, I found the general consensus to be that loop order did not really matter except that the reservoir should always come before the pump. Further, having the shortest loop possible is the best course of action; therefore, I decided to set up my loop as follows. 1) Reservoir, 2) Pump, 3) CPU water block, 4) GPU water block, 5) Radiator, and finally back to the pump. I planned to mount the pump on the outside of the case and run the tubing through an open PCI expansion slot. That was the plan, anyway. Needless to say, the next few days crawled by as I waited for the rest of the parts to come in!
Right now, I’m working on putting together a guide from the perspective of someone just coming into the hobby to try to better answer all of the questions that I had. There is a lot of information online about watercooling but there are just as many questions, and it took reading a bunch of guides to really get to a point where I felt reasonably confident that I could get such a loop working well. I’m hoping to put together a guide where at least most of those questions can be answered all in one place 
. If you have any ideas or questions regarding watercooling or the guide, I’d love to hear them!
More to come regarding my adventure into pumping water through my electronics, so stay tuned!
My cute corgi puppy :)