Nitefly’s first watercooling build :eek:

Nitefly

Nitefly

Nitefly

Man of Honour
Joined
24 Sep 2005
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Original thread

I decided that my pc was just a little too neat and easy to use… so why not just… go for it. A big whopper Watercooling build with hard tubing.

What could go wrong :o

It’s taken a galactic age to get all the bits I wanted together:

wO6dYYy.jpeg


That’s not even everything as it excludes the coolant and a bulk buy of distilled water.

It cost an absolute ****ing fortune. There’s easily a grand of junk here, although I’m sure I could have shaved off a few hundred with cost-conscious purchases. The most obvious throwaway non-essentials are the hard tubing briefcase thing and the thermal grizzly mounting bits / kryosheet, but I quite fancied some ‘set and forget’ stuff.

The main bits:

Alphacool Apex CPU cooler (AM5)
Alphacool Core 5090 MSI Suprim / Gaming Trio GPU cooler
Alphacomputer Ultitube 150 Pro Reservoir with Leakshield + D5 Next Pump
2x 360 GTS black ice nemesis radiators
140 Alphacool rad

There is just so much bonus **** you need to get, it’s unbelievable, such as:

Heat gun
T - junction connectors
G4/G4 connectors that rotate
Drain valves
Stop taps
Coolant
Distilled water
Hoses and hose connections for flushing, testing and draining
Motherboard ‘jumper cable’

… I mean, damn…

Well, **** it, in for a penny, in for a pound :p

First job was flushing the radiators. This is what the mason jar and fish tank pump and stainless steel filter were for. I didn’t take any pics but it basically went from pump in the jar, via soft tubing to rad, then back to jar and into the steel filter. Worked pretty well and got gunk out.

I also checked that my pump was working:

6R1okD1.jpeg


Yup!

So far, so good… now… onto the tricky stuff.

Wish me luck!
 
Damn that's a lot of stuff! Did they chuck the briefcase in as you bought so much or was that just the SKU of the hardline kit?

Edit: Wooohooo! I'm Ray Liotta again :cry:
 
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TrojanWhore said:
Damn that's a lot of stuff! Did they chuck the briefcase in as you bought so much or was that just the SKU of the hardline kit?

Edit: Wooohooo! I'm Ray Liotta again :cry:
Click to expand...

Nah it’s a kit with a bunch of bits that happens to come in a briefcase. Cheaper to buy all the bits separately I think but meh I liked the idea of a no nonsense purchase… it was a headache researching everything else!
 
The good thing is you've now got it all! Any future builds should just be a new block or two, and maybe some tubing/coolant. Perhaps the latest fancy fans.

I keep looking at my 8 year old build and imagining how much it'd cost to build a loop again if I upgrade the components. But then I realise it's really just a GPU block I'd need.
 
Nice. Good jump in there.

Thekwango said:
i know it's a bit cliché but just remember to take your time and measure measure measure (measure twice cut once) nothing worse than cutting a piece of pipe a few mm short!
Click to expand...
I think with hardline - at least at first - you have to accept you're going to get some of the bends wrong....or many of the bends wrong. You can over heat, under heat, over bend, under bend, get them in the wrong place. You'll get there though...just make sure you have some spare tubing!
Personally I get the bend(s) right with extra on each end and then trim to length once I can offer it up to the fittings...but I'm hardly an expert :D
For multiple bends in a single tube, you may be better to screw mandrels to a board so that the bends end up in the right place - you can measure where the mandrels are much more accurately than where a bend that isn't there yet is. Depending how complex your run is, you may have to do this in two planes.... which is why you want to keep it simple :D

Oh, and your idea of not needing the stuff again after you've done the build....wrong. You'll be irritated to find out that if you buy a new GPU, the inlet/outlet holes will be in enough of a different place to mean you have to redo two tubes....ask me how I know :rolleyes: :D

Edit: hardline is (in my opinion) worth it by the way. Once you've mastered acrylic, you can move onto glass! :p Can't make life too easy for yourself! :D
 
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Cenedd said:
You can over heat, under heat, over bend, under bend, get them in the wrong place.
Click to expand...
Oh absolutely, there’s a plethora of ways someone new to hardline will balls a piece of tubing up but at least if they keep to the measure twice cut once rule, that’ll be one less way to **** it up :p

Severe lack of pics and progress btw op - chop chop. :p
 
It's not cheap to watercool nowadays unfortunately
Though yes you did buy some of
The more expensive stuff
Even a torque screwdriver in there

Not seen many/if any builds using leakshield
Are you aware that can also be used
To fill and drain the loop using vacuum?
Though think requires accessory to do it

No mention of a leak tester?
Yeah you can do it without one
But with hard Tubing particularly think I would
Want one of those
Not sure the leakshield can perform that function
Other than once the loops fully set up
But with hard Tubing especially i would leak test after
Installed each component
 
Leakshield can indeed test for leaks but using vacuum instead of pressure. Just been reading up on it as it's the 2nd one I've seen lately and wanted one for last build but it wasn't compatible with my loop as it then was.
 
Yeah it's a leaktester in reverse sort of idea
Instead of pumping air in
Then looking for a drop in air pressure
You create a vacuum and look for a rise in air pressure

Just not sure how viable it is to use it
After every stage of installation rather than once
Loop is completed
Could be wrong here but think there's calibration involved
Which might make it difficult to constantly test
After each and every piece of the loop is put in place

And yeah long time ago I looked at the stand alone
Version of leakshield
But there were specific things you had to do
When using it without the pump/res part
 
Oh the Leakshield - one tip: be careful not to get the membrane in the top part wet. Apparently it wrecks them and you have to replace the part.

Someone on here started an Aquacomputer Discord which is pretty quiet but has the odd visitor. Let me find a link...

discord.gg

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.
discord.gg discord.gg
 
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Thekwango said:
Bits of bog roll tied round each fitting - perfect leak tester, never let me down once :D
Click to expand...
Yeah must admit went 25 years without
A leak tester only got one fairly recently
It does make life easier though

Also find its useful for getting coolant out
Of the blocks by pumping it up
And rapidly unscrewing it causes coolant to be
Vacuumed out back into my distro
 
Would be interested to find out how well the soft tubing (if you're going to use it in the final build) copes with the partial vacuum. Whilst I was thinking I'm at the design stage and can lose the soft tube, I also just realised I plan to have the Mo-Ra externally on QDCs....and that means a soft tube link.
 
With soft tubing
Something like zmt 16/10mm (actually 9.5mm) will be fine
Recommended for soft tubing and leakshield
Is 1.5 x difference between inner and outer diameter
So 1.5 x 10 is 15
Though its actually 9.5
Zmt 11/16 i wouldn't do it
The 11/16mm is much flimsier even though only
A small size difference
 
Cool, cheers. I reckon some ZMT wouldn't look bad
externally - with a black case, black rad, black QDCs and a black carpet
....I've got a problem, haven't I. ;)
 
The soft tubing is just for the testing / draining - the final thing will just be hard tubing :)

I used some cheapo barbed fittings for the testing shown in the OP… yeah, those are deffo prone to leak schenanigans, be careful!

For drainage, I went with some bitspower T fittings and drain valves, that open up when you screw something onto them. I thought that was pretty neat.

And yup - I’m intending to use the leak shield to fill it up, have some bitspower stop taps that I will put adjacent to the T fittings / drain ports.

The method / madness will be revealed soon :p
 
Ah it was you then :cry:
I went to buy those touchaqua drain valves
A while ago
And next minute they were out of stock

Be interested to see what you
Think of those
Looked good value for a 2 pack
Compared to the ek torque fancy drain valve
 
Nitefly said:
I used some cheapo barbed fittings for the testing shown in the OP… yeah, those are deffo prone to leak schenanigans, be careful!
Click to expand...

Ah well those really have their origins before PC watercooling was its own thing. Half of it comes from pneumatics and half of it from cars. Hose barbs go with the aesthetically pleasing jubilee clips (or similar more modern alternatives like single ear clips - but I digress). If you have something like that compressing it past the barb, they do work fine - you can probably get away with cable ties too....but again, they don't look pretty. Pneumatics? Well, that's where you get a lot of the old-school compression fittings and the BSPP thread standards - almost everything is G1/4 which is an old UK pipe thread (that's British Standard Pipe Parallel) and uses both a 55° thread shape (vs the more 'normal' 60°) and also TPI (Threads Per Inch) rather than thread pitch in mm. Just to really compound the 'making sense', the 1/4 is 1/4" but it isn't the the OD of the pipe, oh no nothing that sensible, it's the ID of the pipe and you have to assume how thick the walls are (hence the OD) from standards at the time. So a G1/4 has an 11.8mm tap drill, not 6mm. Ahh, the joys of a semi-sensible (being generous) standard that's become weirder over time and then been co-opted to something completly unrelated and anachronistic. :rolleyes: The only plus is that it IS a standard....EVERYTHING in watercooling uses it.
</memory lane>
 
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