Posted by Finally I have everything, I was unbelievably excited to get the loop set up.
The pump assembled with the D5 reservoir top:
Awesome little bit of kit. Filling was really simple.
Fittings:
I ended up being 1 Monsoon fitting short, so I ordered some XSPC ones instead. The Monsoon fittings have a much better grip on the tubing, however the XSPC ones still work well. The Monsoon fittings are also much easier to loosen and tighten.
The radiators:
I ended up getting an XSPC EX140 and EX280. I couldn't be bothered waiting any longer for the Alphacool ones to arrive
The 140 fitted beautifully in the back, however It blocks the top PCI-E slot, meaning I had to move my GPU.
I was happy with how the radiators fit in my case, my research paid off ><
Quick-Disconnect drain-line:
This thing proved invaluable when I was leak testing, it made it very easy to empty the reservoir and rearrange things!
Completed loop order mock-up:
After what seemed to be an hour of staring at my case and tracing imaginary tubing lengths between components with my fingers, I settled on what you see below for my loop order.
Leak testing:
Leak testing was incredibly tense for the most part, I felt very uncomfortable for the first half hour. I had one leak, and it was between the reservoir and the 90° fitting that connected to the QDC. It was a very small leak, only a dribble, but it proved pretty annoying to fix, and I had to fiddle with it a lot. I suspect it was because the piece of tubing coming from the radiator wasn't long enough, and it was pulling the 90° fitting on an angle, creating a gap in the seal.
The leak was here:
Finished:
Finally I'm finished. Setting up the loop was super fun, and the temperatures are good. The loop has more or less removed to temperature limit for overclocking, and I did a bit of benching this morning. The lame part is that I seemed to have lost the silicon lottery hands-down, and my chip won't do very good clocks at all. It's a huge shame because it means that there is very little tangible benefit to this watercooling loop, hopefully I'll have better luck with an Ivy-E hexacore! Or possibly a Haswell chip, depends how tempting it is I guess.
Overclocking aside, the loop looks great and I'm happy with the noise levels. I have a GTX680 on it's way from the US which I will add to the loop, and I also plan to buy an extra couple of Apaches for push-pull, not because I need push-pull but simply because it will fit.
I'm sorry that this hasn't really been much of a build-log, when I made the thread I had big plans but I just haven't been bothered to take regular photo's and post meaningful updates. Next time I'll just do what I've done in this summary. Thanks for looking
- mush13, TomSahz, mattjones and 12 others like this
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