Build a custom water-cooled mini PC

A little water cooling here, a radiator or two there, and one hell of a lot of processing power. Zak Storey.

For the PC enthusiast in today’s climate, our work has never been as diverse, as interconnected. Just take a step back for a moment, and consider how much more you do on your system now than, say, 10 years ago. We game, we render, we design, we write, we create, we produce. There’s no such thing as the perfect PC, because that would be different for all of us, but what if you wanted to push the limits, to reach beyond the mundane, and to take aesthetic design style and blend it with the craziness of computational processing power?

Well, that’s what we’re aiming to do here. The idea is to build an insanely powerful ITX system, full of the best and the most brilliant hardware we could find to satisfy all of those different needs. So we can push four million AAA pixels in-game, render 4K videos, record audio, and do our work in complete silence, while retaining a beautiful system you’d be proud to showcase on your desk.

“There’s no such thing as the perfect PC, because that would be different for all of us, but what if you wanted to push the limits”

“To get the colour scheme we wanted, it was a simple case of taking the heatsinks off, masking off everything except the red accents, and then applying a couple of layers of Plasti Dip to hide those colour-clashing gaming stripes.”

HARDLINE LIQUID COOLING

Ultimately, this build was all about encapsulating the feel of our Dream Machines, while condensing it down into a smaller, more affordable form factor. Liquid cooling was our first port of call, and we chose the NZXT Manta to house all of our meaty hardware. The backbone of this rig, we decided, was going to be the ASUS Z170i Pro Gaming, thanks to its easily moddable heatsinks and hidden M.2 slot. On top of that we chose an Intel Core i7-6700K which we managed to overclock up to 4.8GHz.

For graphical processing, we went for an Radeon R9 Fury X. The Fury X’s High Bandwidth Memory will work a treat, and thanks to some amazing tomfoolery from EKWB’s design team, once the waterblock is attached, it’s actually a single-slot card.

Then we threw 32GB of HyperX Savage 2,666MT/s DDR4 into the mix — brilliant capacity and performance, though the kit we had on hand hasn’t landed down under yet, so you may need to opt for HyperX’s equivalent Fury kit instead. For storage, we opted for a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 SSD for the operating system, and a further 1TB of storage from the OCZ Trion 100 SSD we still had kicking around the office. More than enough super-fast storage to sink your teeth into.

1 CHOOSING THE PERFECT CASE

The rst thing you have to consider whenever you’re about to embark on a water-cooled adventure is what chassis you’re going to house your new machine in. The bigger rigs tend to be easier to work in, on the whole, because there’s more room inside for you to ddle around, but for us, ITX was the name of the game. NZXT’s Manta looks stunning, and can house a 36mm-deep 240mm rad in the roof, and a meatier 240mm in the front, as well. The only problem was deciding where to mount the res. In the end, we had to drill into the oor, just to the right of the GPU, to add a mounting point for a Phanteks Evolv pump/res mount for our EKWB DDC combi. It still looks classy, and gave us just enough room to manoeuvre in. Although we’re pretty thankful we didn’t opt for a longer graphics card here….

2 SPRAYING THE MOTHERBOARD

Getting the perfect motherboard for this build was particularly di cult. The trick was to nd a traditionally oriented Z170 ITX board, with power connectors in the correct place, an M.2 slot, and the whole thing styled in black. Unfortunately, being so choosy left us with very few options. In the end, we decided to compromise a little on the colour, and go with the Z170i Pro Gaming. To get the colour scheme we wanted, it was a simple case of taking the heatsinks o , masking o everything except the red accents, and then applying a couple of layers of Plasti Dip to hide those color-clashing gaming stripes. Because Plasti Dip is a natural insulator, spraying only over the red accents would ensure we wouldn’t be plagued by ridiculously high VRM temps, which we would have ended up with if we had sprayed the entirety of the heatsinks.

3 PLANNING TUBING RUNS

Tubing runs are always going to be tricky to plan in advance — the best advice we can give you is to invest in some angled rotary ttings, especially for hard tubing. They make life so much easier once everything is in your hands. When building any watercooled rig, you should go through two separate builds. The rst to ensure all of your hardware works prior to attaching waterblocks. Then the second pre t just to see where all of your hardware will lie, and what runs you may have to do. In our case, this was incredibly useful, because we learned pretty quickly that our initial idea to mount the combi resevoir to the radiator just wasn’t going to work in such a tight chassis.

5 SINGLE-SLOT GPUS

The dream, the ambition, the single-slot, water-cooled agship card. EKWB provides a stunning, clean single-slot adapter with its Fury X waterblock, enabling the Fury X to be a truly beautiful, compact powerhouse. Couple that with a full cover backplate, and oof! Well, we’ll let the photography do the talking. When installing GPU waterblocks, follow the instructions to the letter; there’s no messing around here. If you don’t make the right contacts here with the block, you can end up short-circuiting your card, or worse. That said, EKWB’s EK-FC Fury X block was quite straightforward — the hard part was removing that noisy stock cooler o the original Fury X.

4 SUPER-STEALTH STORAGE

You know what we like more than alliteration? Hidden storage. And that’s what we managed to achieve fairly seamlessly. The inclusion of an M.2 slot on the rear of the ASUS Z170i Pro Gaming is a godsend — although incredibly inaccessible once installed in a water-cooled loop, it’s a great way of keeping your M.2 drives cool and out of the way, avoiding any potential eyesores. For our 1TB drive, we simply hid that way down below the PSU cover. Annoyingly, NZXT’s SSD mounting points place most SSDs upside down, as far as the label goes, and that’s just not good enough for this aesthetic build. Still, it’s the performance and capacity we’re after — we’re already glamorous.

6 FILLING THE LOOP

Filling any loop requires forethought and planning; there are always two things you have to consider. Firstly, where your ll port is going to be, and secondly, to ensure that your pump is gravity-fed. Running your pump dry is one of the worst things you can do, as the coolant acts as a natural lubricant for the ball bearing situated in the turbine. To save on size and to ensure this didn’t happen, we opted for an EKWB DDC combi pump reservoir; its overall small form factor is a lifesaver for this build, and by mounting it on the bottom of the chassis, we have easy access to the top ll port for inserting our pearly white coolant. Perfect.