Liquid-Cooling Education
The woes and weaknesses of human error
YOU MAY RECALL a couple of issues back that we did an extensive Build-It and feature on hardline liquid cooling. It was my baby—14 pages of water-cooling goodness and a system build, crammed into 5,500 words.
Alas, the story never quite ends when it comes to liquid-cooling. In fact, that was only the beginning. But after three months, the conundrums that bugged me with the first “final” build have now been resolved. These conundrums mostly came about because of human error on my part. During my wanton abandon, I idiotically ignored the instructions on including the correct extender fitting on the inlets of my reservoir, so I suffered a tiny leak and the death of two pumps (yep!)—a harsh learning curve for myself. After some discussion with my water-cooling contacts and modders from across the tech journosphere, we came to the conclusion that I was either running too many components off a single Molex rail, that the pump, following a slow-rise fan curve on Asus’s Q-Fan software, was burning out because of it, or that it was the tiny leak that caused the problems.
So, I ordered in a custom reservoir top, reconfigured the tubing to run into the top of the res, got hold of an NZXT Grid+ V2 fan controller, swapped the pump over to a separate Molex rail, and even managed to reconfigure the back of the loop, so it didn’t have a slight slant. All in all, she’s running as slick as a whistle now. And with a quick re-orient of the fans, temperatures are six degrees lower, thanks to an increase in positive pressure internally. Which makes me one happy staff writer, that’s for sure.
There’s still a few things I’d like to change. Namely swapping the fans out for some of Corsair’s latest maglev LED SP variants. And I’m also toying with the idea of swapping out the white EK coolant for Mayhem’s black or clear instead.