FILLING HORIZONTAL RESERVOIRS

THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE for water cooling is that your pump is always gravity-fed by a reservoir. If you run a pump dry, it damages the bearing inside, because the coolant acts as a lubricant. The problem with having a horizontal reservoir, then, is that you need to fill it to a certain height with a closed loop to get the coolant flowing and the loop primed. To do this, we used one of EKWB’s T Splitters, to provide us with an additional fill port at the top of the system. This way, we could pump the reservoir full of coolant, and ensure the pump remained wet without worry. This didn’t entirely alleviate our problems, however—we had to orient the case on to its front, then twist that 45° fitting round, so we could fill it vertically, to ensure there wasn’t too much air trapped inside the CPU block and pump.