CHOOSING YOUR STYLE
WHAT’S THE FIRST THING you need to think about when planning your loop? Tubing. You need to decide which type is right for you. You have four options. There’s the classic soft tubing, which is easy to manipulate, cheap, and you can get away with just using a pair of snips or scissors and some standard compression fittings to do the job nicely. Then, of course, you have the hardline variants…
There’s acrylic: clear and crisp. The first hardline builds were created entirely using this type of tubing. Unfortunately, it’s very brittle and can snap easily. It’s also a little more sensitive to heat when you’re bending it, and has a nasty habit of bubbling up if it’s heated too much.
Then there’s PETG, acrylic’s successor. PETG contains a small amount of plastic in its chemical makeup, ensuring that it doesn’t shatter. Instead, it crushes, ideal for the safety and integrity of your system. It is a little pricier than standard acrylic, but it’s well worth it in our opinion.
You’ll need the same equipment to use these types of hard tubing: a heat gun for bending, a chamfer tool to sand down the edges, a silicon tube insert to stop the tubing from caving in on itself during your bends, and something to form your bends around if you’re not fond of doing it by eye. We’ll go into more detail on that later.
Finally, there’s copper or brass tubing. This is opaque, and although it sounds less workable than the other hard-pipe options, it’s the easiest of the three. All you need is a mini pipe bender, a chamfer tool, and job done—no need for heat guns.
Then you have to pick the diameter that’s right for you (ID/OD stands for inner diameter and outer diameter). For hard tubing, the common ODs are 12mm, 14mm, and 16mm. For soft tubing, you’re looking at 13mm, 16mm, and 19mm.
We settled on using PETG hard tubing, provided by EKWB. It’s by far the cleanest and safest material, and the clear style will help us show off our white coolant. To match our ITX chassis, we went with 12mm OD—its elegant size makes it easy and small enough to work with in such a cramped environment.