**A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Water Cooling Loop**

Building a water cooling loop can seem like a daunting task, but with the right tools and knowledge, it can be a fun and rewarding experience. In this article, we'll take you through the process of building a water cooling loop from start to finish.

**The Importance of Leak Testing**

Before we dive into the build process, it's essential to understand the importance of leak testing. Leak testing is a critical step in ensuring that your water cooling system is safe and functional. It involves filling the system with coolant and then letting it sit for an extended period to allow any air bubbles to rise to the surface. "I'm going to start by doing a leak test, so I'm just going to fill this reservoir up with coolant, get all of the air out of there" The author explains.

**Using Clear Tubes for Better Visibility**

Clear tubes are a must-have when it comes to water cooling loops. They provide excellent visibility into the system, making it easier to spot any air bubbles or leaks. "The clear tubes allow me to see what's going on inside the loop so I can easily identify where the leak is" The author notes. Additionally, clear tubes make it much easier to diagnose issues with your system.

**Using a Leaking Tool**

To help locate the source of the leak, the author uses a leaking tool or a hose clip that allows them to detect even the smallest amount of air leakage. "I'm going to use my leaking tool here to check for any leaks" The author explains. This tool is essential in identifying the exact location of the leak and making necessary adjustments.

**Tapping the Tubes**

To further aid in diagnosing the issue, the author uses a gentle tapping motion to release any air bubbles that may be trapped within the tubes. "I'm just going to gently tap on this tubing, that'll help me loosen up the surface tension" The author explains. This technique helps break up any large clusters of bubbles and allows them to rise more easily.

**Aeration and Air Bubbles**

As the coolant circulates through the system, it becomes aerated, creating small air bubbles. These air bubbles can be problematic if not removed quickly enough. "The air bubbles are starting to form here and I'm just letting them go" The author notes. By allowing these bubbles to rise to the surface, they become less of an issue.

**Using a Reservoir Cap**

To prevent any coolant from leaking out of the reservoir, the author uses a cap or plug on top of the container. "If I don't have this cap on it, all that coolant will just spill out everywhere" The author explains. This simple step helps keep the system safe and functional.

**Hooking Up the Rest of the System**

Once the leak test is complete, the author begins to hook up the rest of the system. This includes installing GPU cables, connecting fans to the motherboard, and securing everything in place. "Now that we have our leak test out of the way, it's time to start building the rest of the system" The author notes.

**Final Touches**

After completing the build process, the author takes a step back to admire their handiwork. They also note the importance of taking breaks and not rushing through the process. "It's really important to just set aside some free time so that you're not rushing yourself to try and get it done" The author explains.

**RGB Lighting**

In addition to providing excellent visibility, clear tubes also offer a unique opportunity for RGB lighting. The author has installed an IQ lighting system with Corsair's QL fans, which creates a subtle yet mesmerizing effect. "These surface tension bubbles will go away over time, but you can see I've also gotten all of the rgb set up here with our ql fans from corsair so we have iq installed and it's now giving me it's really slow and subtle but it is sort of color shifting between a very icy blue to a a slightly hued uh blue added to white" The author notes.

**Tools Used**

Throughout the build process, the author has used several specialized tools. One of these tools is a bending kit provided by Corsair, which allows for precise 90-degree bends in the tubing. "The corsair um bending kit with their cord and the saw the little um i guess it's technically a jig or more of a vise their pmma tubing the deeper tool and then the little 90 degree bending kit really came in handy" The author explains.

**Tips and Tricks**

For those looking to build their own water cooling system, here are some final tips and tricks: Always take your time when building your system. Don't rush through the process, as this can lead to mistakes and frustration. Use a leaking tool or hose clip to detect air leaks in your system. Consider using clear tubes for better visibility into your loop.

**Conclusion**

Building a water cooling loop may seem daunting at first, but with patience and practice, it's possible to create an efficient and effective system. By following the steps outlined in this article, you'll be well on your way to creating your own stunning water cooling system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys js2 cents here and it's been a hot minute since i've done my uh how to water cool a computer video i mean i think like 2013 was the last time i did it although the concepts stay the same the parts have changed over the years and things have gotten better so that's why i teamed up with our friends over at corsair to bring you an updated guide on how to water cool your computer for the beginner today's video is sponsored by ebga and the ebga elite member program save money through exclusive elite member-only discounts on select hardware and make money with the evga associate program by earning commissions on sales by sharing your code with others elite members also enjoy 24-hour early access to new evga products to either purchase or enter the queue for purchase and yes that includes graphics cards to see all ways to enter this free edg elite member program and it's constantly expanding benefits follow the sponsored link in the description below so i think there's this preconceived notion that water cooling is hard it's really not that difficult and one of the things that we're going to show you here is the parts that you absolutely need for the bare minimum of a water loop uh we'll talk quickly about how it works so that you understand the concept if you understand the concept and the rest might sort of click we'll talk about a few different variations on tubing type uh pump type con you know combos and whatnot but then we'll show you guys just really the fundamentals of getting your computer water cooled so usually at the very bare minimum people choose to put their cpu on water and then they'll just throw their gpu in there and keep it air cooled but at the very least you need a block whether it be for your gpu or your cpu so fortunately from corsair we've got our xc7 rgb water block that works both intel and amd rigs non-tr4 but am4 and your standard intel stuff but if you want to add your graphics card to the loop like we're going to be adding to our asus strix 3090 they do have the xg7 rgb water block uh specifically for that card so you can go to their website check out corsair's website to see all the different blocks and custom cards configurations that they have water blocks for so now that you're able to pick up the heat which is what the water block is doing it's touching the component you want to cool and it's going to absorb heat now you get need to get that heat moving through the system and the way you do that is with a pump now we're going to be using the xd5 rgb pump in this case because it is a combo unit so we have our reservoir on top which is going to be directly feeding our water pump which means you don't have to worry about that hole like how high is the block versus the radiator like you deal with with aios this is going to handle getting all of the air bled getting the air trapped in the reservoir and you can keep topping it off until all the air is out of your system but the water pump is also included in this which means you don't have to worry about conjoining them either with tubing or fittings it keeps things tidy it comes with some mounting mechanism that mounts onto radiators and fan slots keeping it all nice and simple now what do you do with all that heat once you've grabbed it well you need to exchange it you exchange it with the air so what you're going to do is you're going to install a radiator now what size radiator you need depends on many factors how many components are you cooling are you cooling one graphics card two a cpu with two graphics cards just a cpu or a gpu and a good rule of thumb is i like to have at least 120 millimeters worth of radiator for every part we're cooling if you're keeping it stuck if you're going to be doing any sort of overclocking i recommend at least 240 millimeters worth of radiator for every part so we're going to be running our xr5 360 millimeter radiator times two in this system so we've got two of them because our particular 5000d airflow case will allow us to mount more than one now i'm going to be going with extra radiator space for multiple reasons one i like to keep the components as cool as possible two i like to fill out the case it's kind of like if you're going to do a custom loop you you sort of want to go all out and have it be a showpiece at the same time but you don't have to you could go with a single rad two rads three rads you can go with a 120 on the back you can really scale it to the size that you want there's really no such thing as too big there is a such thing as being too small when it comes to radiator size so that's why i like to stick to at least that 120 per component or 240 per component if you're going to be doing overclocking now obviously we're going to be running corsair fans with these radiators we're going to be running the ql 120 rgb fans this has led rings on both sides of the fence so no more you have to deal with having the ring on one side and then if you're pulling air through the front you can't really see the rgb on the back this has rgb rings on both sides of the fans which is going to give us a lot of illumination so that we can have our system all be lit up without having to run any sort of led strips now the last thing is we are going to be using the xt hardline from corsair this is actually a frosted tube this is something new for me i've not actually used this tubing and i think it looks great because it gives this appearance of being cold got this real nice frosted effect which i think is going to make the system look like it's nice and cold so obviously you need some sort of coolant so we got our xl5 clear from corsair now this we can actually dye to be any color that we want so i'll be using approved water cooling dies which are designed for pcs you don't want to use food coloring or anything like that nothing food based and we can custom mix it to make it the shade of blue that we want just a slight just a slight touch of blue which will look really nice in this frosted tube because it will really pick up the color and make it nice and translucent and we'll and we'll really show it um so we've got a one liter bottle of that we've actually got two liters of this to make sure we have plenty and then last but not least we need our fittings we need stuff to actually attach all of these tubes together so there's two types of fittings from corsair we've got the xf compression fitting this is designed for soft tubing so this has a barb that you put the tubing on then you slide the collar down and lock it down and that does two things one the barb is responsible for making the seal with the inside of the tube the compression clamp is is its only job is to make sure that the tubing doesn't come off so the collar is not responsible for sealing the tube if you make sure that the sizes match if you have say a 14 or a 10 by 13 compression and that same size tubing is listed then you know they're going to be compatible and the collar will fit but we're going to be using compressions uh hardline compressions on this particular setup because we are going with the hard line tubing so soft tubing barbs hard tubing with compressions so as long as you make sure the types match and the sizes match they're always going to be compatible with the tubing and then because we're using hard line and this will work also with soft tubing we do have some 90 degree fittings and some 45 degree fittings this just allows us to not have to rely completely on bending the tubes to get things nice and orderly we can use 90s and 45s where they make sense so that we don't have to to bend everything all the time bending looks cleaner but it's also a little bit harder so we've got a wide range of fittings from corsair that will allow us to be able to make things nice and tidy without having to worry about wasting tubing when it comes to bending it now speaking of bending it we're going to be using the xt hardline bending kit from corsair which comes with the saw it comes with the clamp the deburr tool and then it also has a little jig on there so that you can get perfect 90s so that as you're bending it you don't have to sit there and do the method like i used to do using the edge of the table and going okay if they're parallel in both corners then we know it's 90. it's actually got a radius bend tool in there so that you can get perfect 90s every time so i like to start with water cooling the graphics card first because we can do it outside of the case it's a lot easier to work on the xg7 rgb water block is going to include a back plate for it as well as all the instructions that we need to be able to get it nice and nice and installed i mean yeah we want it installed nicely this way we do things around here i'm also going to be using my ifixit tool kit for this the reason why i like the ifixit toolkits is because of the fact that they've got all the different size bits we could possibly need you deal with some pretty small screws when it comes to working with these graphics cards sometimes they're little torx heads sometimes they're flat heads but the nice thing about these tool kits is the fact that they've got all the different sizes that you'd possibly need so i'll put a link in the description below to the exact tools that we use around here i've got like six of this exact tool kit because i've got one pretty much everywhere we would ever work on a computer they just make things nice and easy so here's our water block right here from corsair this water block like i said is designed to work specifically with the asus strix rtx 3090 so you're going to want to check the website to make sure they have a water block that's for your specific graphics card it will have a fitment guide in there that will tell you everything you need to know about which cards they will fit you can also search for your particular model to see if they make one but the nice thing is they've got all the thermal pads pre-installed on the back same thing with thermal paste with this little plastic cover right here to make sure that you don't mess it up we got our rgb cables right here on the back which are also pass-through so we can connect multiple corsair rgb devices without having to use a bunch of headers and then we also have an extension cable right here that allows us to connect it to our standard motherboard so if you're not using a corsair product for controlling your lighting you can connect it to your motherboard's argb header or an argb splitter so that you have control over all of your devices and then if we look at the back right here we've got our manual we've got our keys and our plugs to be able to remove our fittings and then we've got our corsair backplate so follow the instructions that are in your particular manual for your graphics card which will have complete teardown instructions and installation instructions so that your graphics card is installed properly because if you don't make a good connection between the die and that cool plate or cold plate right there you're not going to get the cooling that you want in fact you may even slow things down by creating thermal throttling all right so now that the x uh g7 3090 block is installed we are going to just kind of snug down our screws in sort of a star pattern starting from the screws right around the gpu core which are these four and work our way outward so when you're installing it just get everything kind of snug make sure everything lines up before you start tightening anything down and then work your way to the outsides of the block tightening the screws but not going too tight you don't want to strip them they're it's kind of easy to strip screws if you're not careful these are very fine threads and such but as you can see it's a perfect fit one of the easiest blocks to install because of the pre-applied thermal pads pre-applied thermal paste and it looks good too so now we're going to put this inside of our system and the next thing we're going to do is screw it down because we obviously don't want to fall out but we're going to go ahead and move on to our cpu block because it's quite a bit easier than the gpu but obviously the gpu is just an optional step if you're going that route but i prefer to do it first that way i know it's all ready to go so that we don't do the tedious stuff at the end we save that the easy stuff for the end so we end on a high note before we install the cpu block i like to take out all of the ram that way it's not in our way but the xc7 is actually really easy to install it comes pre-installed with the intel bracket already on there but since we're using amd we're going to be switching over to this amd retention bracket you can see all the screws are already retained on there and they're self-retaining so you don't have to install anything there and this is going to use the same factory back plate that's found behind the socket and all amd motherboards and this will thread right into that but we've got to change over our block right here be careful on the back we've got pre-installed thermal paste that we don't want to mess up so be careful with that you do have a little cover here that you could leave on there so that you don't accidentally mess it up but since we're taking off this bracket we want to be super gentle so we're going to turn this clockwise until it comes loose pull out the block move the bracket aside we'll take the amd bracket take the block at the same 45 degree angle and then turn it counterclockwise into place this is actually very very simple you're going to line it up and screw it down so you're going to want to turn the thumb screws a little at a time clockwise going in a star pattern until the threads completely bottom out now the threads on here are cut to a certain length but you want to go until they stop and that will give you even tension across the ihs on the cpu to give you maximum cooling so once you're done with that you'll take your rgb cable sort of run it to the side so we can do our cable management portion at the end because we all know we want that rgb goodness all right so we're getting ready to set up the radiators now which means we have to figure out the direction of airflow where the fitting is going to go and which screws to use so i've already taken all my fans out and one thing to keep in mind with airflow for fans is it always goes from the non-caged side to the cage side so that's the direction of the airflow since we're going to be running one fan on each side of these radiators we also need to determine what's going to be push and pull whether we're not going push push or pull pull on on the rads but i want to talk about the screws here real quick this is where a lot of people can cause damage if they're not careful so you got three different size screws that come with the corsair radiators you're going to have a really long screw you have a slightly shorter screw which stand up okay you got a slightly shorter screw then you got a short short screw so these are designed with very specific use cases in mind so this is the front panel mount for the 5000 d airflow that we have and we're going to be mounting our radiator to this now we're going to put the radiator on the back side of the fans with the fans in between the shroud and the rad the reason for that is we want to be able to see the fans on the front side of the case in terms of the way that the airflow works with pull or push it's really not going to make much of a difference on which side you put the radiator on so don't get caught up on oh it should be pull or it should be push it really doesn't have any sort of a major difference that's even truly measurable on which side they go on but the long screw is going to be for when you're mounting through a case through the fans into the radiator so for example if you're going to be taking this radiator and mounting a fan on this side of it and then having it go through a case like a little case strap like this you've got to have a longer screw to account for the thickness of this metal otherwise the short screw won't make it all the way to the piece so if you push it through like this you can see on our fan right there we've got that extra distance sticking up and then that's plenty of length to be able to mount it to our radiator so in the front of this setup i'm going to be doing sort of a sandwich where we're going to be going screw through the metal bracket through the fan into the red now obviously i have the fittings facing the wrong way they're facing this bracket which would not do us any good if we were trying to actually have a functional setup here so what i'm going to do is flip this around and i personally like to have fittings on the top because fittings on the top will make it easier for air to move through the loop so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go ahead and get these front fans and rad set up so you can see what it looks like inside the case all right so we have three different setups here for different rads and front fans based on where they're going in the case so you can see this radiator we have all three fans set up as pull it's gonna be pulling air through the radiator and this guy is gonna actually be going on this back wall right back here now something else that we have to consider too moving forward in the next scene is i have to attach the pump res combo to one of these in some way it's more than likely going to be on this one but this is the top radiator now because this is pulling air into the chassis we need to exhaust that air so you can see once you put this you know at the top of the case we got our fittings facing down so we can access them and the fans are pushing air through so this is going to be going up in the top of our case just like this so you'll want to push all your wires through your wire cable manager or your cable management holes same thing for the front fans here now the fans on the front are also going to be pulling air in so you can see we've got the cage side facing us now this is one of the reasons why i'm a huge fan of these particular fans because we've got the rings on both sides of the fans so the front of the case is going to be lit by the hub ring which lights up the fan blades and then the ring around the actual cage and on the back side we're still going to see the lit up ring on the back side of the hub as well as this ring on the cage so you got lighting on both sides of the fan giving you the most light without having to run any sort of rgb strip so let me go ahead and get these installed and we're going to do that using these short screws which i showed you earlier because the short screw is designed to mount the radiator directly to a piece of sheet metal whether it be the back side of the case or the top of the case or bracket like this all right so we've got our radiators mocked up and we got our front fans in now you'll probably take these in and out a couple of times as you're trying to get everything sort of lined up to figure out where the fittings are going to go where you want everything kind of routed but as you can see we've got these six fans working as an intake so this is kind of a a channel of air coming from the corner here but that's gonna be a lot of intake we put our fittings at the bottom on this back grad because it gives us more clearance to be able to access it and then we move the fittings which i would typically put in the rear to the front because again this is a much open area easier to get to our fittings or our barbs right here and our ports to be able to put our fittings on there so it's time to get the pump in there now that we have the radiators and the fans and everything where they're gonna go the nice thing about the xd5 is the fact that it comes with the mounting brackets to be able to mount it to any fan and or radiator so here's our pump here's the bracketry with the hardware we've got our manual so this will show you which fittings and which ports do what because you want to get your inlet and your outlet set properly and then here are the different brackets that we have available to us for 120 millimeter fans and 140 millimeter fans so one of the things that comes with the pump is actually this coolant temperature sensor which is really nice because if you're gonna hook this up to your motherboard which a lot of motherboards specifically this asus board that we have as well has temperature sensing uh probes on there or headers that you can attach a probe like this to you can control your pump through the actual coolant temperature so you can put this on the back side right here where it's not visible plug it in right here and then what we'll do is it'll give you a temperature readout to be able to start to ramp up or slow down the pump based on temps it's got plenty of wire links to it so you can set it anywhere inside the system or you can connect it to the commander pro because the commander pro also has a temperature sensor on there and this is really nice to see not a lot of in fact i don't know of any other reservoirs that actually come with a temperature sensor on there so that's kind of nice you've got plenty of fittings on here for in out and then you can have a drain plug or a valve which will be attaching in this particular loop set up to the system so that you can get the coolant out of there nice and easily if you want to on the return line for the top of the reservoir you can see we have this push down tube and what this does is this means you can have coolant enter the top of the reservoir but then it will enter the fluid down here at the bottom rather than having a waterfall effect which can make a kind of an ugly sound well unless you want to sound like a fountain but worse than that is it will cause aeration of the bubbles and the percolation in there so by having it push down into the fluid level means that you can still have some air available at the top of the reservoir where all the bubbles can escape to so the pump has got a lot of features built into it uh that are really nice that make things just easier and more user-friendly when it comes to getting air out and having it all set up so just to recap we've got the radiators in i've got the ports on the side i want them to be on so we got the ports on this side of the rad because there's more room here where he showed you how we had to kind of rethink the way we were going to do that loop i've got the fittings on the bottom on this back rad simply because once the top one's in there you don't have enough room to be able to have fittings there so but fortunately because we have this radiator horizontal and we have extra air that's going to be in the reservoir allowing air to escape eventually any air that's caught in the top of this radiator will make its way to the reservoir you can see i started adding some fittings onto here and the fortunate thing about corsair having so many different types of fittings is the fact that we can have our drain plug on here so we're just using this 90 degree fitting right here which is also a y-splitter so that we can have the plug come straight out for the drain and then we have it coming off here at a 90 because i'm trying to get this is the outlet of the pump so now we have to start thinking about our loop we have to think about the order which things are going to flow and these are some of the things that you want to think about as you're putting in the parts but we have to determine our flow order now because we had to put things in in a certain way to fit in the case neatly and still have access to our fittings so this is the outlet from the pump and we're going to be going into this radiator first now i decided because the bottom red has to have an outlet that's going to go over to our gpu i want to inlet from the pump to this radiator on the front side that way we can keep the tubes on the same side they're coming in and out of so i used this y adapter plus an extension plus a swivel 90 that way i could move it over to that side of the pump without having to do it through bends now you can do it through bending tubing and unless you have a lot of experience bending tubes which you probably don't because this video is designed towards the beginner you would just want to get a lot of extra tubing to make sure that you can get the bends nice and tight i prefer to use fittings for one i like the industrial look it kind of gives it gives more of a plumbing slash industrial look and two the bends are perfect because they're 90s so our flow order at this point is going to go from the pump over here through these fittings into this right side fitting on the radiator it's going to come out of that radiator up or cross up and over into the gpu now normally you would go now also too real quick to recap flow order in terms of which component gets cooled first does not matter that needs to be bold and underlined there's this misconception out there that if you cool a gpu first you're just going to be warming up your cpu that's not the way it works not enough coolant temperature change happens once it goes over the cold plate in the gpu to cause any significant raise in temperature in the cpu you might see 2 maybe 3c difference at the most remember this is not a car you are not dealing with massive temperature differences between the coolant temp and the thing you're cooling you are not dealing with 200 degree coolant or 200 fahrenheit coolant to try and keep it cool with something that's way colder like the coolant is running you know much much colder than that so you don't have these great deltas and temperatures so to keep things nice and neat instead of trying to go from the pump and that rad to the cpu back to the gpu back to up here and having crisscross tubes everywhere we can go in the flow order that makes sense in terms of the tubing so we will be going from pump to radiator from radiator to gpu gpu to cpu cpu to radiator over here and out of radiator into the top of the pump now is when we get to start having a lot of fun this is where we get to start bending our tubes and planning our order and what i like to do once you have the loop order figured out is to do the easy bends first the easiest one here so far is going to be from this bottom radiator to the pump this outlet from the pump to the inlet of the rat all right so let's talk about bending rigid tube uh you're gonna need a heat gun for this there's no way around that the only way you can bend it is by using a heat on there now the only other way you could use rigid tubing without having to you know deal with bending it is if you use 90s everywhere and offsets and stuff which can get very expensive very quickly by adding all of those additional fittings so the nice smooth 90s that i can do with the tubing i'll do and then i'll do fittings like you saw over here with the pump but we're going to use the xt hardline bending tool kit which accommodates both 12 millimeter and 14 millimeter tubing this is a 14 millimeter tube here and you can see everything that comes with it here's our bending core right here so this is designed to go inside the tubing which gives us a nice mandrel bend because when you heat it up uh if you don't have something inside to make it retain its shape it's going to crush now this was able to go in here dry but usually you want to have it be slick in some way you can use a little bit of olive oil make sure you clean it all off before obviously you put it in your system so you'd want to rinse the tubes out thoroughly or just a little bit of dish soap which i think is a little bit better just a tiny bit on there will make it slide but you also want to make sure you don't push the core in too far so we also have this tool bender right here which will allow us to be able to bend perfect 90s for either our 12 millimeter or the 14 millimeter you have these stops which will allow you to measure the depth so if you take this little stopper out and change the location of it that will allow us to determine how far down the tubing goes before it stops so then we could heat the tubing up get it nice and soft to where it's pliable then this will allow us to bend our radius we can go to complete 180 if you wanted to do some crazy bends that way or you can see right here we've got these lines that are marked for 45 90 and then what 190 plus 45 yeah 130 math that's good we got that other thing we have in here is very important the saw so that we can actually cut the tubing this material is pmma if you were curious but to be able to have that saw allow us to cut things nicely we have this little clamp right here that will allow us to clamp our tubing down and then we'll be able to saw through the ends right there and it's got this little lip so that you can actually hang it over the edge of the table that we have a nice you know solid surface to be able to mount it to you want to make sure that you give yourself plenty of length so that you have excess you want to have your tubes be a little bit longer that way you can trim off the excess you can't make it longer but you can make it shorter now after you cut the edge you're going to see it's kind of rough and you wouldn't want to put that inside of your system because that would probably cut your o-rings so we have this d-bird tool which will give us both an internal and an external deeper ability so you take the pointy end put that in the inside just give it a few turns the sound is normal that will give us a nice smooth inside so we're not gonna you know have no burr showing there then you switch to the external portion of the tool and again don't put a lot of force on it just push gently against it as you turn and that gets rid of all the sharp edges so now we would be able to put this inside of our system and not cut any of our o-rings which could lead to a leak so now it's time to go ahead and bend our first tube so we know that this is just going to be a plane 90 and it's going to be going from this port on the radiator to this port on the pump now the 90 doesn't need to be right in the middle of this tube we know it's a little bit closer to the side panel a little pro tip don't put sharpie or dry erase markers or anything on here even if it's dry erase and it wipes off with your finger as soon as you heat it it will absorb into the plastic which means it won't come off after you're done so what you want to do is kind of get the best eyeball of where you think your 90s should be placed by just kind of holding your tubing up and going okay it needs to bend roughly right around there so we're going to put this core in on the other side and then we're going to start heating the tube once the tube starts getting soft and kind of wanting to bend that's where we will go ahead and put it into our vise right here or our little bending clamp so that we can get our nice curved radius you'll notice the clamp is also curved on the inside that will also allow it to keep its round shape rather than getting that kind of even with a mandrel sometimes you can get it sort of crushed slightly you get what looks like kind of a flat spot if you were to do it on the table this nice curvature in there will make sure that it maintains its shape so here's our very first bend it's our 90 degree tube we can pull the mandrel out once we get it out of there so you can see nice perfect 90. it maintains its shape it doesn't squish or flatten out a little pro tip of taking the tubing or the core out if it kind of gets stuck just sort of twist it as you pull and then it will work its way out like that it kind of releases some of that surface tension so there's our very first 90. now you can see it's obviously way bigger than what we need in terms of length right so this is where now you'll kind of get everything sort of lined up measured out and then make sure you cut a little bit longer than what you need you can always shorten the tube you cannot make it longer so this is about the time you start getting really excited because you can start to see it sort of take shape so i just made that 90 and then i just trimmed down the links until they were perfect now some of the things that i look for here is you want to make sure especially going for like a 90 degree like everything's got nice 90s and squared off the things i'm looking for here are the things horizontal that should be is this fitting horizontal or is it being you know pushed up weird or is it pulling down to meet the the tubing if it has to go down to meet the tubing you made it too short so i just make sure that i trim small amounts at a time until everything is perfect that's why i don't have the collars on here you see that we have the collars and the o-rings i leave these off until everything in the build is done and ready to be locked down because i don't know if i'm gonna have to make some sort of an adjustment somewhere that might make some of these tubings be off instead of you know then i have to take all the collars off and whatever so i keep them aside in a safe place that way once we're ready to start filling this and getting some liquid in here then i put all the collars back on don't forget that part i've seen people do that before they forget to put the collars back on and then it's full of liquid and they're like oh man all right so all the tubing bends are in you can see i've got all the caps on i didn't put the caps on until everything was lined up how i wanted it all the tubes were done that one you're not sitting there fighting with the collars to try and get them on and off so you also might notice some time is elapsed here um i've got a haircut and change of clothes because one of the things that i think is most important is you set aside plenty of time to do this right take your time be patient if this is your only rig and you're down make sure you schedule that during a time which you don't have to have like a paper due for school or work done at work where you can take your time on this and not rush another really important tip too is before you start bending your tubes do a test piece take a small test piece bend it see how long it takes before it blisters see how long it takes before it's malleable enough to where you can get a nice even radius bend without crushing the inside diameter or stretching the outside diameter trust me you can save yourself a lot of headache if you get an idea of how much time and heat is needed for each type of material the pmma bends completely different than acrylic which also bends completely different at different temperatures than petg so this is the first time i've used used the pmma and it's really hard it's a very hard tube where like acrylic would have probably already broken or shattered when i do that because the acrylic has more of a glass property where the pmma has a much harder property and i'm sure that however that chemical makeup is is how we're getting this nice kind of a frosted translucent look to it so that's my first time bending it it takes a lot of heat and a lot of time and a lot of neighboring heat on the entire area you want to bend to get it nice and smooth once you figure it out you can do it everything you see here i did with one and a half sticks of tubing i only had one bend that actually ended up needing to be done twice and that was this one right here everything else was a one shot fortunate i didn't have to sit there and bend it a million times so the next thing to do now is we need to prepare to fill our loop so i am going to be using the uh xl5 like i said it's a clear coolant um one liter 1000 milliliters should be enough for this size loop we don't have a giant reservoir also i'm going to be using a die uh use a die from a reputable brand designed for water cooling do not use food coloring food coloring is not appropriate for a loop you do not want food grade product it will grow bacteria and growth you don't want that in your loop but what we've got to do here is get our loop also prepared to be able to fill so if you've got a drain plug and you don't have a plug on the end of it like this make sure you plug it even though there is a ball valve in there the last thing you want to do is to find out that there's just a little bit of seepage past that ball check valve so use one of the plugs that are applied or supplied or get some favorite decorative plugs that you want to cap that off also make sure that the valve is perpendicular to the flow that's how you know that it's closed off we are also going to disconnect our 24 pin power supply cable from our system now depending on whether or not your system's already complete or you're building it for the first time uh we'll determine whether or not you're gonna do this out of the case or unplug it or whatever but the reservoir also comes with this uh jumper and what this jumper will do is it will jumper together the 12 volt inside of the harness which is going to trigger the power supply to turn on when you turn on the plug on the back of the power supply which will allow you to be able to run your pump without turning on the system you don't want to turn on the pump and fill the system with the system on for a couple of reasons one there's gonna be a ton of air you'll be turning it on and off you gotta get all the air bled out two that's also part of our leak test time that's probably where a lot of people fail is they think like okay we're ready to go and then off they go and they burn up something because they've got a drip that they didn't see coming but as long as the motherboard and the cpu and the gpu aren't powered on anything that drips on there won't be a problem as long as you let it dry completely prior to powering it up so because i mentioned on this one we want to go with a little bit of a kind of a frosted remember ice has a slight blue tinge to it and that's just because of the way that the water um refracts light as it goes through it actually pulls out the blue spectrum and i kind of want that here because i want it to look like it's frozen because of these translucent tubes so i've just got this little tote right here we're good i think anyway i'm wiping this out you can do this in a clear bottle we don't have any clear bottles hanging out here so we're just using this bottom half of a coolant jug where i'm going to pour the coolant in here and then i'm going to mix up the dye and then i'll use a funnel to pour it back into the bottle and i'll show you how we'll get it inside the system now that we have our coolant mixed up let's talk about an easier way to fill it so because the reservoir here gives us multiple ports on top we have one not being used because obviously the return on top we're on the right side here with the push down tube i've also left the plastic on here i don't take the plastic off the reservoir until everything is done but we're going to be filling it from the top right here now one thing you need to understand is that because we're not going to have another port open to allow air out air is going to have to escape through the same tube that you're filling with so don't over pour don't pour too fast the air will cause bubbles to percolate out and it will get kind of messy but i like to take just a piece of vital tubing get this from any hardware store and then just a cheap barb fitting or something from some buy one extra barb fitting and then you'll be able to fill it this way and i got this tiny little long snout funnel that will push down inside the tube this allows me to thread this into the top have this hanging out and this is where i fill it but before we do that we need to get ready to do our leak test we're just going to take white paper towels and i recommend white not blue shop towels especially right now since i've got blue coolant you want to use white because if you're using a colored dye it will be really obvious if it starts dripping anywhere so you want to put this underneath all of the connections so we've got this bottom one right here it'll do two things one it'll catch any drips two it will allow us to identify any drips because it's white and it will it will be really obvious and show up so think of this less as less about catching things to protect more so just to be able to make it super obvious and be able to see that it's dripping now if you don't have a funnel and some spare vinyl tubing and a fitting you can't order uh from anywhere online pretty much just a squeezy fill bottle this makes it a little bit easier to control you get down inside the reservoir and you just squeeze to fill it until the reservoir is full and then you turn on the power supply to get the pump going make sure it's plugged in obviously to power and then as soon as the reservoir runs empty turn it off refill the reservoir and keep that going until you have coolant coming out of that tube once you do fill it up all the way and then let it run for at least a half an hour to allow the air to start to circulate and make its way to the reservoir the level will continue to drop as long as air is making its way there continue to fill it up but leave a little space for air to actually be able to accumulate at the top you don't want to fill it all the way to the neck and just keep that going until you have well what seems to be all the major air bubbles moved and then we'll talk about how to get rid of the micro bubbles okay so now that our loop is full uh there's gonna be a lot of air in this system so we're gonna do next we're gonna let it run obviously for our leak test we wanna promote the movement of air so you're just going to sort of lean the system and see as i do that we start to see bubbles move you can hear them moving you can see them making their way back to the reservoir in it that way lean it the other way see all the air moving through the tubes the nice thing about clear tubes is that you can actually see it move tip it backwards also make sure the cap is on the radio or the reservoir while you're doing this because you don't want to leak it all out everywhere and then if you give it just a little tap when you when you go down with it don't smash it on the ground but if you just tap it down you'll loosen some bubbles up too you'll break that surface tension i would recommend doing a leak test at least for two or three hours some people will say 24 hours i find that if it doesn't leak in the first few hours it's not going to leak at all so we're going to let that go you'll notice the coolant will start to clear up in the reservoir right now we still have the plastic on it remember that so that's one of the reasons why it doesn't look super clear and shiny but you're going to let this go for a while eventually all the small micro bubbles which are aerating the fluid right now which are making it look cloudy will clear up that'll just take some time and you don't want to fire as tempted as you are right now to fire up your system i mean we don't have gpu cables installed yet so it's not going to fire up let the leak test do its thing don't get impatient give it time make sure everything's dry go get something to eat come back look the paper towels are still dry give it an hour or two if they're still dry after that now we can talk about hooking up the rest of our systems all right so here's the finished product after a couple of afternoons worth of work like i said it's really important to just set aside some free time so that you're not rushing yourself to try and get it done take your time you start feeling frustrated walk away from it for a little bit come back to it later when you start to feel a little bit rejuvenated but you can see the final product really came together a lot of the micro bubbles are gone the cloudiness is kind of going away it's not as aerated it's nice and clear looking now these surface tension bubbles here will go away over time but you can see i also went ahead and got all of the rgb set up here with our ql fans from corsair so we have iq installed and it's now giving me it's really slow and subtle but it is sort of color shifting between a very icy blue to a a slightly hued uh blue added to white it's very subtle but it is shifting back and forth to kind of give you a little bit of this glacier effect i want this to look like the inside of a glacier that's the cool thing about iq is you can go in here and start customize stuff to pull some lighting theme together to go with your themed build but anyway guys you can see it's really not that hard we didn't use a lot of specialty tools to get this done we just used the corsair uh bending kit with their cord and the saw the little um i guess it's technically a jig or more of a vise their pmma tubing the deeper tool and then the little 90 degree bending kit really came in handy i don't usually use these types of tools but the 90s were absolutely perfect as you can see it allowed me to get real sharp bends and keep the radius the same between all of them so they don't look any different the only tool you might actually have to go out and buy would be a heat gun if you're going to do rigid tubing like this so that you can heat up the tubing and bend it if you're going to use soft tubing it's even simpler you just need really sharp scissors or some sort of a tubing cutter that will cut right through the soft tubing without any problem so set aside a couple afternoons and just be patient you can end up with an amazing build like this without too much headache if you guys want to learn more about the hydrex line of water cooling products from corsair i have a link down the description below once again a huge thank you to corsair for sponsoring today's video if you guys have any best tips and tricks when it comes to doing your water cool loops put them down in the comments below there's a lot of people that will be watching this trying to do this for the very first time and if you think i missed anything here that might be beneficial in terms of best practices or tips and tricks comment down below thanks for watching guys and as always we'll see you in the next onewhat's up guys js2 cents here and it's been a hot minute since i've done my uh how to water cool a computer video i mean i think like 2013 was the last time i did it although the concepts stay the same the parts have changed over the years and things have gotten better so that's why i teamed up with our friends over at corsair to bring you an updated guide on how to water cool your computer for the beginner today's video is sponsored by ebga and the ebga elite member program save money through exclusive elite member-only discounts on select hardware and make money with the evga associate program by earning commissions on sales by sharing your code with others elite members also enjoy 24-hour early access to new evga products to either purchase or enter the queue for purchase and yes that includes graphics cards to see all ways to enter this free edg elite member program and it's constantly expanding benefits follow the sponsored link in the description below so i think there's this preconceived notion that water cooling is hard it's really not that difficult and one of the things that we're going to show you here is the parts that you absolutely need for the bare minimum of a water loop uh we'll talk quickly about how it works so that you understand the concept if you understand the concept and the rest might sort of click we'll talk about a few different variations on tubing type uh pump type con you know combos and whatnot but then we'll show you guys just really the fundamentals of getting your computer water cooled so usually at the very bare minimum people choose to put their cpu on water and then they'll just throw their gpu in there and keep it air cooled but at the very least you need a block whether it be for your gpu or your cpu so fortunately from corsair we've got our xc7 rgb water block that works both intel and amd rigs non-tr4 but am4 and your standard intel stuff but if you want to add your graphics card to the loop like we're going to be adding to our asus strix 3090 they do have the xg7 rgb water block uh specifically for that card so you can go to their website check out corsair's website to see all the different blocks and custom cards configurations that they have water blocks for so now that you're able to pick up the heat which is what the water block is doing it's touching the component you want to cool and it's going to absorb heat now you get need to get that heat moving through the system and the way you do that is with a pump now we're going to be using the xd5 rgb pump in this case because it is a combo unit so we have our reservoir on top which is going to be directly feeding our water pump which means you don't have to worry about that hole like how high is the block versus the radiator like you deal with with aios this is going to handle getting all of the air bled getting the air trapped in the reservoir and you can keep topping it off until all the air is out of your system but the water pump is also included in this which means you don't have to worry about conjoining them either with tubing or fittings it keeps things tidy it comes with some mounting mechanism that mounts onto radiators and fan slots keeping it all nice and simple now what do you do with all that heat once you've grabbed it well you need to exchange it you exchange it with the air so what you're going to do is you're going to install a radiator now what size radiator you need depends on many factors how many components are you cooling are you cooling one graphics card two a cpu with two graphics cards just a cpu or a gpu and a good rule of thumb is i like to have at least 120 millimeters worth of radiator for every part we're cooling if you're keeping it stuck if you're going to be doing any sort of overclocking i recommend at least 240 millimeters worth of radiator for every part so we're going to be running our xr5 360 millimeter radiator times two in this system so we've got two of them because our particular 5000d airflow case will allow us to mount more than one now i'm going to be going with extra radiator space for multiple reasons one i like to keep the components as cool as possible two i like to fill out the case it's kind of like if you're going to do a custom loop you you sort of want to go all out and have it be a showpiece at the same time but you don't have to you could go with a single rad two rads three rads you can go with a 120 on the back you can really scale it to the size that you want there's really no such thing as too big there is a such thing as being too small when it comes to radiator size so that's why i like to stick to at least that 120 per component or 240 per component if you're going to be doing overclocking now obviously we're going to be running corsair fans with these radiators we're going to be running the ql 120 rgb fans this has led rings on both sides of the fence so no more you have to deal with having the ring on one side and then if you're pulling air through the front you can't really see the rgb on the back this has rgb rings on both sides of the fans which is going to give us a lot of illumination so that we can have our system all be lit up without having to run any sort of led strips now the last thing is we are going to be using the xt hardline from corsair this is actually a frosted tube this is something new for me i've not actually used this tubing and i think it looks great because it gives this appearance of being cold got this real nice frosted effect which i think is going to make the system look like it's nice and cold so obviously you need some sort of coolant so we got our xl5 clear from corsair now this we can actually dye to be any color that we want so i'll be using approved water cooling dies which are designed for pcs you don't want to use food coloring or anything like that nothing food based and we can custom mix it to make it the shade of blue that we want just a slight just a slight touch of blue which will look really nice in this frosted tube because it will really pick up the color and make it nice and translucent and we'll and we'll really show it um so we've got a one liter bottle of that we've actually got two liters of this to make sure we have plenty and then last but not least we need our fittings we need stuff to actually attach all of these tubes together so there's two types of fittings from corsair we've got the xf compression fitting this is designed for soft tubing so this has a barb that you put the tubing on then you slide the collar down and lock it down and that does two things one the barb is responsible for making the seal with the inside of the tube the compression clamp is is its only job is to make sure that the tubing doesn't come off so the collar is not responsible for sealing the tube if you make sure that the sizes match if you have say a 14 or a 10 by 13 compression and that same size tubing is listed then you know they're going to be compatible and the collar will fit but we're going to be using compressions uh hardline compressions on this particular setup because we are going with the hard line tubing so soft tubing barbs hard tubing with compressions so as long as you make sure the types match and the sizes match they're always going to be compatible with the tubing and then because we're using hard line and this will work also with soft tubing we do have some 90 degree fittings and some 45 degree fittings this just allows us to not have to rely completely on bending the tubes to get things nice and orderly we can use 90s and 45s where they make sense so that we don't have to to bend everything all the time bending looks cleaner but it's also a little bit harder so we've got a wide range of fittings from corsair that will allow us to be able to make things nice and tidy without having to worry about wasting tubing when it comes to bending it now speaking of bending it we're going to be using the xt hardline bending kit from corsair which comes with the saw it comes with the clamp the deburr tool and then it also has a little jig on there so that you can get perfect 90s so that as you're bending it you don't have to sit there and do the method like i used to do using the edge of the table and going okay if they're parallel in both corners then we know it's 90. it's actually got a radius bend tool in there so that you can get perfect 90s every time so i like to start with water cooling the graphics card first because we can do it outside of the case it's a lot easier to work on the xg7 rgb water block is going to include a back plate for it as well as all the instructions that we need to be able to get it nice and nice and installed i mean yeah we want it installed nicely this way we do things around here i'm also going to be using my ifixit tool kit for this the reason why i like the ifixit toolkits is because of the fact that they've got all the different size bits we could possibly need you deal with some pretty small screws when it comes to working with these graphics cards sometimes they're little torx heads sometimes they're flat heads but the nice thing about these tool kits is the fact that they've got all the different sizes that you'd possibly need so i'll put a link in the description below to the exact tools that we use around here i've got like six of this exact tool kit because i've got one pretty much everywhere we would ever work on a computer they just make things nice and easy so here's our water block right here from corsair this water block like i said is designed to work specifically with the asus strix rtx 3090 so you're going to want to check the website to make sure they have a water block that's for your specific graphics card it will have a fitment guide in there that will tell you everything you need to know about which cards they will fit you can also search for your particular model to see if they make one but the nice thing is they've got all the thermal pads pre-installed on the back same thing with thermal paste with this little plastic cover right here to make sure that you don't mess it up we got our rgb cables right here on the back which are also pass-through so we can connect multiple corsair rgb devices without having to use a bunch of headers and then we also have an extension cable right here that allows us to connect it to our standard motherboard so if you're not using a corsair product for controlling your lighting you can connect it to your motherboard's argb header or an argb splitter so that you have control over all of your devices and then if we look at the back right here we've got our manual we've got our keys and our plugs to be able to remove our fittings and then we've got our corsair backplate so follow the instructions that are in your particular manual for your graphics card which will have complete teardown instructions and installation instructions so that your graphics card is installed properly because if you don't make a good connection between the die and that cool plate or cold plate right there you're not going to get the cooling that you want in fact you may even slow things down by creating thermal throttling all right so now that the x uh g7 3090 block is installed we are going to just kind of snug down our screws in sort of a star pattern starting from the screws right around the gpu core which are these four and work our way outward so when you're installing it just get everything kind of snug make sure everything lines up before you start tightening anything down and then work your way to the outsides of the block tightening the screws but not going too tight you don't want to strip them they're it's kind of easy to strip screws if you're not careful these are very fine threads and such but as you can see it's a perfect fit one of the easiest blocks to install because of the pre-applied thermal pads pre-applied thermal paste and it looks good too so now we're going to put this inside of our system and the next thing we're going to do is screw it down because we obviously don't want to fall out but we're going to go ahead and move on to our cpu block because it's quite a bit easier than the gpu but obviously the gpu is just an optional step if you're going that route but i prefer to do it first that way i know it's all ready to go so that we don't do the tedious stuff at the end we save that the easy stuff for the end so we end on a high note before we install the cpu block i like to take out all of the ram that way it's not in our way but the xc7 is actually really easy to install it comes pre-installed with the intel bracket already on there but since we're using amd we're going to be switching over to this amd retention bracket you can see all the screws are already retained on there and they're self-retaining so you don't have to install anything there and this is going to use the same factory back plate that's found behind the socket and all amd motherboards and this will thread right into that but we've got to change over our block right here be careful on the back we've got pre-installed thermal paste that we don't want to mess up so be careful with that you do have a little cover here that you could leave on there so that you don't accidentally mess it up but since we're taking off this bracket we want to be super gentle so we're going to turn this clockwise until it comes loose pull out the block move the bracket aside we'll take the amd bracket take the block at the same 45 degree angle and then turn it counterclockwise into place this is actually very very simple you're going to line it up and screw it down so you're going to want to turn the thumb screws a little at a time clockwise going in a star pattern until the threads completely bottom out now the threads on here are cut to a certain length but you want to go until they stop and that will give you even tension across the ihs on the cpu to give you maximum cooling so once you're done with that you'll take your rgb cable sort of run it to the side so we can do our cable management portion at the end because we all know we want that rgb goodness all right so we're getting ready to set up the radiators now which means we have to figure out the direction of airflow where the fitting is going to go and which screws to use so i've already taken all my fans out and one thing to keep in mind with airflow for fans is it always goes from the non-caged side to the cage side so that's the direction of the airflow since we're going to be running one fan on each side of these radiators we also need to determine what's going to be push and pull whether we're not going push push or pull pull on on the rads but i want to talk about the screws here real quick this is where a lot of people can cause damage if they're not careful so you got three different size screws that come with the corsair radiators you're going to have a really long screw you have a slightly shorter screw which stand up okay you got a slightly shorter screw then you got a short short screw so these are designed with very specific use cases in mind so this is the front panel mount for the 5000 d airflow that we have and we're going to be mounting our radiator to this now we're going to put the radiator on the back side of the fans with the fans in between the shroud and the rad the reason for that is we want to be able to see the fans on the front side of the case in terms of the way that the airflow works with pull or push it's really not going to make much of a difference on which side you put the radiator on so don't get caught up on oh it should be pull or it should be push it really doesn't have any sort of a major difference that's even truly measurable on which side they go on but the long screw is going to be for when you're mounting through a case through the fans into the radiator so for example if you're going to be taking this radiator and mounting a fan on this side of it and then having it go through a case like a little case strap like this you've got to have a longer screw to account for the thickness of this metal otherwise the short screw won't make it all the way to the piece so if you push it through like this you can see on our fan right there we've got that extra distance sticking up and then that's plenty of length to be able to mount it to our radiator so in the front of this setup i'm going to be doing sort of a sandwich where we're going to be going screw through the metal bracket through the fan into the red now obviously i have the fittings facing the wrong way they're facing this bracket which would not do us any good if we were trying to actually have a functional setup here so what i'm going to do is flip this around and i personally like to have fittings on the top because fittings on the top will make it easier for air to move through the loop so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go ahead and get these front fans and rad set up so you can see what it looks like inside the case all right so we have three different setups here for different rads and front fans based on where they're going in the case so you can see this radiator we have all three fans set up as pull it's gonna be pulling air through the radiator and this guy is gonna actually be going on this back wall right back here now something else that we have to consider too moving forward in the next scene is i have to attach the pump res combo to one of these in some way it's more than likely going to be on this one but this is the top radiator now because this is pulling air into the chassis we need to exhaust that air so you can see once you put this you know at the top of the case we got our fittings facing down so we can access them and the fans are pushing air through so this is going to be going up in the top of our case just like this so you'll want to push all your wires through your wire cable manager or your cable management holes same thing for the front fans here now the fans on the front are also going to be pulling air in so you can see we've got the cage side facing us now this is one of the reasons why i'm a huge fan of these particular fans because we've got the rings on both sides of the fans so the front of the case is going to be lit by the hub ring which lights up the fan blades and then the ring around the actual cage and on the back side we're still going to see the lit up ring on the back side of the hub as well as this ring on the cage so you got lighting on both sides of the fan giving you the most light without having to run any sort of rgb strip so let me go ahead and get these installed and we're going to do that using these short screws which i showed you earlier because the short screw is designed to mount the radiator directly to a piece of sheet metal whether it be the back side of the case or the top of the case or bracket like this all right so we've got our radiators mocked up and we got our front fans in now you'll probably take these in and out a couple of times as you're trying to get everything sort of lined up to figure out where the fittings are going to go where you want everything kind of routed but as you can see we've got these six fans working as an intake so this is kind of a a channel of air coming from the corner here but that's gonna be a lot of intake we put our fittings at the bottom on this back grad because it gives us more clearance to be able to access it and then we move the fittings which i would typically put in the rear to the front because again this is a much open area easier to get to our fittings or our barbs right here and our ports to be able to put our fittings on there so it's time to get the pump in there now that we have the radiators and the fans and everything where they're gonna go the nice thing about the xd5 is the fact that it comes with the mounting brackets to be able to mount it to any fan and or radiator so here's our pump here's the bracketry with the hardware we've got our manual so this will show you which fittings and which ports do what because you want to get your inlet and your outlet set properly and then here are the different brackets that we have available to us for 120 millimeter fans and 140 millimeter fans so one of the things that comes with the pump is actually this coolant temperature sensor which is really nice because if you're gonna hook this up to your motherboard which a lot of motherboards specifically this asus board that we have as well has temperature sensing uh probes on there or headers that you can attach a probe like this to you can control your pump through the actual coolant temperature so you can put this on the back side right here where it's not visible plug it in right here and then what we'll do is it'll give you a temperature readout to be able to start to ramp up or slow down the pump based on temps it's got plenty of wire links to it so you can set it anywhere inside the system or you can connect it to the commander pro because the commander pro also has a temperature sensor on there and this is really nice to see not a lot of in fact i don't know of any other reservoirs that actually come with a temperature sensor on there so that's kind of nice you've got plenty of fittings on here for in out and then you can have a drain plug or a valve which will be attaching in this particular loop set up to the system so that you can get the coolant out of there nice and easily if you want to on the return line for the top of the reservoir you can see we have this push down tube and what this does is this means you can have coolant enter the top of the reservoir but then it will enter the fluid down here at the bottom rather than having a waterfall effect which can make a kind of an ugly sound well unless you want to sound like a fountain but worse than that is it will cause aeration of the bubbles and the percolation in there so by having it push down into the fluid level means that you can still have some air available at the top of the reservoir where all the bubbles can escape to so the pump has got a lot of features built into it uh that are really nice that make things just easier and more user-friendly when it comes to getting air out and having it all set up so just to recap we've got the radiators in i've got the ports on the side i want them to be on so we got the ports on this side of the rad because there's more room here where he showed you how we had to kind of rethink the way we were going to do that loop i've got the fittings on the bottom on this back rad simply because once the top one's in there you don't have enough room to be able to have fittings there so but fortunately because we have this radiator horizontal and we have extra air that's going to be in the reservoir allowing air to escape eventually any air that's caught in the top of this radiator will make its way to the reservoir you can see i started adding some fittings onto here and the fortunate thing about corsair having so many different types of fittings is the fact that we can have our drain plug on here so we're just using this 90 degree fitting right here which is also a y-splitter so that we can have the plug come straight out for the drain and then we have it coming off here at a 90 because i'm trying to get this is the outlet of the pump so now we have to start thinking about our loop we have to think about the order which things are going to flow and these are some of the things that you want to think about as you're putting in the parts but we have to determine our flow order now because we had to put things in in a certain way to fit in the case neatly and still have access to our fittings so this is the outlet from the pump and we're going to be going into this radiator first now i decided because the bottom red has to have an outlet that's going to go over to our gpu i want to inlet from the pump to this radiator on the front side that way we can keep the tubes on the same side they're coming in and out of so i used this y adapter plus an extension plus a swivel 90 that way i could move it over to that side of the pump without having to do it through bends now you can do it through bending tubing and unless you have a lot of experience bending tubes which you probably don't because this video is designed towards the beginner you would just want to get a lot of extra tubing to make sure that you can get the bends nice and tight i prefer to use fittings for one i like the industrial look it kind of gives it gives more of a plumbing slash industrial look and two the bends are perfect because they're 90s so our flow order at this point is going to go from the pump over here through these fittings into this right side fitting on the radiator it's going to come out of that radiator up or cross up and over into the gpu now normally you would go now also too real quick to recap flow order in terms of which component gets cooled first does not matter that needs to be bold and underlined there's this misconception out there that if you cool a gpu first you're just going to be warming up your cpu that's not the way it works not enough coolant temperature change happens once it goes over the cold plate in the gpu to cause any significant raise in temperature in the cpu you might see 2 maybe 3c difference at the most remember this is not a car you are not dealing with massive temperature differences between the coolant temp and the thing you're cooling you are not dealing with 200 degree coolant or 200 fahrenheit coolant to try and keep it cool with something that's way colder like the coolant is running you know much much colder than that so you don't have these great deltas and temperatures so to keep things nice and neat instead of trying to go from the pump and that rad to the cpu back to the gpu back to up here and having crisscross tubes everywhere we can go in the flow order that makes sense in terms of the tubing so we will be going from pump to radiator from radiator to gpu gpu to cpu cpu to radiator over here and out of radiator into the top of the pump now is when we get to start having a lot of fun this is where we get to start bending our tubes and planning our order and what i like to do once you have the loop order figured out is to do the easy bends first the easiest one here so far is going to be from this bottom radiator to the pump this outlet from the pump to the inlet of the rat all right so let's talk about bending rigid tube uh you're gonna need a heat gun for this there's no way around that the only way you can bend it is by using a heat on there now the only other way you could use rigid tubing without having to you know deal with bending it is if you use 90s everywhere and offsets and stuff which can get very expensive very quickly by adding all of those additional fittings so the nice smooth 90s that i can do with the tubing i'll do and then i'll do fittings like you saw over here with the pump but we're going to use the xt hardline bending tool kit which accommodates both 12 millimeter and 14 millimeter tubing this is a 14 millimeter tube here and you can see everything that comes with it here's our bending core right here so this is designed to go inside the tubing which gives us a nice mandrel bend because when you heat it up uh if you don't have something inside to make it retain its shape it's going to crush now this was able to go in here dry but usually you want to have it be slick in some way you can use a little bit of olive oil make sure you clean it all off before obviously you put it in your system so you'd want to rinse the tubes out thoroughly or just a little bit of dish soap which i think is a little bit better just a tiny bit on there will make it slide but you also want to make sure you don't push the core in too far so we also have this tool bender right here which will allow us to be able to bend perfect 90s for either our 12 millimeter or the 14 millimeter you have these stops which will allow you to measure the depth so if you take this little stopper out and change the location of it that will allow us to determine how far down the tubing goes before it stops so then we could heat the tubing up get it nice and soft to where it's pliable then this will allow us to bend our radius we can go to complete 180 if you wanted to do some crazy bends that way or you can see right here we've got these lines that are marked for 45 90 and then what 190 plus 45 yeah 130 math that's good we got that other thing we have in here is very important the saw so that we can actually cut the tubing this material is pmma if you were curious but to be able to have that saw allow us to cut things nicely we have this little clamp right here that will allow us to clamp our tubing down and then we'll be able to saw through the ends right there and it's got this little lip so that you can actually hang it over the edge of the table that we have a nice you know solid surface to be able to mount it to you want to make sure that you give yourself plenty of length so that you have excess you want to have your tubes be a little bit longer that way you can trim off the excess you can't make it longer but you can make it shorter now after you cut the edge you're going to see it's kind of rough and you wouldn't want to put that inside of your system because that would probably cut your o-rings so we have this d-bird tool which will give us both an internal and an external deeper ability so you take the pointy end put that in the inside just give it a few turns the sound is normal that will give us a nice smooth inside so we're not gonna you know have no burr showing there then you switch to the external portion of the tool and again don't put a lot of force on it just push gently against it as you turn and that gets rid of all the sharp edges so now we would be able to put this inside of our system and not cut any of our o-rings which could lead to a leak so now it's time to go ahead and bend our first tube so we know that this is just going to be a plane 90 and it's going to be going from this port on the radiator to this port on the pump now the 90 doesn't need to be right in the middle of this tube we know it's a little bit closer to the side panel a little pro tip don't put sharpie or dry erase markers or anything on here even if it's dry erase and it wipes off with your finger as soon as you heat it it will absorb into the plastic which means it won't come off after you're done so what you want to do is kind of get the best eyeball of where you think your 90s should be placed by just kind of holding your tubing up and going okay it needs to bend roughly right around there so we're going to put this core in on the other side and then we're going to start heating the tube once the tube starts getting soft and kind of wanting to bend that's where we will go ahead and put it into our vise right here or our little bending clamp so that we can get our nice curved radius you'll notice the clamp is also curved on the inside that will also allow it to keep its round shape rather than getting that kind of even with a mandrel sometimes you can get it sort of crushed slightly you get what looks like kind of a flat spot if you were to do it on the table this nice curvature in there will make sure that it maintains its shape so here's our very first bend it's our 90 degree tube we can pull the mandrel out once we get it out of there so you can see nice perfect 90. it maintains its shape it doesn't squish or flatten out a little pro tip of taking the tubing or the core out if it kind of gets stuck just sort of twist it as you pull and then it will work its way out like that it kind of releases some of that surface tension so there's our very first 90. now you can see it's obviously way bigger than what we need in terms of length right so this is where now you'll kind of get everything sort of lined up measured out and then make sure you cut a little bit longer than what you need you can always shorten the tube you cannot make it longer so this is about the time you start getting really excited because you can start to see it sort of take shape so i just made that 90 and then i just trimmed down the links until they were perfect now some of the things that i look for here is you want to make sure especially going for like a 90 degree like everything's got nice 90s and squared off the things i'm looking for here are the things horizontal that should be is this fitting horizontal or is it being you know pushed up weird or is it pulling down to meet the the tubing if it has to go down to meet the tubing you made it too short so i just make sure that i trim small amounts at a time until everything is perfect that's why i don't have the collars on here you see that we have the collars and the o-rings i leave these off until everything in the build is done and ready to be locked down because i don't know if i'm gonna have to make some sort of an adjustment somewhere that might make some of these tubings be off instead of you know then i have to take all the collars off and whatever so i keep them aside in a safe place that way once we're ready to start filling this and getting some liquid in here then i put all the collars back on don't forget that part i've seen people do that before they forget to put the collars back on and then it's full of liquid and they're like oh man all right so all the tubing bends are in you can see i've got all the caps on i didn't put the caps on until everything was lined up how i wanted it all the tubes were done that one you're not sitting there fighting with the collars to try and get them on and off so you also might notice some time is elapsed here um i've got a haircut and change of clothes because one of the things that i think is most important is you set aside plenty of time to do this right take your time be patient if this is your only rig and you're down make sure you schedule that during a time which you don't have to have like a paper due for school or work done at work where you can take your time on this and not rush another really important tip too is before you start bending your tubes do a test piece take a small test piece bend it see how long it takes before it blisters see how long it takes before it's malleable enough to where you can get a nice even radius bend without crushing the inside diameter or stretching the outside diameter trust me you can save yourself a lot of headache if you get an idea of how much time and heat is needed for each type of material the pmma bends completely different than acrylic which also bends completely different at different temperatures than petg so this is the first time i've used used the pmma and it's really hard it's a very hard tube where like acrylic would have probably already broken or shattered when i do that because the acrylic has more of a glass property where the pmma has a much harder property and i'm sure that however that chemical makeup is is how we're getting this nice kind of a frosted translucent look to it so that's my first time bending it it takes a lot of heat and a lot of time and a lot of neighboring heat on the entire area you want to bend to get it nice and smooth once you figure it out you can do it everything you see here i did with one and a half sticks of tubing i only had one bend that actually ended up needing to be done twice and that was this one right here everything else was a one shot fortunate i didn't have to sit there and bend it a million times so the next thing to do now is we need to prepare to fill our loop so i am going to be using the uh xl5 like i said it's a clear coolant um one liter 1000 milliliters should be enough for this size loop we don't have a giant reservoir also i'm going to be using a die uh use a die from a reputable brand designed for water cooling do not use food coloring food coloring is not appropriate for a loop you do not want food grade product it will grow bacteria and growth you don't want that in your loop but what we've got to do here is get our loop also prepared to be able to fill so if you've got a drain plug and you don't have a plug on the end of it like this make sure you plug it even though there is a ball valve in there the last thing you want to do is to find out that there's just a little bit of seepage past that ball check valve so use one of the plugs that are applied or supplied or get some favorite decorative plugs that you want to cap that off also make sure that the valve is perpendicular to the flow that's how you know that it's closed off we are also going to disconnect our 24 pin power supply cable from our system now depending on whether or not your system's already complete or you're building it for the first time uh we'll determine whether or not you're gonna do this out of the case or unplug it or whatever but the reservoir also comes with this uh jumper and what this jumper will do is it will jumper together the 12 volt inside of the harness which is going to trigger the power supply to turn on when you turn on the plug on the back of the power supply which will allow you to be able to run your pump without turning on the system you don't want to turn on the pump and fill the system with the system on for a couple of reasons one there's gonna be a ton of air you'll be turning it on and off you gotta get all the air bled out two that's also part of our leak test time that's probably where a lot of people fail is they think like okay we're ready to go and then off they go and they burn up something because they've got a drip that they didn't see coming but as long as the motherboard and the cpu and the gpu aren't powered on anything that drips on there won't be a problem as long as you let it dry completely prior to powering it up so because i mentioned on this one we want to go with a little bit of a kind of a frosted remember ice has a slight blue tinge to it and that's just because of the way that the water um refracts light as it goes through it actually pulls out the blue spectrum and i kind of want that here because i want it to look like it's frozen because of these translucent tubes so i've just got this little tote right here we're good i think anyway i'm wiping this out you can do this in a clear bottle we don't have any clear bottles hanging out here so we're just using this bottom half of a coolant jug where i'm going to pour the coolant in here and then i'm going to mix up the dye and then i'll use a funnel to pour it back into the bottle and i'll show you how we'll get it inside the system now that we have our coolant mixed up let's talk about an easier way to fill it so because the reservoir here gives us multiple ports on top we have one not being used because obviously the return on top we're on the right side here with the push down tube i've also left the plastic on here i don't take the plastic off the reservoir until everything is done but we're going to be filling it from the top right here now one thing you need to understand is that because we're not going to have another port open to allow air out air is going to have to escape through the same tube that you're filling with so don't over pour don't pour too fast the air will cause bubbles to percolate out and it will get kind of messy but i like to take just a piece of vital tubing get this from any hardware store and then just a cheap barb fitting or something from some buy one extra barb fitting and then you'll be able to fill it this way and i got this tiny little long snout funnel that will push down inside the tube this allows me to thread this into the top have this hanging out and this is where i fill it but before we do that we need to get ready to do our leak test we're just going to take white paper towels and i recommend white not blue shop towels especially right now since i've got blue coolant you want to use white because if you're using a colored dye it will be really obvious if it starts dripping anywhere so you want to put this underneath all of the connections so we've got this bottom one right here it'll do two things one it'll catch any drips two it will allow us to identify any drips because it's white and it will it will be really obvious and show up so think of this less as less about catching things to protect more so just to be able to make it super obvious and be able to see that it's dripping now if you don't have a funnel and some spare vinyl tubing and a fitting you can't order uh from anywhere online pretty much just a squeezy fill bottle this makes it a little bit easier to control you get down inside the reservoir and you just squeeze to fill it until the reservoir is full and then you turn on the power supply to get the pump going make sure it's plugged in obviously to power and then as soon as the reservoir runs empty turn it off refill the reservoir and keep that going until you have coolant coming out of that tube once you do fill it up all the way and then let it run for at least a half an hour to allow the air to start to circulate and make its way to the reservoir the level will continue to drop as long as air is making its way there continue to fill it up but leave a little space for air to actually be able to accumulate at the top you don't want to fill it all the way to the neck and just keep that going until you have well what seems to be all the major air bubbles moved and then we'll talk about how to get rid of the micro bubbles okay so now that our loop is full uh there's gonna be a lot of air in this system so we're gonna do next we're gonna let it run obviously for our leak test we wanna promote the movement of air so you're just going to sort of lean the system and see as i do that we start to see bubbles move you can hear them moving you can see them making their way back to the reservoir in it that way lean it the other way see all the air moving through the tubes the nice thing about clear tubes is that you can actually see it move tip it backwards also make sure the cap is on the radio or the reservoir while you're doing this because you don't want to leak it all out everywhere and then if you give it just a little tap when you when you go down with it don't smash it on the ground but if you just tap it down you'll loosen some bubbles up too you'll break that surface tension i would recommend doing a leak test at least for two or three hours some people will say 24 hours i find that if it doesn't leak in the first few hours it's not going to leak at all so we're going to let that go you'll notice the coolant will start to clear up in the reservoir right now we still have the plastic on it remember that so that's one of the reasons why it doesn't look super clear and shiny but you're going to let this go for a while eventually all the small micro bubbles which are aerating the fluid right now which are making it look cloudy will clear up that'll just take some time and you don't want to fire as tempted as you are right now to fire up your system i mean we don't have gpu cables installed yet so it's not going to fire up let the leak test do its thing don't get impatient give it time make sure everything's dry go get something to eat come back look the paper towels are still dry give it an hour or two if they're still dry after that now we can talk about hooking up the rest of our systems all right so here's the finished product after a couple of afternoons worth of work like i said it's really important to just set aside some free time so that you're not rushing yourself to try and get it done take your time you start feeling frustrated walk away from it for a little bit come back to it later when you start to feel a little bit rejuvenated but you can see the final product really came together a lot of the micro bubbles are gone the cloudiness is kind of going away it's not as aerated it's nice and clear looking now these surface tension bubbles here will go away over time but you can see i also went ahead and got all of the rgb set up here with our ql fans from corsair so we have iq installed and it's now giving me it's really slow and subtle but it is sort of color shifting between a very icy blue to a a slightly hued uh blue added to white it's very subtle but it is shifting back and forth to kind of give you a little bit of this glacier effect i want this to look like the inside of a glacier that's the cool thing about iq is you can go in here and start customize stuff to pull some lighting theme together to go with your themed build but anyway guys you can see it's really not that hard we didn't use a lot of specialty tools to get this done we just used the corsair uh bending kit with their cord and the saw the little um i guess it's technically a jig or more of a vise their pmma tubing the deeper tool and then the little 90 degree bending kit really came in handy i don't usually use these types of tools but the 90s were absolutely perfect as you can see it allowed me to get real sharp bends and keep the radius the same between all of them so they don't look any different the only tool you might actually have to go out and buy would be a heat gun if you're going to do rigid tubing like this so that you can heat up the tubing and bend it if you're going to use soft tubing it's even simpler you just need really sharp scissors or some sort of a tubing cutter that will cut right through the soft tubing without any problem so set aside a couple afternoons and just be patient you can end up with an amazing build like this without too much headache if you guys want to learn more about the hydrex line of water cooling products from corsair i have a link down the description below once again a huge thank you to corsair for sponsoring today's video if you guys have any best tips and tricks when it comes to doing your water cool loops put them down in the comments below there's a lot of people that will be watching this trying to do this for the very first time and if you think i missed anything here that might be beneficial in terms of best practices or tips and tricks comment down below thanks for watching guys and as always we'll see you in the next one\n"