Building a Custom Water Cooling Loop for a Threadripper System

As a DIY enthusiast, I recently set out to build a custom water cooling loop for my Threadripper system. This project required careful planning and execution, but the end result was well worth it. In this article, I'll walk you through my experience building the loop from scratch.

My initial setup consisted of a radiator, pump, tubing, and fittings. I chose to use a DIY approach, utilizing black rubber tubing and double stick tape for a more utilitarian look. The system's design allows for easy disconnection and reconnection of components, making it ideal for frequent maintenance and upgrades. However, this also means that the system is not designed for long-term disconnection, as it relies on the constant flow of coolant to function properly.

One of the key features of my setup is the use of a quick-release fitting. This allows me to easily disconnect the loop when needed, making it possible to dump fluid from the radiator without having to drain the entire system. The fitting also provides a convenient means of connecting and disconnecting tubes, making it easier to work with the system.

To ensure that my setup is leak-free, I conducted a 24-hour leak test using distilled water. This test proved to be successful, and I was able to identify any potential issues before they became major problems. It's worth noting that this type of testing can be time-consuming and requires patience, but it's essential for building a reliable cooling system.

Once my loop is built, the next step is to add coolant. In this case, I chose to use a 10-1 mixture of distilled water and EK Cryo Fuel. This solution provides excellent thermal performance while being safe for long-term use in the system. However, it's worth noting that other cooling solutions may not be suitable for use in this type of setup.

After assembling my loop, I moved on to the final step: installing the radiator and pump. The radiator is a crucial component of any water cooling system, as it plays a key role in dissipating heat from the components. In my case, I chose to use a custom-built radiator that would fit perfectly with the rest of the loop.

To complete the setup, I connected all the necessary fittings and tubes to the pump and radiator. This involved carefully measuring and bending the tubing to ensure a precise fit, as well as securing it in place using fittings and clamps. The end result was a beautifully designed system that seemed almost too good to be true.

Now that my loop is complete, I'm excited to put it through its paces. As soon as possible, I plan on adding the finishing touches, including the GPU water block and custom-built case fans. With this setup, I'll be able to achieve unparalleled cooling performance while also showcasing the beauty of my handiwork.

My system consists of an 18/4 Terabyte SSD and seven thousand-dollar GPU, along with another seven thousand-dollar GPU and a twelve hundred dollar GPU, all mounted on custom water blocks for improved thermal performance. The system's liquid cooling capabilities will allow me to achieve incredibly low temperatures, pushing my components to their limits.

The final piece of the puzzle was mounting the entire system in my case. This involved careful planning and execution, as well as a fair amount of patience. I carefully placed all the necessary components, including the power supply, motherboard, and RAM, into their designated slots. The end result is a beautifully built machine that seems almost too good to be true.

After months of preparation and testing, my system is finally ready for its debut. As I put everything together and flipped the switch, it was clear that this was going to be something special. With its custom-built water cooling loop and top-of-the-line components, my Threadripper system is poised to deliver unparalleled performance and aesthetics.

The Level One Forums will provide a space for us to discuss our builds, share knowledge, and learn from one another. It's a community that values DIY enthusiasts and provides an opportunity for users like me to showcase their work and connect with others who share similar interests.

As I finalize this article and look back on my experience building the custom water cooling loop for my Threadripper system, I'm reminded of just how rewarding it can be to push the boundaries of what's possible. From start to finish, this project required patience, dedication, and a willingness to learn. With these qualities in mind, you too can build an incredible cooling system that pushes your components to their limits.

Conclusion

Building a custom water cooling loop for my Threadripper system was an experience I'll never forget. With careful planning, precision execution, and a healthy dose of patience, it's possible to create a system that delivers unparalleled performance and aesthetics. Whether you're looking to upgrade your current build or start from scratch, this article provides valuable insights into the process of building a custom water cooling loop.

Parts List:

* Radiator

* Pump

* Tubing

* Fittings

* EK Cryo Fuel

* Custom-built GPU water block

Level One Forum:

A community for DIY enthusiasts to share knowledge, showcase builds, and connect with others who share similar interests.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay now with all of this out of the way it's basically time for the unveiling i mean the rest of the system builds pretty pedestrian i mean this is a glorious system there's 32 cores and so much memory get the corsair dominator memory in here this is the fastest memory that i have 64 gigabytes it is a very nice kit of memory cl 14 i think i'm not really sure but in benchmarks it is consistently very very impressive probably need to add a little bit more to it to really satisfy my needs but get the intel ssd in my 3d printed mount and this system is basically ready it's ready for the unveiling 32 core workstation with modular liquid cooling it's easier than you think and it makes more sense than you think especially for somebody like me that's you know changing their system configuration around depending on what sort of a thing they're running or what problem they're trying to solve i've got a custom loop in here now it's flexible tubing it's not as uh not as ornery as uh hardline tubing but you know cooling the gpu and then adding that and then how are we going to manage you know a gpu block how we're going to add taking the gpu out putting a new gpu in maybe i want to pop the gpu out entirely and uh put an air cooled gpu in to do some testing or something like that is there an answer in water cooling well yeah ek does actually have the answer i helped a friend put together a custom loop cooling system based on the intel 9900k that system turned out amazing we put in a gigabyte motherboard some team group memory we put it in a lienly dynamic case hardline you know an orange themed build he's super into hard lines and i helped with some of the other stuff he custom liquid cooled his gpu and we put the system through its paces and the thing that struck me the most about that system was how quiet it was he had at just an insane overclock and i came back upstairs to use this and yeah i've got an ek just a performance 360. it's the kit it's a sort of a no-brainer uh but with the velocity block on my 32 core threadripper and i did that versus a tower cooler i mean i could use a tower cooler but i did that to try to make the system a little quieter and it does work it's it's it's great because it is a little bit quieter i can run three vardar fans in the top at a relatively low rpm still get plenty of airflow through the system the treble runs when i start mixing in my tesla v100s now i've used these in the machine learning videos i've used these in several different videos and several tutorials and helped some people out in the forum with some different stuff and so i'm always taking them in you know putting them in taking them out putting them in taking them out and these are really designed for servers they're really designed for the airflow that you would have in a server case so there's not actually a fan in the v100 but yes it absolutely does need active cooling well i 3d printed a shroud as a way to deal with that and i got to thinking there's got to be an easy way for you know i would be a lot more enamored with custom loops if there was an easy way to uh add and remove things to the loop well it turns out there is coolants has these quick release fittings so you can just and you're not going to lose much fluid because it springs closed i also was not super satisfied with my 360 millimeter radiator in my giant fractal defined 7xl case because it doesn't quite go all the way down and i tried to fit a cd-rom in there but the cd-rom doesn't quite fit so i wanted to put a larger radiator at the top and maybe even add one to the front especially if i'm considering cooling my gpu and maybe even my v-100s so i bought all this ek stuff that you see here i even bought an extra radiator and some other fittings but i did reach out to ek to say hey i've got this threadripper system and i think this is going to be a five-year system and it's not i mean it's cattle i want my cattle to be healthy but at the same time like just throw it in a cardboard box and if it's fine don't worry about it i've helped some friends with their five-year-old systems you know four three four five-year-old systems that had custom loops even like four gpus justin uh we put together his threatened upper system earlier this year which by the way he's loving and is amazing and does all kinds of ridiculous insanity uh he had a custom loop set up and uh the plasticizer and the colorant and the cooling fluid just leached all out and it was bad and it was a mess and those those oh just oh it wasn't good and so if i look at my lube here that i've been running for about six months just distilled water with a little bit of biocide you can see that the tubes they're getting kind of yellow they might be starting to leach a little bit of their plasticizer in here i'm not really sure how uh how my cold plate looks in the velocity block because you know we did the inner max teardowns and it's not good i definitely don't see anything growing in here so that's good so it's not chinese tap water but uh it's also something that has worried me a little bit i've been working on servers that have really awesome you know closed loop cooling and quasi custom loop cooling and i can't help but notice all those use you know like standard automotive black rubber fittings i mean cars have had this figured out for a long time like move fluid from a to b make sure this tube is going to last 20 years don't actually leak anything into the fluid so i asked ek about that and they said yeah black rubber that's a thing so this is the super insane stability it's not a clear tube you can't put fancy metallic cooling in it but again cattle and not a pet i mean you can still be proud of your cattle it's like i have the most you know roided out super cows on earth or sent a cow or whatever i mean the number of cores here it basically is the centical of computers but um yeah ek it turns out that they're working on a pro line they're working on a pro line for people just like me that addresses the quick release problem or will make it easy for me to add and remove v100s to the system with custom loop liquid cooling and to be able to move it between systems that have the same ek setup as well as you know super stable tubing that i don't have to worry about and maybe not so much of the rgb bling so yeah ek sent over the mother lode there was there is one honorable mention though that's ace attack what is this what is what is this insanity this is an rtx 2080 ti but it's only a two slot card but this is great when you've got a case like this because you know threadrip has only got four expansion slots and i can put this in and have this card be sideways in the vertical slots and it won't take up any of the extra room so i can use all four of my x16 slots without resorting to the expense and complexity of a custom loop i mean yeah there are you know just two slot blower style 2080 ti's but this will clock a little bit higher and be cool a little bit less because it's not one but two blower motors i'm gonna do a separate video on this just to show you the options but being able to mount it like this in a tower case and be able to use your horizontal and vertical slots both that's maximum efficiency good job asatech this is the ek quick disconnect kit and this is actually i ordered one of these on amazon just to kind of see what it was all about like not knowing what i was doing and that's what made me reach out to ek and say hey what's up with this so the idea with the gpu block is something a little like this now this would already be screwed in you want to screw it in before you actually connect your barbed fittings but you'll have this mounted on the side of your gpu with your gpu block imagine your gpu block is in place and then your soft line tubing is going to go over toward the front of your computer and hook into the block so your quick release fittings will actually be located here at the block and on your actual lines so you can just pop your gpu off and that's why there's so much spacing on this block so each each thing will have its own lines basically and that's how it'll uh it'll do the fluid flow and distribution and all that so the idea is you're going to have all of your quick release fittings on this block and then you're going to be able to just pop a gpu on it's like oh it's time to switch machines just pop it off it's sealed it's nice and that's going to be our distribution block so we get a 360 millimeter radiator for the front and i've got the barbs in the top here at least temporarily this is the other style barbs for the transparent tubing this is not for the black rubber tubing you really got to make sure that you get the correct fittings for the correct tubes or you're going to have uh you're going to have issues there's going to be water everywhere so i can put it at the top but there's not really a lot of clearance here for the black rubber tubing so i'd have to use something like a right angle fitting i've only got these chrome right angle fittings on hand probably get something something else something a little different if i were planning this build out a little better or i could flip the radiator around and have these at the bottom of the case they'd give me a few more options in terms of tube routing i could actually route you know tube behind here somewhere that you don't see it uh maybe maybe that's an option i like to always do a little bit of a test fit when i'm doing a build like this because you never know exactly how things are going to go together and even though frackle says there's enough room for this big 480 millimeter radiator in the top you get a little bit of margin at the top and bottom of the radiator and so it doesn't exactly quite fit perfectly in there i've got to use the fans as a little bit of a spacer so this is pretty much the only way i can mount this fortunately the top's removable fractal makes it easy for the pump because this is an increased water flow situation it's the ek kinetic quantum it's a nice pump i'm not sure that i wouldn't want to go a dual pump configuration with a build like this i'm going to try it with this pump but i may actually go for a dual pump situation because you know worst case scenario we're talking three gpus it's pretty similar to the d5 pump that comes with the ek performance kit which is what i'm used to except the lid has three intakes and we will be using uh one of the intakes because i plan to run a fill port all the way to the top here to connect it to this so that it is rgb i mean you get a little bit of rgb here but ek one common misconception with the d5 pumps from ek is that you could use the top as an inlet well you can but it's not really recommended on this particular pump the inlet and the outlet are located right next to each other and they're at the bottom of the port if you find that you have you know excessive air in the system or you get an air bubble that comes in through the inlet and it's immediately pulled in through the uh you know through the pump you can actually add the take this little plastic thing out and add the tubes that are included in the box so that you don't get the air bubbles through the system or at least the air bubbles that come in through the inlet will go to the top and out of the way of the pump so the pump doesn't suck the air back in one thing that is a little annoying about the mounting bracket here is that it's not drilled to mount to 120 millimeter holes this has great options for mounting your distribution block it does not have great options for mounting to pretty much anything else because most of the stuff in your case is set up for 120 140 millimeter fans so it turns out these two screws in the middle do actually match the mounting pattern that's where 220 millimeter fans meet each other in the radiator it's kind of up here out of the way and i can have my my small my spaghetti strap gpu tube sort of come down this way and my cpu tubes can be routed up here out of the way so i think up here is the thing that makes the most sense for me so i'd rather have the mounting stability of having the screws on the end but i'll take it you can build your own pump bracket fractal in particular has their multi bracket and so this actually works well with the multi bracket for thermal paste i'm using kingpins cooling jar stuff it's a little unsettling because i got to like scrape it on but bearded hardware turned it on to me or bearded hardware turned me on to it it works pretty well ran out of tubing not quite enough tubing gonna need two rolls if you're gonna do a build like this two sections of it or whatever from the ek store so here we are at about a mid build stage uh it's not been easy and actually you know running short of this rubber tubing really sort of complicated things a little bit i use a little bit of my old tubing which has the different fittings and some other stuff uh out of the block the distribution block and into the cpu you don't want to hook your cpu up in line necessarily although you could that's what i ended up doing here basically everything goes into the distribution block and then out again these fittings are a little smaller than those so it's going to restrict the flow just a tiny tiny little bit but i'll be able to put my quick release fittings along the bottom here for up to four connections and then some thin black cabling will come down here and connect to the edge of the cold plate for the gpu but before i do that it kind of makes sense to go ahead and fill this thing and see if we've got any leaks before we get to the quick release stuff right now nothing in here is quick release i mean i could have used these for quick release so that i could unhook my uh you know processor or something like that but i ended up using this right angle fitting and i've got just a dummy plug in the end here but eventually i could put a drain port on that and it'll work out real well i'm not really much of an expert on custom loop cooling i don't really put a lot of time into it or anything like that but i found that using these quick release fittings like i can just put one of these inside the case that's just kind of on a dangler or even just right here on the other side of this and i can use the other side of the quick release with just a tube when i'm ready to do draining so normally this is closed and i can just connect it and go that but these aren't really meant to be disconnected for a long time they're normally connected do make a lot of sense for being able to dump the fluid in the loop quickly if you don't want to buy a ball valve just as long as it's normally connected so like for example i could put this quick release fitting in here in line in this tube and then when i want to drain it i can just undo the quick release connection and then connect another quick release tube and then be able to just dump you know dump the pump that way everything that's coming out of the uh this side of the radiator but ball valve also works really well too it's just a little more permanent with the main part of our system fully put together i mean i don't have the ram in there i don't have any peripherals there's no video card i mean it's not really going to post i'm just running the pump to mess with it but with the main part of the system put together it's time to set aside the tower and go back to the lignum it's an eighteen hundred dollar four terabyte ssd and seven thousand dollar gpu and another seven thousand dollar gpu and then like twelve hundred dollar gpu and then a lot of cooling like mounting a custom water block on a gpu really could be its own mini how to there's a lot of videos on the internet for doing that and i'm definitely not as experienced in doing that as some other i mean some some other youtubers live to do this so i'm a little more utilitarian hence my use of black rubber tubing a little bit double stick tape does wonders that feels like real wood that is real wood that's not even veneer that's like that's real wood notice that i have not mounted this to my gpu at all what you should do at this point is connect your quick release fittings to these barbs with the appropriate length tube and actually do a leak test you know ek recommends a 24 hour leak test that's basically what i did with the setup over there the setup that i was using wasn't super convenient for leak testing outside of the machine just because of the tolerances and the links of cable distilled water is non-conductive at least until it hits metal ions and if you do have a leak as long as it's not super severe you can clean it up with paper towels notice that i also have not added the ek cryo fuel yet once i'm reasonably satisfied the the loop is operating the wall the way that i want i'll actually flush out this initial run of distilled water and then add back a ten to one mixture of distilled water and ek cryo fuel but i'm just using the basic stuff i'm not using any of the colorants or anything like that because only the basic stuff has that five year stability that i'm looking for you could also add a couple of drops of iodide but for some reason here in the states it's gotten a little difficult to get iodide at the local pharmacy they want to tell you something else and i don't trust it now that we've tested our block to make sure that it's reasonably leak free we can transplant the block onto our 2080 ti you always want to save all the little screws and stuff because there's a million tiny screws and everything in this bag and you want to save the screws from this block as you take it out from the regular cooling system um just in case you want to put it back later because you will want to put it back later at some point at some point i'll be like i'm going to put this in a different computer and then it's like oh yeah get the intel ssd in my 3d printed mount and this system is basically ready it's ready for the unveiling uh actually wait a second hang on it's not it's not perfect um give me one quick second here yes there we go yes this is oh yes there we go now it's time for the unveiling that's my brand new threadripper system well it's my brand new upgraded threadripper system i've logged almost a year on this thing well not quite i guess whenever threadripper launched but um i'm gonna be using this thing for a long time to come i really like the fractal defined 7xl really like the mods that i did to it worked out pretty well if you want to build the system for yourself parts list and the level one forum is at your disposal i'm wendell this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see in the level one forums youokay now with all of this out of the way it's basically time for the unveiling i mean the rest of the system builds pretty pedestrian i mean this is a glorious system there's 32 cores and so much memory get the corsair dominator memory in here this is the fastest memory that i have 64 gigabytes it is a very nice kit of memory cl 14 i think i'm not really sure but in benchmarks it is consistently very very impressive probably need to add a little bit more to it to really satisfy my needs but get the intel ssd in my 3d printed mount and this system is basically ready it's ready for the unveiling 32 core workstation with modular liquid cooling it's easier than you think and it makes more sense than you think especially for somebody like me that's you know changing their system configuration around depending on what sort of a thing they're running or what problem they're trying to solve i've got a custom loop in here now it's flexible tubing it's not as uh not as ornery as uh hardline tubing but you know cooling the gpu and then adding that and then how are we going to manage you know a gpu block how we're going to add taking the gpu out putting a new gpu in maybe i want to pop the gpu out entirely and uh put an air cooled gpu in to do some testing or something like that is there an answer in water cooling well yeah ek does actually have the answer i helped a friend put together a custom loop cooling system based on the intel 9900k that system turned out amazing we put in a gigabyte motherboard some team group memory we put it in a lienly dynamic case hardline you know an orange themed build he's super into hard lines and i helped with some of the other stuff he custom liquid cooled his gpu and we put the system through its paces and the thing that struck me the most about that system was how quiet it was he had at just an insane overclock and i came back upstairs to use this and yeah i've got an ek just a performance 360. it's the kit it's a sort of a no-brainer uh but with the velocity block on my 32 core threadripper and i did that versus a tower cooler i mean i could use a tower cooler but i did that to try to make the system a little quieter and it does work it's it's it's great because it is a little bit quieter i can run three vardar fans in the top at a relatively low rpm still get plenty of airflow through the system the treble runs when i start mixing in my tesla v100s now i've used these in the machine learning videos i've used these in several different videos and several tutorials and helped some people out in the forum with some different stuff and so i'm always taking them in you know putting them in taking them out putting them in taking them out and these are really designed for servers they're really designed for the airflow that you would have in a server case so there's not actually a fan in the v100 but yes it absolutely does need active cooling well i 3d printed a shroud as a way to deal with that and i got to thinking there's got to be an easy way for you know i would be a lot more enamored with custom loops if there was an easy way to uh add and remove things to the loop well it turns out there is coolants has these quick release fittings so you can just and you're not going to lose much fluid because it springs closed i also was not super satisfied with my 360 millimeter radiator in my giant fractal defined 7xl case because it doesn't quite go all the way down and i tried to fit a cd-rom in there but the cd-rom doesn't quite fit so i wanted to put a larger radiator at the top and maybe even add one to the front especially if i'm considering cooling my gpu and maybe even my v-100s so i bought all this ek stuff that you see here i even bought an extra radiator and some other fittings but i did reach out to ek to say hey i've got this threadripper system and i think this is going to be a five-year system and it's not i mean it's cattle i want my cattle to be healthy but at the same time like just throw it in a cardboard box and if it's fine don't worry about it i've helped some friends with their five-year-old systems you know four three four five-year-old systems that had custom loops even like four gpus justin uh we put together his threatened upper system earlier this year which by the way he's loving and is amazing and does all kinds of ridiculous insanity uh he had a custom loop set up and uh the plasticizer and the colorant and the cooling fluid just leached all out and it was bad and it was a mess and those those oh just oh it wasn't good and so if i look at my lube here that i've been running for about six months just distilled water with a little bit of biocide you can see that the tubes they're getting kind of yellow they might be starting to leach a little bit of their plasticizer in here i'm not really sure how uh how my cold plate looks in the velocity block because you know we did the inner max teardowns and it's not good i definitely don't see anything growing in here so that's good so it's not chinese tap water but uh it's also something that has worried me a little bit i've been working on servers that have really awesome you know closed loop cooling and quasi custom loop cooling and i can't help but notice all those use you know like standard automotive black rubber fittings i mean cars have had this figured out for a long time like move fluid from a to b make sure this tube is going to last 20 years don't actually leak anything into the fluid so i asked ek about that and they said yeah black rubber that's a thing so this is the super insane stability it's not a clear tube you can't put fancy metallic cooling in it but again cattle and not a pet i mean you can still be proud of your cattle it's like i have the most you know roided out super cows on earth or sent a cow or whatever i mean the number of cores here it basically is the centical of computers but um yeah ek it turns out that they're working on a pro line they're working on a pro line for people just like me that addresses the quick release problem or will make it easy for me to add and remove v100s to the system with custom loop liquid cooling and to be able to move it between systems that have the same ek setup as well as you know super stable tubing that i don't have to worry about and maybe not so much of the rgb bling so yeah ek sent over the mother lode there was there is one honorable mention though that's ace attack what is this what is what is this insanity this is an rtx 2080 ti but it's only a two slot card but this is great when you've got a case like this because you know threadrip has only got four expansion slots and i can put this in and have this card be sideways in the vertical slots and it won't take up any of the extra room so i can use all four of my x16 slots without resorting to the expense and complexity of a custom loop i mean yeah there are you know just two slot blower style 2080 ti's but this will clock a little bit higher and be cool a little bit less because it's not one but two blower motors i'm gonna do a separate video on this just to show you the options but being able to mount it like this in a tower case and be able to use your horizontal and vertical slots both that's maximum efficiency good job asatech this is the ek quick disconnect kit and this is actually i ordered one of these on amazon just to kind of see what it was all about like not knowing what i was doing and that's what made me reach out to ek and say hey what's up with this so the idea with the gpu block is something a little like this now this would already be screwed in you want to screw it in before you actually connect your barbed fittings but you'll have this mounted on the side of your gpu with your gpu block imagine your gpu block is in place and then your soft line tubing is going to go over toward the front of your computer and hook into the block so your quick release fittings will actually be located here at the block and on your actual lines so you can just pop your gpu off and that's why there's so much spacing on this block so each each thing will have its own lines basically and that's how it'll uh it'll do the fluid flow and distribution and all that so the idea is you're going to have all of your quick release fittings on this block and then you're going to be able to just pop a gpu on it's like oh it's time to switch machines just pop it off it's sealed it's nice and that's going to be our distribution block so we get a 360 millimeter radiator for the front and i've got the barbs in the top here at least temporarily this is the other style barbs for the transparent tubing this is not for the black rubber tubing you really got to make sure that you get the correct fittings for the correct tubes or you're going to have uh you're going to have issues there's going to be water everywhere so i can put it at the top but there's not really a lot of clearance here for the black rubber tubing so i'd have to use something like a right angle fitting i've only got these chrome right angle fittings on hand probably get something something else something a little different if i were planning this build out a little better or i could flip the radiator around and have these at the bottom of the case they'd give me a few more options in terms of tube routing i could actually route you know tube behind here somewhere that you don't see it uh maybe maybe that's an option i like to always do a little bit of a test fit when i'm doing a build like this because you never know exactly how things are going to go together and even though frackle says there's enough room for this big 480 millimeter radiator in the top you get a little bit of margin at the top and bottom of the radiator and so it doesn't exactly quite fit perfectly in there i've got to use the fans as a little bit of a spacer so this is pretty much the only way i can mount this fortunately the top's removable fractal makes it easy for the pump because this is an increased water flow situation it's the ek kinetic quantum it's a nice pump i'm not sure that i wouldn't want to go a dual pump configuration with a build like this i'm going to try it with this pump but i may actually go for a dual pump situation because you know worst case scenario we're talking three gpus it's pretty similar to the d5 pump that comes with the ek performance kit which is what i'm used to except the lid has three intakes and we will be using uh one of the intakes because i plan to run a fill port all the way to the top here to connect it to this so that it is rgb i mean you get a little bit of rgb here but ek one common misconception with the d5 pumps from ek is that you could use the top as an inlet well you can but it's not really recommended on this particular pump the inlet and the outlet are located right next to each other and they're at the bottom of the port if you find that you have you know excessive air in the system or you get an air bubble that comes in through the inlet and it's immediately pulled in through the uh you know through the pump you can actually add the take this little plastic thing out and add the tubes that are included in the box so that you don't get the air bubbles through the system or at least the air bubbles that come in through the inlet will go to the top and out of the way of the pump so the pump doesn't suck the air back in one thing that is a little annoying about the mounting bracket here is that it's not drilled to mount to 120 millimeter holes this has great options for mounting your distribution block it does not have great options for mounting to pretty much anything else because most of the stuff in your case is set up for 120 140 millimeter fans so it turns out these two screws in the middle do actually match the mounting pattern that's where 220 millimeter fans meet each other in the radiator it's kind of up here out of the way and i can have my my small my spaghetti strap gpu tube sort of come down this way and my cpu tubes can be routed up here out of the way so i think up here is the thing that makes the most sense for me so i'd rather have the mounting stability of having the screws on the end but i'll take it you can build your own pump bracket fractal in particular has their multi bracket and so this actually works well with the multi bracket for thermal paste i'm using kingpins cooling jar stuff it's a little unsettling because i got to like scrape it on but bearded hardware turned it on to me or bearded hardware turned me on to it it works pretty well ran out of tubing not quite enough tubing gonna need two rolls if you're gonna do a build like this two sections of it or whatever from the ek store so here we are at about a mid build stage uh it's not been easy and actually you know running short of this rubber tubing really sort of complicated things a little bit i use a little bit of my old tubing which has the different fittings and some other stuff uh out of the block the distribution block and into the cpu you don't want to hook your cpu up in line necessarily although you could that's what i ended up doing here basically everything goes into the distribution block and then out again these fittings are a little smaller than those so it's going to restrict the flow just a tiny tiny little bit but i'll be able to put my quick release fittings along the bottom here for up to four connections and then some thin black cabling will come down here and connect to the edge of the cold plate for the gpu but before i do that it kind of makes sense to go ahead and fill this thing and see if we've got any leaks before we get to the quick release stuff right now nothing in here is quick release i mean i could have used these for quick release so that i could unhook my uh you know processor or something like that but i ended up using this right angle fitting and i've got just a dummy plug in the end here but eventually i could put a drain port on that and it'll work out real well i'm not really much of an expert on custom loop cooling i don't really put a lot of time into it or anything like that but i found that using these quick release fittings like i can just put one of these inside the case that's just kind of on a dangler or even just right here on the other side of this and i can use the other side of the quick release with just a tube when i'm ready to do draining so normally this is closed and i can just connect it and go that but these aren't really meant to be disconnected for a long time they're normally connected do make a lot of sense for being able to dump the fluid in the loop quickly if you don't want to buy a ball valve just as long as it's normally connected so like for example i could put this quick release fitting in here in line in this tube and then when i want to drain it i can just undo the quick release connection and then connect another quick release tube and then be able to just dump you know dump the pump that way everything that's coming out of the uh this side of the radiator but ball valve also works really well too it's just a little more permanent with the main part of our system fully put together i mean i don't have the ram in there i don't have any peripherals there's no video card i mean it's not really going to post i'm just running the pump to mess with it but with the main part of the system put together it's time to set aside the tower and go back to the lignum it's an eighteen hundred dollar four terabyte ssd and seven thousand dollar gpu and another seven thousand dollar gpu and then like twelve hundred dollar gpu and then a lot of cooling like mounting a custom water block on a gpu really could be its own mini how to there's a lot of videos on the internet for doing that and i'm definitely not as experienced in doing that as some other i mean some some other youtubers live to do this so i'm a little more utilitarian hence my use of black rubber tubing a little bit double stick tape does wonders that feels like real wood that is real wood that's not even veneer that's like that's real wood notice that i have not mounted this to my gpu at all what you should do at this point is connect your quick release fittings to these barbs with the appropriate length tube and actually do a leak test you know ek recommends a 24 hour leak test that's basically what i did with the setup over there the setup that i was using wasn't super convenient for leak testing outside of the machine just because of the tolerances and the links of cable distilled water is non-conductive at least until it hits metal ions and if you do have a leak as long as it's not super severe you can clean it up with paper towels notice that i also have not added the ek cryo fuel yet once i'm reasonably satisfied the the loop is operating the wall the way that i want i'll actually flush out this initial run of distilled water and then add back a ten to one mixture of distilled water and ek cryo fuel but i'm just using the basic stuff i'm not using any of the colorants or anything like that because only the basic stuff has that five year stability that i'm looking for you could also add a couple of drops of iodide but for some reason here in the states it's gotten a little difficult to get iodide at the local pharmacy they want to tell you something else and i don't trust it now that we've tested our block to make sure that it's reasonably leak free we can transplant the block onto our 2080 ti you always want to save all the little screws and stuff because there's a million tiny screws and everything in this bag and you want to save the screws from this block as you take it out from the regular cooling system um just in case you want to put it back later because you will want to put it back later at some point at some point i'll be like i'm going to put this in a different computer and then it's like oh yeah get the intel ssd in my 3d printed mount and this system is basically ready it's ready for the unveiling uh actually wait a second hang on it's not it's not perfect um give me one quick second here yes there we go yes this is oh yes there we go now it's time for the unveiling that's my brand new threadripper system well it's my brand new upgraded threadripper system i've logged almost a year on this thing well not quite i guess whenever threadripper launched but um i'm gonna be using this thing for a long time to come i really like the fractal defined 7xl really like the mods that i did to it worked out pretty well if you want to build the system for yourself parts list and the level one forum is at your disposal i'm wendell this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see in the level one forums you\n"