Building Custom Water Blocks and Back Plates for NVIDIA GPUs: A Personal Experience

As I sat down to work on my latest build, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and nervousness. My goal was to install custom water blocks and back plates on my two NVIDIA GeForce 980 TI GPUs, a project that had been on the backburner for quite some time. To say the least, it was a thrilling experience that taught me valuable lessons about patience, persistence, and attention to detail.

Upon completing the installation, I couldn't help but feel a sense of pride and satisfaction. The custom water blocks and back plates added an extra layer of sophistication to my system, making it truly one-of-a-kind. If you're considering taking on a similar project, I would recommend starting with a reference GPU. Not only does this reduce the risk of encountering unforeseen issues, but it also allows you to test your skills in a relatively low-risk environment.

As I worked through the process, I encountered several challenges that tested my patience and resolve. One particular issue that proved particularly frustrating was trying to remove the heat sink from my Zotac amp 980 TI GPU. It seemed like an impossible task, but with a little perseverance and the right tools, I eventually managed to overcome the obstacle.

I also discovered the value of using high-quality tweezers in this type of project. Precision nose tweezers proved invaluable in securing the thermal pads onto the memory chips, ensuring that they were properly seated and functioning as intended. This small investment paid off significantly in terms of reliability and performance.

Another essential tool that I found to be incredibly useful was a magnetic screw tray. With so many tiny screws scattered about, it's easy to lose track of them or misplace them altogether. The screw tray allowed me to keep everything organized and within reach, saving me hours of frustration and headache in the process.

Looking back on my experience, I realize that building custom water blocks and back plates for NVIDIA GPUs is not as daunting a task as it initially seemed. While it does require patience, attention to detail, and a willingness to learn, the rewards are well worth the effort. With practice and experience come expertise, and I'm confident that you'll be able to tackle similar projects with ease.

The road ahead promises to be just as exciting, if not more so. As I finish up my current build, I can already envision the next project on the horizon – a second custom water block installation for another NVIDIA GPU. With a little creativity and some expertly crafted thermal armor, I know that this system will be truly one-of-a-kind.

And now, I'm excited to share my progress with you, dear readers. Stay tuned for the next build log, where we'll delve into the world of custom water blocks and back plates once again. Who knows what secrets I'll uncover along the way? One thing's for sure – it's going to be a wild ride.

I've already received some exciting updates from my suppliers, including new fittings that will complete the build. As soon as these arrive, we'll be one step closer to bringing this custom water block installation to life. Until then, I'll keep you posted on any developments and offer advice along the way.

In the meantime, I invite you to join me on this thrilling journey through the world of custom water blocks and back plates. Whether you're a seasoned enthusiast or just starting out, your feedback and encouragement mean the world to me. Let's get building!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: endon't in this one oh my God look at this car it's so hot red look at this leather everywhere oh my gosh it even has navigation we should go to let's go some a road trip like we can go all the way across the country like to New York or something hey hey hey honey well at least this thing is silent can I make a phone call really quick cuz I you know supp talking get out what the hell introducing the node 202 from fractal design it's cool Compact and quiet check the description below for more details what's up guys welcome to build log three of my custom liquid cooled system now in the first few build logs you guys obviously saw a lot of custom painting with the thermal armor on my Sabertooth x99 motherboard as well as the uh radiators that I'm going to using be using in the system but I haven't even told you guys the full spectrum of Hardware that I'll be using in this system so that's what I'm going to go over right now uh if you can take a look here there it is sitting nice and pretty uh so I'm just going to kind of run through this stuff pretty quickly because there's a lot to go over and I don't want to bore you to death so starting off with some of the stuff that you already know is in this system is the defin s from fractal design we've got the Sabertooth x99 uh from Asus beautiful motherboard we've also got a lot of stuff from Ek they've really hooked me up for this project so starting off with the pump this is their D5 pump it's a pump and Reservoir combo as you can see we've also got their their cool stream PE radiator so we've got a 360 at the top there and a 240 on the front aided by some fractal design uh these are their Venturi HP fans these are hp20s of course there's going to be three of them in push at the top and two more at the front uh that are also going to be in push given some uh nice intake to the case above that we've also got some uh tubing here and a lot of you guys were asking me are you doing Hardline tubing or are you doing soft tubing well here's your answer I'm definitely going soft uh take that for what you will this is ek's primo chill Primo Flex Advanced LRT and yeah I could have done hard line tubing but I figure it's it's more complicated and since this is my first time doing a custom build uh you know I I just assume that you should probably learn how to walk first before you start running so that's why I'm going to go with this and I think even if I had the choice between Hardline acrylic and soft tubing I just think that the soft tubing is going to look really nice in here anyway so uh wish me luck on that we've also got some Mayhem pastels perfect pink or mayhem's pastel perfect pink fluid I've actually seen Lee from PC junky mods use this in one of his systems a while back and it looked really nice so I'm pretty stoked on that apart from that we've got some more water cooling Hardware here including two beautiful water blocks for our gpus which are the gtx980 ti of course right here it says Titan X but as most of you know the PCB is like pretty much the same between the two of them so EK obviously spent no extra time making a custom 980 TI version uh they're completely compatible so those will work just fine along with some sexy back plates for our video cards as well got to have those uh spray paint I'm going to get to later uh We've also got this very nice EK Supremacy Evo water block this is one of the cleanest looking water blocks I've ever seen I've always been attracted attracted to these uh these types of water blocks especially the Su Supremacy line from Ek and I think it's just going to look absolutely stunning once it's all in there of course I've got some EK fittings already attached I've also got a dual slot terminal to connect the the two gpus uh and it is in parallel I believe so that's going to be pretty sweet as far as storage options we've got two Savage ssds from hyperx or Kingston for those of you who aren't familiar with their their hyperx line so we've got a 240 gig up top it's going to be my boot drive with some applications editing software and stuff and then we've got a 960 gig excuse me we got a 960 gig for pretty much um all of the raw files that I'm going to be editing with we've also got three 4 TB WD black hard drives right here two of which are going to be in raid one I'm going to be mirroring these I'm going to be putting all the awesome sauce archives on it as well and we've got just a third one uh just just because maybe for games and movies and music and photos and things like that apart from that we've got an EVGA Supernova 1000 watt P2 sorry for the reflection and get over here you can see I'm on my knees right now wouldn't be the first time uh this is going to be just enough power I think for the two GTX 8 TI as well as the 5960x which I don't have shown here it's actually in my test bed right now I'm going to do a little CPU swaero voodoo magic uh but that's why it's not here but I will be using a 5960x for this system here are the two gtx980 the first one the gigabyte is fully referenced it's got the reference cooler from Nvidia on it it's just rebranded uh gigabyte logo and a sticker has been slapped onto it uh but this one's the Zotac amp Edition which I recently did a review on you can go ahead and check that out if you want uh but this is fully customized cooler that uh works really well and it's super silent so I'm a little bit bummed that I'm that I'm going to have to uh take off the cooler but I think I'll be okay once I see how it looks with those beautiful water blocks installed onto it so um that's that's that and then we've got some G skill rip Jaws 4 ddr4 memory this stuff is blazingly fast it's 2666 MHz 32 gigs is going to be plenty for my needs in this case uh and I think that's pretty much it apart from the sleeving so this is a beautiful Tio sline sleeving from Mainframe Customs if you guys haven't seen my um my custom sleeve tutorial where I teach you how to do your own extensions go ahead and check that out it's a really good tutorial and I in that video I use this exact same sleeving so you can see kind of what it looks like when it's done or you can just stick around for the end product of this build and you'll also be able to see what it looks like when it's done um but here's the deal now this is why I saved the spray paint for last and that's because I'm going to need to edit some stuff that I originally thought I would like and now I don't like so much which is the thermal armor on the Sabertooth x99 at first I was like cool with the fact that it was a really dark gray and that the radiat radiators were light gray and that's why I chose these three colors cuz you got dark gray and light gray along with black of course and I was like yeah that'll look fine once it's all done but I've since then decided I don't like that and the reason why is because I think there's just too much dark gray in one area and there's too much light gray in another and it kind of divides the case it divides the look and feel of the case I think so what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to pop the thermal armor off you guys are going to think I'm crazy because I am and I'm going to go ahead and mask off all the black again and I'm going to sand down all the gray and I'm going to respray paint it with the same uh with the same spr spray paint cuz remember these two are the same came from the same can both of these Shades uh the the gray you're seeing here I just did way too many coats uh my first run on on the thermal armor so now that I'm a bit more experienced with spray painting I know I say experience but I've really only just spray painted these three things but it's amazing how much you learn from from doing so little uh you learn pretty quickly so I think I'm pretty confident that the next time around when I go over this thermal armor I'm going to get a gray much closer to the radiators and I think overall that's going to look really nice of course then that creates another problem because now I no longer have a dark need for a dark gray in my sleeving so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this fuchia stuff this fuchsia fuchsia bright spray paint and I'm going to try to spray paint some of the sleeving um pink or fuchsia whatever uh that way instead of using the dark gray the the sleeving colors will just be black light gray and that fuchsia color that which is going to match the liquid perfectly um I think that will really give off the look that I've been intending this whole time for the build and I think I'm going to be much happier for it I know it's going to be a lot of extra work to do those things painting the thermal armor and stuff and the and the sleeving but I think overall the results are just going to be worth it in the end so enough of me rambling I'm rambling way too much now so what am I going to be doing in this video well uh instead of just talking my ass off I will actually be installing these two water blocks onto these two video cards right now and it's uh it's it's going to be fun cuz I've never done it before I'm really excited uh so cross your fingers everyone cross your fingers I could see you I can see you're you you right there you're you're not Crossing them and let's just see how they turn out you guys ready all right let's do this a all right guys so I have hit a snag uh as you you can probably tell from the time lapse I finished installing the GPU block on the reference card here it is it's actually very nice looks pretty sweet it's kind of dirty it's got some thermal paste on it but uh I'll I'll clean that up soon enough but uh this this was fairly easy um I did have to remove the uh the Water block at some point because I forgot to put some thermal pads on a few of the The Regulators but there it is it's looking all right for now um then I started moving on to the Zotac card which the cooler is right here kind of take a look here there it is the cooler was really easy to remove the back plate was really easy to remove but this heat sink that's covering some of the the memory modules as well as uh the vrm and whatnot is like glued shut onto the PCB and I just I I tried forcing it but I don't want to force it too much obviously cuz I don't want to break the PCB so unless I have a heat gun which I don't have much experience with I know you just kind of point at it and and warm it up but that's also more time and something I've never done before um I think I'm going to have to call it quits on the zot card I'm going to have to resign the zot card for now put it aside and just go for the other reference GTX 980ti that I have uh the PNY one and I've already spent quite a bit of time getting this one installed I prefer not to spend too much time uh on on trying to get this guy removed so on that note I'm going to set this aside like I said and I'm going to work on the other reference 980 TI all right folks here they are those two GTX 98 TI with their custom water blocks and back plates fully installed looking nice looking nice if you guys have never seen one of these things Uh custom blocked GPU in person I'll tell you right now the video Never does Justice uh they are just super sexy and I think they look pretty damn good in my system so far if you are curious about doing this yourself there are a couple things to keep in mind and I guess this is where I should quickly transition into the things that I learned in this process uh the first one being that putting a custom block on your GPU is not difficult if you think it's hard and it's intimidating um you shouldn't be scared uh it's kind of like when I first built my computer um for the first time ever the first one I ever did I was pretty worried that I would mess it up and I was like well so like this is out of my league type of thing but it's not really like that um and the same thing goes for for something like this uh it does however take a lot of time and patience to get it right and uh you know you never want to rush this sort of thing that being said uh I did run into a few snags which also was a good learning experience for me uh if you are going to do this for the first time anyway and you're not too experienced like myself um I would suggest trying to work with a reference GPU first just because there's fewer surprises I guess like the the instance that I ran into with the Zotac amp 980ti uh where I just couldn't get that damn heat sink off I wasn't expecting that and thank God I had a another reference 98 TI lying around I was able to use that but that's just another thing I would say unless you've done extensive research on that particular model of non-reference card and you see that it's really easy and simple to uh take the cooler completely off and mount a uh your own custom one um I would suggest going with uh a non-reference I'm sorry a reference video card uh when doing something like this another thing this is probably more specific but um tweezers no one ever told me to use twe twe and I'm sure there's videos out there that do tell you to use tweezers but tweezers came in handy so much in this uh this whole experience just because I could not get the thermal pads on correctly or I couldn't get them on straight or properly with my fat nubby Fingers um having those Precision nose tweezers the high quality ones were really helpful just being able to lift them off of the little adhesive pad that they come on and stick them right onto the uh whatever it was the memory chips and what have you um was really helpful so I would highly suggest getting some tweezers before you take on a task like this as well also a little screw tray a magnetic screw tray you guys might have seen that in the time lapse pick one up on Amazon or wherever for next to nothing and um it's really helpful in this kind of situation because you're dealing with a lot of little screws and you don't want to get them lost so even having maybe a couple of them having one or two might be helpful because you can kind of uh divide them up evenly between whatever cards that you're using or uh based on wherever they go and I think the last thing is that that's it I think those are all the things so um stay tuned for the next build log hopefully you guys enjoyed this one toss me a like on it if you liked it if not tell me why in the comments um but build log four get this look at this look at this guys these are the last fittings that I was waiting for in the mail and they just came yesterday so you know what that means that means in the next build log we might build this thing I don't want to say we're going to because I I still have some stuff to do I still need to paint the thermal armor paint the thermal armor and I might even do some other custom modding slight custom modifications that I'm I'm going to keep a secret for now but this means that we are now I am now ready to build this thing as soon as those other things happen there's a very specific order these things need to H operate in um but we're getting really close we're getting super close I'm really excited thank you guys so much for joining me along on this amazing journey it's been super fun I can't wait to build my second one now having the experience that I do building this first one so thanks for staying tuned guys I'll see you next time in the next video\n"