The Build Process: A Journey to EK-Free Skunk Works

As I began my journey to create the ultimate liquid cooling setup, I had to make some tough decisions. One of the most significant was reducing my max power limit to 300 watts to prevent overheating issues with the CPU. This decision was made to ensure that the system would not push the CPU beyond its recommended limits. While it may seem like a lot of work, reducing the power limit allowed me to focus on other aspects of the build.

After setting up the system, I decided to run a series of tests to gauge its performance. The results were promising, with temperatures dropping significantly once the cooling system was fully functional. However, during the testing phase, I encountered some unexpected issues. One of the main challenges was bleeding out the radiator, which proved to be a more difficult task than anticipated. The cross-flow design made it particularly tricky to remove air bubbles from the system, and I found myself struggling with the process.

Despite these setbacks, I persevered and eventually managed to bleed out the radiator, ensuring that the system was functioning correctly. The next step was to verify that the cooling system was working as expected. To do this, I performed a series of tests, including a benchmarking session. The results showed that the system was capable of handling high loads without overheating.

One of the most interesting aspects of the build process was observing the behavior of the liquid cooling system. As the system came online, tiny bubbles began to form on the reservoirs, eventually growing into larger bubbles. This process was fascinating to watch, and I found myself mesmerized by the slow-moving bubbles. However, my fascination with these bubbles was short-lived, as I soon realized that there were still a few EK fittings hidden in the system.

As it turned out, there were 5 EK fittings remaining in the system, which were located at the bottom of the Dro plates. While this was disappointing news, I knew that I couldn't change them now. Instead, I decided to leave them as they were, hiding them from view where they belonged. This compromise allowed me to complete the build without further delay.

The final stages of the build process involved adding some finishing touches to the system. One of these additions was a new terminal block made from acetol, which would improve the overall appearance of the system. Additionally, I had to deal with an unexpected issue - bleeding on the GPU loop. This problem arose due to the vertical orientation of the cross-flow radiators, which created a difficult environment for air bubbles to escape.

In retrospect, I realize that using cross-flow radiators in this configuration was not the best decision. If I were to build another system in the future, I would likely opt for horizontal radiators instead. This design change would have eliminated the need for bleeding and made the overall process much smoother. However, despite these challenges, the system eventually came online, and I was able to enjoy its benefits.

One of the final touches I added to the system was a new acrylic cover for the reservoirs. While this change improved the appearance of the system, it also highlighted another issue - the contrast between the clear acrylic and the matte black components. This difference in color created an awkward visual effect that detracted from the overall aesthetic of the build.

Finally, I had to deal with some disappointment when it came time to film a montage for the build. The lack of foam in the system was a significant issue, as it made the process of bleeding out the radiator much more difficult than anticipated. While vacuum filling the system would have eliminated this problem, I decided to focus on completing the build rather than pursuing a film project.

In conclusion, building the ultimate liquid cooling setup has been an adventure filled with challenges and surprises. From reducing my max power limit to dealing with bleeding issues, every step of the process presented its own unique obstacles. However, through perseverance and determination, I was able to overcome these challenges and create a system that is both functional and visually stunning.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so the work log continues um yeah so here's what I'm going to do today I'm going to kind of build on this and I don't think I'm going to do a whole lot of talking during it I think what end up being like kind of a build Montage on things I'm getting done and I'm going to recap at the end it just takes a lot of time to like slow down and stop and explain each step along the way um but uh yeah I think that's what we're going to do today hey day d d what we got work to do yeah I'm playing World of Warships World of Warships is the free-to-play naval strategy game where you command the most iconic and famous warships from World War I and World War II recreated with stunning detail and accuracy build your Fleet while participating in various game types while upgrading your ship's Arsenal along the way new players who sign up using my link below will receive an exclusive starter pack to get you up and running quickly by receiving 7 Days Premium Time 1 million credits 300 to blooms and the tier five premium ship the exitor so what do you guys waiting for start sinking ships of World of Warships by heading in the description below and getting your freebies there's a lot to kind of keep track of here I mean I didn't anticipate this being a full tear down of the system to get all the EK stuff out of there but I it allowed me like I said to sort of fix some things that I had problems with uh initially with this build build um that I wasn't too happy with but I'm going to be changing the fans out to the Leon Lee fans like I said These Are the Leon Lee V2s um mostly because of I I like the pattern that goes along the sides of the the fans and I think with everything being so Square in this build it'll go along really well with it um nice thing about these fans too is the fact that the 120s are actually extra thick they're 28 mm instead of 25 and because of the fact that I'm going with thinner radiators I want to be able to move more air through the RADS um that way I can make sure that I have plenty of cooling although I should have plenty of cooling cuz each these two represent my radiators actually I need two more of the 140s now that I think about it cuz I have the 280 on the back I forgot so there's two more 140s that are missing so you've ever wondered how many fan Skunk Works has it's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 plus one more on the back makes eight so there's eight 12s and then I have six 140s but four of these are for the top rad four of these are for the bottom rad and then two of them are for the other bottom rad and I'm still haven't decided 100% if I'm going to run both bottom RADS that's the kind of thing we're going to figure out as we go but uh anyway um that's pretty much that so the things I have to get done today I have to swap the motherboard I still haven't decided if I'm going to reuse the maxus or use the other maxus that I have now that I'm not using the EK full cover block means that I'm going to be able to use that screen that I had to remove to use EK block which I thought was a really stupid design and then uh or if I'm going to go with the board that I did did um on one of our recent videos where we did high-end versus like more entry level pricing on the same tier products that mother board will actually fit in here and give me quite a bit more room than I currently have right now but I can't decide so we're just going to decide as I go all right here we go let's do the fill thingy e he he oh a a this is when I wish I had just gone with the Mystic fluid and said screw it to be honest uh anyway the problem with clear glycol as you can see is it gets foamy uh the foam will go away it just takes a long time for it to work the micro bubbles out as you can see in the dro plate the fluid just takes the path of of smoothest resistance which means all these Corners collect the air rated glycol which is what happens when you push air out of the system so basically it just takes a long time for all the air to make its way out I did something in this build I've never done before and that's two different color loops and I'm going to see how long I like this fun facts if I change any color loop it's going to be the CPU Loop cuz that one's super easy to fill and I don't have to worry about like the foam and stuff building up in there I have Micro bubbles that are stuck to the you know with surface tension glycol has a lot of stickiness to it so it sticks to stuff as you can see by these bubbles right here it actually makes it look like cold and frosty even though it's not that's just on the inside and you can see I'm overclocked to 315 I push the voltage all the way up because why the heck not let me turn down a little bit and see if I can even hold that clock nope so I'm Hing upper 40s at the most at 1.1 volts I don't actually run it like that at home I don't I'm actually running it hot right now because heat actually helps get those bubbles moving too uh it helps break up the bubbles cuz it creates a little more pressure and such so anyway just thought I'd show that I'm very very pleased with the performance of the GPU block I really am believe it or not with my EK block I was never getting this type of performance in terms of temperatures now in my room with the windows closed and stuff it'll get up into the mid-50s easy because it gets so hot in that room because there's a lot of heat there's a lot of thermal dynamics happening here that get exhausted to the room we talked all about that in another video about why your rooms turn into a furnace um anyway I'm not like displeased with the way anything turned out as you can see I ended up bringing back double bends instead of doing elbows so I actually got pretty lucky on a lot of these bends I use rotaries and cheated everywhere I possibly could to make them line up but why not cuz they they're all black now so they really just sort of blend into the setup but it looks so much cleaner by just having the black tubing with black fittings and using the rotaries to make them line up I'm okay with the fact that the GPU and CPU don't light up there's still enough happening on the motherboard obviously with the titanium Ram in there we got our LCD display showing on the uh front right here OLED display or whatever and then I made the Maris a skunk works and then I also we made the Loop colors on the fans or the fans that are part of Loops match the color of their Loop so for instance the purple fans up here are for the CPU and then blue actually I should make the front purple also because technically these are feeding air to the CPU Loop the bottom down here is all blue with twinkling purple lights in there it's hard to see on camera I'm sure there's blue blue with purple twinkling lights or pink and then up here that's like a purple violet with blue twinkling lights as an inverse so we got blue for the GPU and purple for the CPU nice thing RGB is I can change that if I decide it doesn't work for me uh one other thing I want to do right now is I'm going to stop this test we're going to see how fast the GPU cools down as soon as I stop the test so it's at 48 C 35 see 34 so you can see a lot of temperature directly comes from the fact that there is a there is a transfer loss between the component and the block itself that's just heat of the die and the amount of voltage needed to run 3,15 MHz right but it instantly dropped down to 33c and when I was idling earlier I was idling at about 21 C which is literally the ambient temperature of the room which is perfect see it's already down to 32 I do not have the fans doing anything special they are just on a default fan curve for the motherboard I haven't gone in and reconfigured any of these fans with the new headers using fan control which is a software I like to use for fans um what I'm going to do right now too is I'm going to go ahead and put everything back to the default I actually don't overclock my graphics card at home Believe It or Not mostly because I'm trying to keep temperatures down inside the room let's do this though I'm going to open up hardware monitor and I want to see how this CPU block does that's one right now that I'm really curious about so I'm going to use cinebench R23 to see what our initial temperatures look like you can see I am running a 57 all core and a 44 ecore cuz I did have a a CPU overclock going it probably won't hold that though cuz I did go in and reduce my max power limit to or uh watts to 300 which is still above where Intel recommends I don't want this that's a lot of work to get that CPU out I don't want to have to deal with changing out the CPU although it's not as much work as if it had an RGB cable so that's nice um let's go ahead now and run this test my package is at 35 C 81c at 1.25 volts 5.6 to 5.5 all core 4.4 that's dropping down because of the 300 watt limit I put on there it did Spike 86 for a second but I still have tuning to go in here and do I did clear my CA settings uh because I couldn't get an image even though I bench tested it turns out I forgot to plug the pcie 5.0 Cable in on the power supply side so it was only giving me igpu which is another reason why I say igpus are nice to have cuz you can use it for troubleshooting anyway it's up and running you can see now everything is uh little bubbles are starting so what happens if you're wondering about these little bubbles here and you can kind of see it right here I want to show you because I get questions about this all the time the little bubbles form into big bubbles and then the big bubbles eventually move it just takes time so I tend to leave my systems running and running and running when they're new as much as possible and then these micro bubbles on the reservoirs do eventually make their way off all right well there we go guys Skunk Works is now EK free I lied I have to be honest there's 1 2 3 4 five EK fittings still in here it's the ones on the bottom of the the uh Dro plates because I did not have enough extensions that I needed for those I feel really dirty about that but I need to get this system done so at least they're down in the bottom where you can't see them where they kind of belong in the basement Optimus if you're watching make this terminal out of acetol please this clear acrylic is a terrible contrast to the amazing ceramic matte black that you have going here this needs to be changed honestly oh and I want to point out bleeding on this GPU Loop was a pain in the ass something I did not account for with cross flow radiators is when you have them set vertically like I do right now it makes a massive place for air to collect if they're horizontal there's only the height of the radiator that it can collect when it's vertical or up and down that whole rad has to be full before it starts moving air or fluid again and then what happens is that fluid will make its way into the Next Rad cuz I have a series rad where it then has to fill up again and it gets to the point to where the pump has a hard time pushing that much air the pump can push air but it can't push that much like a huge chunk of air so yeah I probably wouldn't have kept thinking about that I probably would have gone cross flow Reds to be honest I don't think I did myself any favors by doing it this way I thought I would temperatures are probably very comparable to what they would have been but I did not think about the fact of how difficult it was to bleed I probably should have just left the second 280 out I ended up going with the or the the second rad in the bottom the 280 I should have left it out and 560 would have been easier to fill than having one rad have to fill another rad which then cuz it goes from Top out on one to bottom in on the other so once it's full then all it does is start to deal with not be able to move fluid cuz the other side's not full so it's just trickling into there and it's a slow painful process but I got it I also could have vacuum filled it but then we don't get to do film montages which kind of suck but next time I'm going to vacuum fill it cuz that at least will fill enough get enough of that cavity and enough of those areas full of fluid to where I at least would have been able to um get it moving if you will and I probably would have gotten a lot of foam honestly under vacuum to be honest cuz as soon as it would have repressurized instead of being depressurized it would have um just air rated and probably been a ton of foam but as you can see I'm dealing with that anyway all right guys thanks for watching uh now I can take it home and start playing games and stuff again which is nice cuz I'm looking forward to that all right guys thanks for watching as always we'll see you in the next oneokay so the work log continues um yeah so here's what I'm going to do today I'm going to kind of build on this and I don't think I'm going to do a whole lot of talking during it I think what end up being like kind of a build Montage on things I'm getting done and I'm going to recap at the end it just takes a lot of time to like slow down and stop and explain each step along the way um but uh yeah I think that's what we're going to do today hey day d d what we got work to do yeah I'm playing World of Warships World of Warships is the free-to-play naval strategy game where you command the most iconic and famous warships from World War I and World War II recreated with stunning detail and accuracy build your Fleet while participating in various game types while upgrading your ship's Arsenal along the way new players who sign up using my link below will receive an exclusive starter pack to get you up and running quickly by receiving 7 Days Premium Time 1 million credits 300 to blooms and the tier five premium ship the exitor so what do you guys waiting for start sinking ships of World of Warships by heading in the description below and getting your freebies there's a lot to kind of keep track of here I mean I didn't anticipate this being a full tear down of the system to get all the EK stuff out of there but I it allowed me like I said to sort of fix some things that I had problems with uh initially with this build build um that I wasn't too happy with but I'm going to be changing the fans out to the Leon Lee fans like I said These Are the Leon Lee V2s um mostly because of I I like the pattern that goes along the sides of the the fans and I think with everything being so Square in this build it'll go along really well with it um nice thing about these fans too is the fact that the 120s are actually extra thick they're 28 mm instead of 25 and because of the fact that I'm going with thinner radiators I want to be able to move more air through the RADS um that way I can make sure that I have plenty of cooling although I should have plenty of cooling cuz each these two represent my radiators actually I need two more of the 140s now that I think about it cuz I have the 280 on the back I forgot so there's two more 140s that are missing so you've ever wondered how many fan Skunk Works has it's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 plus one more on the back makes eight so there's eight 12s and then I have six 140s but four of these are for the top rad four of these are for the bottom rad and then two of them are for the other bottom rad and I'm still haven't decided 100% if I'm going to run both bottom RADS that's the kind of thing we're going to figure out as we go but uh anyway um that's pretty much that so the things I have to get done today I have to swap the motherboard I still haven't decided if I'm going to reuse the maxus or use the other maxus that I have now that I'm not using the EK full cover block means that I'm going to be able to use that screen that I had to remove to use EK block which I thought was a really stupid design and then uh or if I'm going to go with the board that I did did um on one of our recent videos where we did high-end versus like more entry level pricing on the same tier products that mother board will actually fit in here and give me quite a bit more room than I currently have right now but I can't decide so we're just going to decide as I go all right here we go let's do the fill thingy e he he oh a a this is when I wish I had just gone with the Mystic fluid and said screw it to be honest uh anyway the problem with clear glycol as you can see is it gets foamy uh the foam will go away it just takes a long time for it to work the micro bubbles out as you can see in the dro plate the fluid just takes the path of of smoothest resistance which means all these Corners collect the air rated glycol which is what happens when you push air out of the system so basically it just takes a long time for all the air to make its way out I did something in this build I've never done before and that's two different color loops and I'm going to see how long I like this fun facts if I change any color loop it's going to be the CPU Loop cuz that one's super easy to fill and I don't have to worry about like the foam and stuff building up in there I have Micro bubbles that are stuck to the you know with surface tension glycol has a lot of stickiness to it so it sticks to stuff as you can see by these bubbles right here it actually makes it look like cold and frosty even though it's not that's just on the inside and you can see I'm overclocked to 315 I push the voltage all the way up because why the heck not let me turn down a little bit and see if I can even hold that clock nope so I'm Hing upper 40s at the most at 1.1 volts I don't actually run it like that at home I don't I'm actually running it hot right now because heat actually helps get those bubbles moving too uh it helps break up the bubbles cuz it creates a little more pressure and such so anyway just thought I'd show that I'm very very pleased with the performance of the GPU block I really am believe it or not with my EK block I was never getting this type of performance in terms of temperatures now in my room with the windows closed and stuff it'll get up into the mid-50s easy because it gets so hot in that room because there's a lot of heat there's a lot of thermal dynamics happening here that get exhausted to the room we talked all about that in another video about why your rooms turn into a furnace um anyway I'm not like displeased with the way anything turned out as you can see I ended up bringing back double bends instead of doing elbows so I actually got pretty lucky on a lot of these bends I use rotaries and cheated everywhere I possibly could to make them line up but why not cuz they they're all black now so they really just sort of blend into the setup but it looks so much cleaner by just having the black tubing with black fittings and using the rotaries to make them line up I'm okay with the fact that the GPU and CPU don't light up there's still enough happening on the motherboard obviously with the titanium Ram in there we got our LCD display showing on the uh front right here OLED display or whatever and then I made the Maris a skunk works and then I also we made the Loop colors on the fans or the fans that are part of Loops match the color of their Loop so for instance the purple fans up here are for the CPU and then blue actually I should make the front purple also because technically these are feeding air to the CPU Loop the bottom down here is all blue with twinkling purple lights in there it's hard to see on camera I'm sure there's blue blue with purple twinkling lights or pink and then up here that's like a purple violet with blue twinkling lights as an inverse so we got blue for the GPU and purple for the CPU nice thing RGB is I can change that if I decide it doesn't work for me uh one other thing I want to do right now is I'm going to stop this test we're going to see how fast the GPU cools down as soon as I stop the test so it's at 48 C 35 see 34 so you can see a lot of temperature directly comes from the fact that there is a there is a transfer loss between the component and the block itself that's just heat of the die and the amount of voltage needed to run 3,15 MHz right but it instantly dropped down to 33c and when I was idling earlier I was idling at about 21 C which is literally the ambient temperature of the room which is perfect see it's already down to 32 I do not have the fans doing anything special they are just on a default fan curve for the motherboard I haven't gone in and reconfigured any of these fans with the new headers using fan control which is a software I like to use for fans um what I'm going to do right now too is I'm going to go ahead and put everything back to the default I actually don't overclock my graphics card at home Believe It or Not mostly because I'm trying to keep temperatures down inside the room let's do this though I'm going to open up hardware monitor and I want to see how this CPU block does that's one right now that I'm really curious about so I'm going to use cinebench R23 to see what our initial temperatures look like you can see I am running a 57 all core and a 44 ecore cuz I did have a a CPU overclock going it probably won't hold that though cuz I did go in and reduce my max power limit to or uh watts to 300 which is still above where Intel recommends I don't want this that's a lot of work to get that CPU out I don't want to have to deal with changing out the CPU although it's not as much work as if it had an RGB cable so that's nice um let's go ahead now and run this test my package is at 35 C 81c at 1.25 volts 5.6 to 5.5 all core 4.4 that's dropping down because of the 300 watt limit I put on there it did Spike 86 for a second but I still have tuning to go in here and do I did clear my CA settings uh because I couldn't get an image even though I bench tested it turns out I forgot to plug the pcie 5.0 Cable in on the power supply side so it was only giving me igpu which is another reason why I say igpus are nice to have cuz you can use it for troubleshooting anyway it's up and running you can see now everything is uh little bubbles are starting so what happens if you're wondering about these little bubbles here and you can kind of see it right here I want to show you because I get questions about this all the time the little bubbles form into big bubbles and then the big bubbles eventually move it just takes time so I tend to leave my systems running and running and running when they're new as much as possible and then these micro bubbles on the reservoirs do eventually make their way off all right well there we go guys Skunk Works is now EK free I lied I have to be honest there's 1 2 3 4 five EK fittings still in here it's the ones on the bottom of the the uh Dro plates because I did not have enough extensions that I needed for those I feel really dirty about that but I need to get this system done so at least they're down in the bottom where you can't see them where they kind of belong in the basement Optimus if you're watching make this terminal out of acetol please this clear acrylic is a terrible contrast to the amazing ceramic matte black that you have going here this needs to be changed honestly oh and I want to point out bleeding on this GPU Loop was a pain in the ass something I did not account for with cross flow radiators is when you have them set vertically like I do right now it makes a massive place for air to collect if they're horizontal there's only the height of the radiator that it can collect when it's vertical or up and down that whole rad has to be full before it starts moving air or fluid again and then what happens is that fluid will make its way into the Next Rad cuz I have a series rad where it then has to fill up again and it gets to the point to where the pump has a hard time pushing that much air the pump can push air but it can't push that much like a huge chunk of air so yeah I probably wouldn't have kept thinking about that I probably would have gone cross flow Reds to be honest I don't think I did myself any favors by doing it this way I thought I would temperatures are probably very comparable to what they would have been but I did not think about the fact of how difficult it was to bleed I probably should have just left the second 280 out I ended up going with the or the the second rad in the bottom the 280 I should have left it out and 560 would have been easier to fill than having one rad have to fill another rad which then cuz it goes from Top out on one to bottom in on the other so once it's full then all it does is start to deal with not be able to move fluid cuz the other side's not full so it's just trickling into there and it's a slow painful process but I got it I also could have vacuum filled it but then we don't get to do film montages which kind of suck but next time I'm going to vacuum fill it cuz that at least will fill enough get enough of that cavity and enough of those areas full of fluid to where I at least would have been able to um get it moving if you will and I probably would have gotten a lot of foam honestly under vacuum to be honest cuz as soon as it would have repressurized instead of being depressurized it would have um just air rated and probably been a ton of foam but as you can see I'm dealing with that anyway all right guys thanks for watching uh now I can take it home and start playing games and stuff again which is nice cuz I'm looking forward to that all right guys thanks for watching as always we'll see you in the next one\n"