Gadgetory

hey guys you're watching Jays two cents I'm finally going to get to bring you a video that you've been asking for and I've been wanting to bring you for a long time together we're going to build a water cooling loop for less than $200 so don't go anywhere when it comes to water cooling loops that can definitely range anywhere from a hundred bucks up to a thousand dollars depending on the parts that you choose and because there's so many parts in between there a lot of people get very confused on how to build their very first water cooling loop so together today I'm going to show you all the basics and I do mean basics on how to build an inexpensive budget custom water cooling loop for your CPU now when it comes to building a custom water loop that can range all over the place in price and people always ask me why you should build a custom water cooling loop hey the sun's going away people always ask me why you should build a custom water cooling loop compared to going with like an H 100 I or an H ATI or cracking or something like that it really comes down to future customization the sealed kits are good they don't get me wrong I'm not dogging on the the sealed kits at all in fact we've got a JD sitting or Nhat I sitting right here in this very expensive very compact build that we did in a previous video but the reason why I certainly advocate building your own custom loop is it gives you customization options in the future if you want to add a graphics card to your loop you can't do that if you go with an all-in-one unit like behind me but you can certainly expand upon an upgrade your system over time if you go with a custom loop so that's what we're focusing on today when it comes to building your custom loop that are some parts are going to be required and we're talking basic parts remember this video here is all about building a custom loop for your CPU AMD or Intel for less than two hundred dollars now when it comes to putting together your system there are some basic parts you're going to need and remember this is a basic build and buy basic I mean we're keeping it under two hundred dollars which is a very cheap custom loop first things first you're going to need some tubing and right here we have the master clear it is a red tubing and it is 1/2 inch inner diameter I perfect I prefer 1/2 inch inner diameter but you can go 3/8 seven sixteenths there's all sorts of sizes when it comes to size they're not going to perform any differently it's just generally as you add more blocks and components to your system you should go with a larger inner diameter that we have better flow that's the only thing is flow has nothing to do with temperatures now for the pump in this build we chose the fobia DC 12 260 pump it is a 12-volt pump it's got a three pin header don't put this on your mother by the way guys I I mean you could like chant it's just better to hook it up to a molex adapter yeah but it's got plenty of flow it's got more than enough power to power this entire loop push the fluid no problem in fact you could even use this with a graphics card or even multiple blocks and not have any problems whatsoever it is a non variable speed pump but it is very powerful you're going to need a water block through CPU obviously it's the whole point we're doing this build and for this build we are using the race storm this is a a acetal and copper block right here it is by excess PC it's a great block I used it in my AMD build and we're going to be using it in this AMD build that we're going to be using as a test for this entire loop right here so you're gonna need a water block you're going to need obviously a radiator because the radiator is what makes everything cool we are using the excess PC e x 240 I believe is a teeny X 240 it is the part number that's a thin 30 millimeter radiator it's got plenty of airflow I mean you can see right through it so you can see my face so you can use low-speed fans you're going to need a way to hold all of your fluid and for that we chose to go with the Swift Tec MC I only remember the part number but it is their micro res v2 it's not the flashiest looking reservoir out there but it's cheap I mean you can get these for 25 bucks brand-new then it comes with all the hardware obviously to mount it and it's got multiple port options and it's very anti turbulent with this little shelf in here I highly recommend this reservoir if you're on a budget you're going to need some fans obviously for your radiator fans are one of those things where noise is certainly the number one issue when it comes to fan and then on top of that you've got static pressure and you want to make sure you can get the air through your fans now what I have right here are yeat loon medium speed fans these are the D 12 SM 12 so this is the medium speed fan right here which is absolutely water coolers if you ask any form any water cooling expert they'll probably tell you for the best bang for the buck fan yeat loons are where you want to go and you can get these fans for four dollars on various water cooling sites and parts sites I've sleeved these myself that way they don't look as bad they do come with bare wires these are sleeved already and we're going to be using these fans because of their amazing performance to sound ratio for four bucks you can't go wrong Gate lune fans definitely consider those okay you're obviously going to need some fluid for this build we are just using simple distilled water tap water is no good purified drinking water is no good you want distilled water it's a process that gets rid of all of the impurities and all the minerals inside of the fluid and this is the best thing that you can go with for your system and when you're doing distilled water you have to have a way to stop the growth so you're going to want to go with some sort of an anti algae additive this is just PT nuke two drops of it is all you're going to need for the entire loop you could pretreat the water I wouldn't recommend it just add it to your system after it's all put together and bleeding people are going to ask what about colored fluids or what about like the Nano fluid behind you fluids are one of those things that have been debated for as long as I've been water cooling which is easily ten years and distilled water is always one of the best performing fluids that you can possibly put in but because it doesn't have any anti corrosives in it if you start mixing metals like copper and nickel and brass and aluminum depending on the part you go if you could start to see corrosion issues so when you go with a pre-mixed fluid from the various companies that are out there typically they have some sort of an anti corrosive additive put into them now distilled water over time has never shown to actually corrode the metals but there are people that would argue that if you want to take an extra step in precaution you can get what's called a kill coil it's basically just a piece of pure silver that you can coil up or inside of in place inside of a tube or you can put it in the bottom of your reservoir in fact you can see we have these different plugs in here they even sell kill coils that are on the threaded plugs you can use it to plug this at the same time the silver is on the inside I've never ever used to kill coil with any of my distilled water loops and I've never had a problem you could go with an advanced fluid like I have back here in my system which is the Mayhem's nano fluid it's not required it's just one of those things I've actually testing out for the first time myself I'm very impressed with this fluid but for the basic build like this distilled water and PT nuke some sort of an anti algae mixture is all you need now last but not least you're gonna need some sort of tools obviously and for that I just got my basic multi-tool which you've seen in some my other videos different Phillips and flathead screwdrivers and nut drivers on it and then I use actual tubing cutter for my builds because I do water cooling built all the time so it's just easier to use that to cut but you could use a pair of large scissors or a razor blade when you're cutting thin wall tubing like this it's not a problem to use scissors but if you do use thicker 3/4 inch wall tubing or something you'll find that razor blades and scissors just can't really get through it as well which is why I prefer the cutters these are cobalt got these at Home Depot for about I think 10 bucks maybe 15 at the most so even then it's not that expensive and we may have more uses for you in the future who knows a couple of things accessories that I would say are going to come in handy zip ties for this build we're not using compression fittings we are going to be using barbed fittings you're going to want to have two fittings for every single component that you have because every component has an in and an out so however many components you have radiator block reservoir pump that's for you're going to have two four six eight of fittings that are necessary and because we're keeping things on the cheap we are going to simply be a fixing our tube to the barbs by just using zip ties hey may look a little ghetto but again guys this is the basic water cooling build here okay so now we've gone over the parts let's go ahead and turn around and let's get the system prepped and ready to accept the new parts and so we're going to take off the stock cooler I'm going to take off the upper fan that's in this case behind me and for those of you that are wondering what we're using here for our video it is an AMD athlon x4 with a GTX 460 we're not water cooling the card only the CPU and we are putting this in a h8 Cooler Master HAF 922 airflow case so when it comes to getting your system prepped and ready to go you're going to want to remove anything from the case that could potentially be in the way or that you wouldn't want to accidentally get damaged and as always when you're working with computers you are going to be even when you're doing water cooling you are going to be working with a somewhat static environment so you want to make sure that you discharge yourself and take the same kind of precautions that you would working in building a computer when handling any of the parts so to get this computer ready to go I'm going to remove the graphics card I'm going to remove any of the cabling out of the way that may be in the way I'm going to remove the top fan because that's where our radiator is going to go and I'm going to remove our cooler from our graphic from our motherboard but we're going to leave the socket in place we're then going to cool off cool off yeah we're going to definitely cool off this baby we are going to clean off the processor here with 75% or greater isopropyl alcohol we are using 91% here with a lint-free paper towel and clean it off with a microfiber at the NC of a nice perfectly clean finish on the top of the processor so we'll go ahead and do that and then we'll come back afterwards and show you what comes next okay on this field because we are going AMD we're going to have to go ahead and also remove the stock socket retainer here for the AMD you're going to have to consult your block and your motherboard depending on the chipset and what you're going with specifically for your parts to see whether or not you do or don't have to do this so definitely consult the manual that comes with your CPU block and follow those instructions not necessarily mine okay so now that we've got the system ready to go I've removed the top fan for the radiator we have room for that and I've removed the AMD socket and the stock cooler from that and this is why I want to point out that it's very important to use quality thermal compound most of the time the thermal compound that comes with your CPU blocks your water cooling kit are going to be perfectly fine but as an option you may want to choose to use a thermal compound that you like for this build I'm going to be using two NIC TX for the socket thermal paste or the CPU thermal paste that came on the stop cooler over time turned into this and as you can see that is a very very nasty it this is what this is why CPUs cook themselves in overheat over time the thermal compound breaks down and no longer does its job in fact that's one of the reasons why we're water cooling this PC now because this thing has been getting extremely hot and for the sake of this video we're now putting water cooling in here so that you guys can learn how to do it so now that we've got all that ready to go the next thing you want to do is you want to install your CPU block onto your CPU use your thermal compound use the method that's comfortable to you and then we will come back and show you what's next okay now we've got the CPU block installed per the manufacturer installation recommendations definitely consult your manual make sure you're installing that right you'll want to take any chances with your CPU socket now most water blocks will have marked on them an inlet and an outlet it's very important that you keep that in mind when you're positioning your block because you want to make sure that it's on the optimal side however you're going to run this loop so next thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and prep our radiator we're going to get our fans mounted to that we're going to get the radiator mounted up on the top now the most common question people ask when it comes to radiator installation and when it comes to the fans is whether or not they should go in a pool configuration which is where the fan pulls the air through the radiator and exhausted or if they should go in a push configuration where the fan goes under the radiator and pushes air through it there's really not been any seriously conclusive evidence that either one is better than the other the most optimal would obviously be a push pool which is where you have a fan on either side of the radiator kind of like this pushing air and pulling air at the same time on the different fans the spots on the fan for the radiator but in a basic build like this we're not going to do that I personally in low thin and low fin count radiators like this one here which is optimized for slower speed fans I prefer a push configuration that way the fan has as much air available to it and the air only has one way to go which is through the radiator so because you're dealing with a lower speed fan I prefer a push configuration so we're going to be setting up these fans here to push the air through the radiator like this and that the radiator is then going to get mounted to the top of the case like so so we're going to fans on the bottom pushing air through the top now you also want to keep in mind which is going to be most convenient on which end to have the barb pump you can install the radiator like this with the barbs in the back or you can install the radiator the other way with the barbs in the front depending on what's most convenient so you're going to have to kind of plan ahead a little bit on the routing for your tubing and determine which is going to be best for you just a little tech tip when it comes to installing the fans onto your radiator you want to make sure that you use the included hardware with your radiator if you bought the radiator new it's going to come with the specific screws intended for your radiator if you take screws that are too long say these guys right here they can potentially push all the way through the fan and all the way down into the radiator tubes some of the rows and the radiators which is the passages that the fluid flow flows through it's hard to say that the fluid flows through may line up perfectly with those screws and if you puncture that your radiator is toast so you want to make sure that you use the right screw that you don't that it comes with the radiator if you have to buy a hardware home depot you definitely want to make sure that you measure and get the right screws that way you don't puncture your radiator it's a little tech tip for you be very careful that you don't screw the radiator the fan too far down into the radiator and let your screws are the proper length very important okay so now that we've got the radiator together we got the fans mounted you want to kind of keep the cabling nice and orderly we mounted the fans on the side that the cables come out the back that way they're easily tucked away and they're not going to be in the way making your build look tacky so now that we've got things ready to go let's go ahead and mount it to the top of the case and then from there we'll start planning where we're going to put our tubing and our pump we'll get this thing up and running in no time okay we're back we've got the radiator mounted on the top we've got the CPU block installed on the CPU here the next thing we want to do is get the rest of our parts ready to go and you want to install your fittings on top of your other parts or in your other parts that's going to include reservoir pump and that's pretty much it what's left on these now a point I want to make when it comes to installing the fittings on your various parts most of the parts you'll be dealing with the top of this block this pump this reservoir they're all plastic so it's really important that you don't over tighten when it comes to installing a metal barb onto a plastic piece it's really easy to strip out the threads and once you do that you just ruin your day what you want to do is you want to tighten these down hand tight until you can't get the any tighter and then if what I typically do is I take a wrench and I'll turn it just maybe an eight turn more now if you're dealing with the metal part you can type it down a little bit more it's going to be one of those topics it's a little bit debated on how tight you should do it some people say hand tight only and nothing more I agree with that statement only for good measure I do about another eighth of a turn more with the wrench and if never once stripped any sort of thread I've never had any problems so it's going to get the rest of our parts ready to go and what we're going to do now is we're going to start getting our parts positioned on where we think will have the most optimal flow and pattern here inside of our system it's going to be a little bit unique in this case this case is not as water cooling friendly as many others on the market if you're dealing with a small case it's going to be really tight and because of the limited mounting options of this pump I'm probably going to end up going to sided tape which may sound really ghetto but I've done it myself for years and had no problems whatsoever but when it comes to the order of parts since we're now going to be planning our system is you need to make sure that you have the outlet of your reservoir directly feeding the inlet of the pump and that the reservoir at least level wise is higher than the pump that way gravity can feed into the pump when you're priming your system we'll talk more about that when it comes time to fill your system and bleed it but make sure that you have your pump being fed directly by the reservoir and that the reservoir is a little bit higher than the pump it's very very important ok I'm back now and it's starting to get dark because it took me so long to figure out how I wanted to run this so I've gone ahead and mounted my reservoir and my pump because those are the two as I mentioned in the previous segment that have the most important correlation with each other so what I've come up with here is I've got the pump or the reservoir mounted to the drive cage and I've got the pump mounted to the floor directly below the reservoir so you can see we've got a short little piece of tubing feeding it and we barely made this fit because we have the PCI Express cables here for our GTX 460 and we've got to make a fairly decent loop out of the pump into the radiator in fact we're going to into the radiator over here so it's going to be a long piece of tube which isn't quite I deal but unfortunately the half 922 is not as friendly as I would like it to be plus because we're on the cheap we're not using any 45 or 90 degree elbow fittings because that makes the easily double the cost of this bill so now we're going to do is I'm going to kind of plan out where I'm going to route my tubing when you get my tubing cut measure twice cut once because once you cut it you can't make it longer again I'm going to I uh hose up we're gonna we're need some hose up in here keep your mind clean there guys and you're going to pull out your hose again keep your mind clean and we're going to get this thing plumbed up and then I'll show you how we came up with the path that we have and hopefully it won't look ridiculous but it's definitely going to get the job done okay now one quick tip I want to show you here when you're using a thin wall tubing like this it's really easy to get a kink if it's if you can't really see that too well this tube right here is pinched completely shut because of how tight of a bend that is but it's not only because it's a tight Bend it's also because the tubing is too long so if you get a kink like that you can slowly start trimming off the end of the tube and then you'll notice that that kink will start becoming a little bit less and less each time you can also kind of do a little bit of a just a little bit of eyeballing on there and eventually you'll get it so that once it's in there it's not kinking at all in fact we're almost there now so got a little bit of a kink but we'll get we'll get that squared away okay so here's our order we've got reservoir to pump and one thing that's very important is that you actually have the reservoir feeding the inlet of the pump every pump has an inlet and an outlet and it does matter so make sure you consult your pumps manual to find out which Inlet and outlet which ports are Inlet and outlet so we're going from reservoir to pump from pump into the radiator out of the radiator into the CPU block and out of the CPU block back into the reservoir now it's not the cleanest loop but it gets the job done and this is a when you go with a budget system like this it's definitely going to be about function over form so it it really doesn't look so bad in person um you can to see on the camera there it's it's a little bit blood wicking and intestine II but it gets the job done so the next thing we're going to do now is we're going to simply zip tie off each one of these barbs right on the point where it meets the tube and then we are going to come back we're going to start filling it up and performing our leak test okay so everything's now plumbed up and all of the connections have been zip tie fitted nothing is going to go anywhere so now when it comes to filling your loop you're going to fill in using your reservoir obviously hopefully your reservoir has an inlet on the top and you're going to fill this lower or you fill this reservoir as far up as it will go and then you're going to slightly lean the case around to get some of that fluid to move around into the pump and into into here and then you're going to cycle the pump on and on for only a few seconds at a time just so that it pulls the fluid in once the fluid goes down into the pump you want to turn it off before it runs dry and rinse and repeat that process now it's very important that you don't run your pump dry running it dry is definitely the worst thing you can do for it the fluid actually works as a as a lubricant for the bearing it's a floating bearing in there which means the lubricant moves around the bearing and it causes it to never touch the side of the housing or the motor housing so if you run it dry it's just grinding against the housing and it will destroy a pump in no time flat so we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and get the system bled we're going to fill the reservoir as far as we can cycle the pump on and off and by cycling the pump you're going to want to use either a second power supply or you can unhook the 24-pin power supply in your plug here and then you can jumper the green and black wire on your 24 pin make sure it is not plugged into your motherboard and then you can jumper these two pins cycle your power supply on and off that way you can run your pump without killing your system in the meantime now as you start to fill your system you're going to want to make sure that you don't fill it too fast because you are dealing with a closed loop it's pretty much sealed once you start to fill it with water here it may not flow down into the reservoir as fast as you're pouring it you don't want to have it leak inside of your system also once you start to fill up down during the water level starts to rise we have water right here in the tube you want to just kind of preliminarily check preliminary lemon airily I don't even know if that's a word you want to make sure that none of these fittings are leaking right here first off so that's kind of your first process of doing the leak check it's as you're pouring you're going to be keeping an eye out for anything that may be leaking okay so now that we've got the reservoir as full as it will go in fact we've actually backed up slightly into the funnel it's a good thing my funnel makes the seal as I push it down in there this is the part we're going to jump on our power supply and we're going to start cycling the pump until it pulls that fluid down starts making flow and then we're going to turn it off refill it and rinse and repeat see as fast as I turned on that pump it pulled almost all of that fluid down in there that's kind of the drawback of having a small reservoir like this but unfortunately it's just the part we're using so we need to make sure that we don't run it dries it to be fast on the switch okay we're going to start getting to the point now to where it's going to start making a complete loop because up until now every time it's pulled in the fluid it's never come back out into the reservoir which means we still have more air than fluid in the system but now we're getting to the point to where it's going to start making a complete flow which is where we're going to want to start doing our leak testing and then making sure that we keep the reservoir topped off as the air works its way out of the system as you can see now like I said we've reached that part where we're getting a complete flow going the water is very aerated for two reasons one the water level is low and two there's a lot of air in the system and an error is going to take time to work its way out it's going to get trapped up here in the radiator it's going to get trapped some of these tubes so now is where we want to top it off to where the water level is at least higher than the return line and then we're going to just let it run for a while turning it on and off and on and off making sure that we can get the air to move out of the places that its trapped but as you can see the pump is quieting down we've got a lot less aeration going on there but all of these little bubbles that you see churning around here in the corner those are a sign that we still have air in the system so we're going to let this go for a while we're going to turn it off we're going to turn it back on and every time we do you're going to notice that we get more air bubbles now one other thing that you can do to help promote movement of air inside the system it's just to kind of slowly tilt it along on its edges like this and every time you do you'll usually see more bubbles working their way out of the system I don't tilt too far especially if you have your reservoir open because if you do you're going to find that you're going to leak water all over the place and now that we've got the system filled and it's running and we're letting it bleed this is where we're going to start doing our leak test and to do that we're going to put paper towels around all of our components that have a fitting that way we can check to see if we're getting any sort of leakage from any of these fittings now one last trick that you can do to help promote the movement of air inside of your system is if you have thin wall tubing like this is you can pinch it a few times and every time you do you'll notice this is semi-transparent tubing so I can see the fluid moving through here and I can also see where we have some of the air trapped now when it comes to leak testing a lot of the experts will tell you that they recommend leak testing anywhere from 12 to 24 hours I definitely recommend that if you're new to water cooling and you have never dealt with it before I would leave all of your components unplugged leave your paper towels and leave the PSU or the power supply unit jumpered like this with the pump running for at least 24 hours prior to putting all of your components back to power because I'm not going to do that I'm going to do probably 20 minutes at best because I've done so many systems and I'm so confident in my ability to water cool but and the fact that we already have no leaks leaks tend to not really form over time unless you have a degradation of part or an o-ring fail or something like that which is no amount of leak testing with fine if something's going to fail anyway so I definitely recommend if you're new perform a good long leak test if you're an experienced builder chances are that you're just watching this video for fun and we'll want to let this thing run for a while and make sure that we have no leaks now over time the water fluid is going to start to drop because we are still replacing air with fluid so you want to just keep an eye on the water level and you'll want to refill that as necessary but before you close your reservoir back up you want to leave at least a little bit of space for air to move to that way the air has a place to go and replace itself with fluid so leave a little bit of air gap at the top don't fill all the way to the brim okay so now that you performed all of your leak testing your system is running there's no leaks you're happy with it the last thing you want to do is you want to add two drops of your anti fungal anti algae your PT nuke whatever you want to call it to your water cooling loop and we're talking just two drops is all it's needed this is very strong stuff and you can add this right into your reservoir and then this will add this will protect your system from there being any sort of algae growth at all overtime okay just one last point I'd like to make now before we finish up is the tubing right here that runs in front of the graphics card I made sure that it was a little bit longer than necessary because we want to make sure that if you have to access your graphics card and get it out of there that you can do so without the tubing blocking it in so we have plenty of slack on here that way we can get the graphics card out if we need to do that okay so that's it now if you follow this tutorial you would have built your very first water cooling system for your CPU this is everything done behind me as you can see we added a red light it really doesn't look too bad and the tubing doesn't really look at it place on this AMD athlon x4 at stock spades right now our core under load and this is load 25 degrees Celsius we are running prime95 right now and 25 degrees Celsius under 22 degrees on the CPU socket 25 on the core now this is a stock speeds but what does this mean if when you run this type of cooling option you get a lot more Headroom to do cool things with your computer overclocking and stress testing and better performance in gaming so now we're going to overclock this thing we're going to end this video hopefully you guys found this easy we ran overclock this see exactly what we can get out of it see how much temperature Headroom we have this thing is running so cool it's actually surpassing what I thought it would perform as very simple loop didn't cost a lot I hope you found this video very helpful now if you're not a beginner and you already know the basics of water cooling but you were hoping to learn a little bit more about doing advanced water cooling techniques and multiple radiators stronger pumps bigger reservoirs and how to plumb everything to look very very cool and streamlined and flashy and all that cool stuff and you have a lot more budget to spend to do that then you're definitely gonna want to stay tuned for next week when I show you how to build an advanced water cooling system with multiple radiators and high end luxury parts for water going thanks for watching guys as always if you've liked this video you know what to do if you stumbled across my channel and liked what you saw I hope you stick around and hit that subscribe button because it will get you more videos like this for myself Jays two cents and as always I'll see you in my next video