Maintaining Your Loop
As this is the final episode of Water Cooling 101 I would be remiss if I failed to at least touch on loop maintenance. If you’ve followed the whole series you should have a good idea of how to break down and drain your loop. If not check out Episode 6 where I go into detail on how I drain and break down a loop.
This is going to be an important activity for you as a water loop owner. If you followed our methodology for prepping your parts, and you used distilled water, everything you put in the loop should be free of contaminants. Unfortunately it is still very likely that your loop will start to develope some build up and/or bacterial growth.
There are a couple of things that can be done to counter this. The most recommended is the use of a pure silver strip placed into the reservoir. The silver will kill off any bacteria that starts to grow. You can also use a biocide or dye containing a biocide that will of course kill bacteria as well. Certainly these products are really only extending the time between “flushes”.
Flushing is a term used in the water cooling community for the process of draining your loop and refilling with fresh distilled water. Typically this is done at least every six months if you aren’t using an anti bacterial method and even with a biocide or silver strip it is recommended to replace the water at least once a year.
This is also a great opportunity to try out some new tubing or dye since the loop is drained. A lot of the appeal of water cooling is in the aesthetics. Most of us don’t worry about the time period between water changes as we end up breaking down the loop to change or upgrade some part of our loop or rig anyway.
Thanks for Reading!
It’s been a long journey but we are now at the end. The ThinkComputers Water cooling 101 series is a project that we have been working on for a long time and we can’t thank you enough for reading and using the guides! Building watercooling loops is one of our most favorite parts of modding and computing and we truly hope that you find as much enjoyment in it as we do. Equipped with the knowledge we’ve given you here, you should have no trouble building and maintaining your own epic water cooling loop! Check out all of the Water Cooling 101 Episodes below:
– Water Cooling 101: Why Water Cooling and The Gear Used
– Water Cooling 101: Designing Your Loop and Choosing Your Parts
– Water Cooling 101: The ThinkComputers WC101 Rig – Product Overviews
– Water Cooling 101: Your Parts Arrived, Now What?
– Water Cooling 101: Installing Your Basic Loop
– Water Cooling 101: Upgrading Your Loop
– Water Cooling 101: Adding Memory Blocks & Maintaining Your Loop
One thing I appreciate about this series is that you make some mention of material composition in your write-up on choosing components, and you highlighted some radiators that are composed of good materials that won’t destroy a loop over time.
Here, however, you are showing a product whose material composition is never mentioned in your article, and upon further searching, I find that Phobya’s website makes no mention of the materials used, and the web stores I’ve found that carry this product only describe it as ‘anodized aluminum’, with nickel plated brass fittings.
I want to believe that it’s safe to assume that the water channels in these blocks are copper or brass, but if Phobya doesn’t care enough to confirm this on their own product website, why should I trust them at all?
This article was a good overview of how to install RAM blocks, and I appreciate that you told us that watercooling RAM is mainly for aesthetics. However I’m disappointed that you didn’t put the loop together in such a way that you could test it and show us your temperatures, as you did when you added a GPU block. It would’ve been interesting to see what, if any impact the added restriction had on your more critical components.
2 things I would have done differently (but using the same products):
1) Either change out the stock 1/2″ barbs (on the RAM modules) for compression fittings – looks as though the barbs can be replaced – or used (red) barbs throughout the system, for uniformity.
2) Speaking of uniformity; I would have either changed the tubing for all 3/8″, or would have continued using the 1/2″ x 3/4″, the tubing run looks funny with 2 different sizes of tubing.
Just my 2 cents