For Science!

Maintenance is not just about replacing the coolant, you should consider cleaning the insides of the blocks occasionally. Doing a custom loop on a new build is fine, nothing intrinsically wrong about it as long as you know the components work.

1. Make sure you are 120% sure you want to do it, if you have doubts, probably better steer clear 2. If you want to do hard tubing, regardless of whether it is your first time or not, just do it. No amount of soft tubing experience will prepare you for hard tubing 3. Buy cheap and you will buy twice, so invest in quality 4. If shipping is not free, better buy in slight excess as time is money too (regarding fittings, tubing, etc) 5. Get a proper coolant

My advice: spend part of the $300 on an aircooler or liquid cooled AIO. Buy the system, assemble it as a normal air-cooled system. Play with it for a while, ask yourself whether you really want a custom liquid cooled system, and then decide whether you have the courage to do it yourself or not. That way you know your system a bit better and you might decide that you need the remiander of the $300 for something else anyway. In short, no, I wouldn't get somebody to assemble a custom loop for you.

In my opinion, a CPU-only loop does not often significantly outperform for example a 360 mm radiator AIO, so for performance it makes the least sense. GPU cooling works quite well, so if you have a loud and hot GPU, a GPU-only loop makes more sense in my (unpopular) opinion. Again, its more about the aftercare and support he is willing to provide, because if it just means that when something goes wrong or 1 year later for maitenance, you yourself will have to learn how to take apart a loop and put it back together, then you might as well learn now and then do it yourself. So in my opinion its not about whether he can build it well or cheap for $300, is that whether you are willing to be dependent on this dude for the long term for maintenance. If not, don't do it, if yes, then you can consider it.

What guarantee does the person provide? Make sure that this $300 covers for any potential damage they may cause, and subsequent trouble shooting. I wouldn't let anybody do the work unless they are really willing to stand by their work As a minimum they should: - Confirm the system works before starting the work - Go through with you the design they intend on implementing (regardless of hard tubing/soft tubing) - Do the installation within a specified time frame (no use if they take half a year to complete the job) - Ensure that the system works after the installation - Provide some form of instructions for the maintenance procedure, or better agree to a certain maintenance schedule (frequency and cost) - Provide aftercare support. Otherwise those $300 are wasted for a potential botched job with no support. Paying money to get a custom loop is one thing, but then it would suck if you are just left in the blue when something goes wrong or in 1 or 2 years when you need to change the coolant.

Radiator + Chiller combo kinda works as long as you don't intend on taking the water temperature below ambient temperature (room temperature), as soon as you want to go subambient using the chiller, the presence of the radiator will be hindering.

My quad-2080 Ti blower workstation begs to differ. It runs just fine without heat issues while maintaining a decent noise profile and at least stock clocks.

Post pictures

Going to assume this is due to decreasing viscosity with increased temperature. Is this just water, or perhaps some glycol based coolant?

Assuming conventional (most logical), black to black (ground) and then red to yellow.

I see, so basically your external system operates by mixing in cold(er) water into the PC system's reservoir. I guess that works too!

How is the QDCs plumbed into the main system? can you run the loop with the QDCs loose or do you have to seal the ends with a short run to complete the run? I'm gussing at the moment you have males on one end and females on the other end, and so if you have male and female on each end, you could seal them up without the need for the orange run.

Don't forget that Noctua's massive purpose designed passive heatsink is supposedly coming out this quarter. This would be my first bet, if it fits in the case https://bit-tech.net/news/noctua-starts-mass-production-of-its-passive-cpu-cooler/1/ https://hexus.net/tech/news/cooling/144454-noctuas-hulking-passive-cpu-cooler-delayed-q1-2021/

Whats the point of asking whether it is worth it or not? With the amount of time and typing that has gone into the thread you probably could have written three full reports of the missing "l". Just don't get upset if its not fixed in the next patch as it won't be a top priority.

Its actually push-only, so its a front exhaust. I have all my radiators on exhaust so that the heat is thrown directly out of the case instead of reheating the internals. the rear fan is the only intake of my system, and I have 5 fans rotating quite slowly that scales with fluid temperatures.

Since you're doing soft tubing its not as tight, but here is my drain port to give you an idea about how you could do it. T-fitting, male-to-male fittings coming off the radiator, ball valve, and an angled fitting with a stop plug. When its time to drain, I attach another fitting with soft tubing onto the plugged fitting, then open the ball valve.

Unless you have a particular use case in mind, I don’t think they’re worth it (I.e. if you need to ask whether you need or not, you probably don’t). A well placed drain port will negate its purpose for regular maintenance so in my limited brain power they could be useful for.... 1 : external radiators 2: test benches, I guess 3: Reservoirless SFF builds

I think with EK they just have a wider userbase, and so more novices mess things up (my opinion, no data to back it up). I've used fittings from EKWB, Alphacool, Bitspower. As Mick says above, my opinion is also any fitting from a reputable company (including Barrow, in my opinion) is a decent choice. My comment would be to get tubing from the same company as the fitting to maximize compatibility to minimize chances of a poor mate

Barrow over EKWB fittings? 2020 is full of surprises!

Welcome to the forums I guess then. Yes, the RGB is supported, and as nobody has replied in 2 months, my directions to go to actually contacting HyperX seems to have been succinct and the most effective advice for this topic at hand. In the opening, a non-supported product was mis-typed and so my comments there were also valid given the information provided at the time.

I’m not super familiar (or a fan) of primo hill stuff and so unsure, but what you suggest there sounds okay to me. as a minimum I would drain, rinse with distilled water, dry and remove residual water, the refill with a decent coolant designed for pc watercooling (additives are okay if you know what you’re doing)

All, three and as I updated my post above, utopia explicitly says not to use silver. Silver has no place in current day water cooling.

As a starting point, get rid of the silver kill coil, it’s not doing you any favours. It may even be the cause of your problems https://www.primochill.com/products/primochill-liquid-utopia-15ml-bottle

I think it’s important for OP to resolve whether the “battery water” in question was actually the cause of this. This can be worked out by a TDS reading, or perhaps even a pH reading would say(dilute sulphuric acid will have a very low pH). Because if it turns out that OP’s water is actually okay, it is entirely possible that the build up up just occur again and there is some kind of incompatibility in the loop.

Not saying that it wasn’t impossible, but I think chances are something else cause this, battery water is not battery water until it’s in battery. So unless you really bought “battery water” I.e., the contents of an acid battery, this all sounds a bit weird to me. A TDS reading of the “battery water” should tell you whether it had anything in it or not.