Mixing Hard and Soft Tubing

[Daharen]

So as I make upgrades to my rig into the future, I've been "trying" to future proof elements of my build. To that end I bought a 1600 Watt Titanium power supply, a ton of Noctua fans, a bunch of high quality radiators, and recently upgraded to the Obsidian 1000D alongside Dual Laing D5 PWM. 800 - 4700 RPM for redundancy. Obviously the rest of the hardware for the most part is going to see upgrades, from better SSDs (Looking at the Gen. 4 Optane), GPUs, CPUs, Mobos, and upcoming memory upgrades, so none of that really matters. 

What I'm struggling with is trying to make a "modular" upgradeable system for my water cooling loop... I want to be able to clean it out fast, easily, and regularly, but also be able to quickly switch out components for rebuilds if I want to do so. 

I was thinking of trying to do a mixed soft/hard-line tubing. Hardline for the majority, but with softline tubing and quick disconnects between all the cooled hardware, and two empty reservoirs, one high, one low, that I could use to empty the loop of old fluid, and simultaneously exchange it with cleaning fluid, and then drain the whole thing again and replace it with new fluid with hardly any disassembly or pain. 

I figured I could re-invent the wheel, since I have a solid idea of what I'm looking to do... BUT... I also figured I should come on here and check to see if anyone else has done this sort of setup, had some pitfalls for me to look out for, advice, or suggestions on the overall objective here. 

 

[Jumballi]

Mixing tubing isn’t an issue of any sort, it it makes your system look better and easier to assemble, then do it.

[SupaKomputa]

It's just water tubing...

 

1600w psu is not future proofing btw. Unless you have 8 gpus, you won't use it ever.

[Daharen]

2 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

It's just water tubing...

 

1600w psu is not future proofing btw. Unless you have 8 gpus, you won't use it ever.

Lol, on the one hand, I "think" you are correct. On the other hand, I knew people who saw the trend of GPUs and CPUs getting more efficient, and figured they'd be solid with a 800 watt PSU for the foreseeable future, and then discovered that as competition rose, you start seeing some GPUs and CPUs cranking power limits hard again (With some "spiking" above 1,000 W with high end rigs despite averaging 800-850 under load). 

While this is exclusively in the range of the enthusiast space, that's the range I like building in... Sooo... Admitably, 1600 is WAY above anything I've seen other than multi-gpu rigs, and I could probably have settled at 1200 and never hit my ceiling even with the most ludicrous current setups, say an OC'd water cooled 3090 with custom PCB and OC'd 5950X (Probably wouldn't bother OCing a AMD CPU, but I'd have to at least "try" and see if I could get consistent benefit out of it, or if I just won the silicon lottery). However, with that sort of spec, and the type of overclocking I enjoy, I might have been pushing it a bit close still (Again considering spikes, which I know most PSU's can handle greater than their declared max, but some will literally shut the system down if they get spikes above their rated power, even if they could theoretically handle it unsustained). 

So... I am wary of your statement being made with confidence. It's not that I think you're wrong... This uptick in power consumption could very well be short-term and we could return to ever decreasing power ratings for the foreseeable future until my PSU is totally stupid levels of overkill, however, ya never know, and in the enthusiast space, better safe than sorry seems the better solution... I was sincerely considering a 2,000 Watt power supply that was on the market when I bought my 1,600 watt, but it would have required me to rewire my outlet and breaker, and it was Platinum rated, and I like the fact that I can run very very close to the exact power draw of the system while still having a ton of overhead because of the PSUs efficiency (At the low ranges I know it runs closer to "gold" and it's titanium rating accounts for its entire range, so I know I'm sacrificing some efficiency, but still). 

None the less, I appreciate your reply, and that it probably applies to 99% of consumers (And "PROBABLY" even me). 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Custom Loop and Exotic Cooling

[Whosme]

I think the challenge is getting it 'clean' it's hard to achieve a nice effect with mixed tubing and quick disconnects also because the quick disconnects are quite clunky and will need lots of wiggle room (soft tubing) in order to make them work correctly. And don't forget each connector is a potential leak hazard, so the more connexions in your loop the more chances on a leak.

If you anyhow decided on a custom loop, then quick interchanging any component anyhow went out of the window at the moment you made that decision, even taking one of the biggest cases on the market will not help you there.

I think the most important if you want an easy bleed and refill option is to have on the lowest and highest point of your loop a nice bleed / fill port. That worked magic for me most of the time in creating an easily serviceable custom water loop. Also the newest trends of a distroplate makes a custom waterloop much more serviceable then in the past. Maybe you should consider one of those (I don't know however if they even exist for your case.

 

But good luck with your build!

[kaiwenwu]

On 4/6/2021 at 8:02 AM, SupaKomputa said:

It's just water tubing...

 

1600w psu is not future proofing btw. Unless you have 8 gpus, you won't use it ever.

 

On 4/6/2021 at 8:14 AM, Daharen said:

Lol, on the one hand, I "think" you are correct. On the other hand, I knew people who saw the trend of GPUs and CPUs getting more efficient, and figured they'd be solid with a 800 watt PSU for the foreseeable future, and then discovered that as competition rose, you start seeing some GPUs and CPUs cranking power limits hard again (With some "spiking" above 1,000 W with high end rigs despite averaging 800-850 under load). 

While this is exclusively in the range of the enthusiast space, that's the range I like building in... Sooo... Admitably, 1600 is WAY above anything I've seen other than multi-gpu rigs, and I could probably have settled at 1200 and never hit my ceiling even with the most ludicrous current setups, say an OC'd water cooled 3090 with custom PCB and OC'd 5950X (Probably wouldn't bother OCing a AMD CPU, but I'd have to at least "try" and see if I could get consistent benefit out of it, or if I just won the silicon lottery). However, with that sort of spec, and the type of overclocking I enjoy, I might have been pushing it a bit close still (Again considering spikes, which I know most PSU's can handle greater than their declared max, but some will literally shut the system down if they get spikes above their rated power, even if they could theoretically handle it unsustained). 

So... I am wary of your statement being made with confidence. It's not that I think you're wrong... This uptick in power consumption could very well be short-term and we could return to ever decreasing power ratings for the foreseeable future until my PSU is totally stupid levels of overkill, however, ya never know, and in the enthusiast space, better safe than sorry seems the better solution... I was sincerely considering a 2,000 Watt power supply that was on the market when I bought my 1,600 watt, but it would have required me to rewire my outlet and breaker, and it was Platinum rated, and I like the fact that I can run very very close to the exact power draw of the system while still having a ton of overhead because of the PSUs efficiency (At the low ranges I know it runs closer to "gold" and it's titanium rating accounts for its entire range, so I know I'm sacrificing some efficiency, but still). 

None the less, I appreciate your reply, and that it probably applies to 99% of consumers (And "PROBABLY" even me). 

I use two 1500w to power one 3090 because one can't handle it. When I using 1080ti I never think a gpu can hit 1000w on water.