Initial Setup
The parcel arrived and was very well packed with shredded paper, there was no way the contents were going to get damaged on their journey from Hull to Reading that's for sure! I spent 10 minutes just throwing paper around trying to find all the parts :) Once unpacked, I realised that a fan was missing from the radiator. A quick call to OverclockedPC and Jess arranged to have one sent down as soon as he could, there's customer service for you.
Now as with most new things, I do like to get stuck in, so the first evening I spent just familiarising myself with the parts of the kit.
One of the most useful pieces of advice that I have seen on the forums is:-
"Always run your intended system outside of the PC first"
Now you may think that this is an unnecessary step, but I sure as hell didn't want to install a WaterCooling system straight into my PC, and then discover I hadn't assembled it correctly and it leaked all over my rig.
I started slowly, first creating a loop with just silicone tubing and the pump to see if I could get an air free closed loop system going. Next step was to measure the distances between the pump, radiator and water block etc within the PC to cut the silicone tubing to the right lengths. Once I had a number of lengths of the tubing, I then set about creating the setup I would be running in my PC.
One of my main considerations was whether to run the CPU and GFX water blocks in series or parallel. This decision would influence finals temperatures as well as the physical layout of the system. After asking many people about their experiences I decided to run them in parallel. The main reasons for running the two water blocks in parallel are:
- Water temperature will be higher when it gets to the second water block in series.
- The GeForce 4 water block does not have the same flow rate as the CPU so could cause flow problems if they were setup in series
Once I was happy that I had setup the full closed loop system without any air bubbles, I then left the setup to run for 24hrs on the kitchen floor, oh how my other half loved that - Not! :) During the 24hr test period, tissues were placed under and around the joints to check for any leakage. Thankfully, all appeared to be well after the testing stage. The Case modding session was getting ever closer! How would I feel hacking apart my nice shiny CoolerMaster ATCS210 case?
Well when it came to it, I have to admit that I have so far bottled out of hacking my lurvely Coolermaster Case and have settled for sitting the radiator on top of the case and the pump sat on the desk beside it.
I fully intend to mod my radiator and pump into my case, but for now I'm more than happy to leave it as it is, I can admire it that way :)
