WC newbie

[Chance_P]

Hey guys, I am working on my first custom loop and was hoping to get some input from you.

I am having trouble deciding which way I want the flow to go, as well as where to place my drain valve for easiest use in the future. I have to keep the 280 rad mounted the way it is, otherwise I can not get 3x 140's mounted on the front of my case. The res will sit higher because my D5 will be mounted on top of the drive cages where the res is currently sitting. GPU and CPU will be in the loop. Yellow spots are the open ports on my rads. Top rad is an alphacool xflow 420/45 and front rad is an alphacool uflow 280/60.

How would you route things? Any other input? Positive or negative lets hear it! (unless its about my ketchup and mustard. you keep your mouth shut about my PSU sleeving)

 

[Chance_P]

Ended up with this after a couple of hours. Waiting on my d5 top to get here so I can mount the res and pump. Pump will feed into bottom of 280 rad where the drain valve is. Res will be fed from GPU. I feel pretty good about it considering its my first time.

 

[thesmokingman]

Loop order doesn't really matter. I usually go for the most logical, pragmatic, and shortest path possible. Fill port should not be on your rad, will take 10 years to fill lol. Run tube from your res to wherever. Personally I don't even bother with the dedicated fill port nor drain. I use QDc's and break the loop as needed.

 

[Tsumi]

As said, loop order doesn't matter, with one caveat: the lower the flow rate, the greater the importance of loop order. With a D5 and your choice of radiators and blocks, you should have enough flow that order doesn't really matter.

Fill port to reservoir really is the best way to go. The reservoir is the best place to catch and bleed air, and at the same time the best place to add water. QDCs are a good idea, not sure how feasible they would be with hard tubing.

 

[Brian_B]

Not a lot to add here that hasn't already been said:

Rads love to trap air, blocks to a lesser extent. It really reduces their capacity as well, so you want some way to get the air out of there. Usually, I do that just by running the pump, tape off any vent/weep hole on the res (not all have one), and then rotate the case around after filling with just the pump running to help burp all the air out of the components. The air will all collect out in the res if your careful and don't let it get back into the lines from there. You will probably need to repeat this 2-3 times before it finally stays full and you've gotten most of the air out.

Do use the res as your fill point. No compelling reason to put one anywhere else, and you don't need anything permanently installed for that. Drain point ... with a hard pipe system If you want something dedicated I would typically go somewhere right after the outlet of the pump, before that line feeds into any other system, as you can't really just break a connection there to drain. That way your pump drains the system for you, but I don't know that it's necessarily any better than just draining out of the res in the first place. Don't bother with vents or anything anywhere else - the res takes care of that for you. If you are installing the pump up top, then just use the res for everything.

Usually I try to install the pump just after the res - so it takes it's suction from the bottom of res. That way as air bleeds out of the other components, it doesn't go through the pump and air bind the impeller up, and the only way you lose flow is if the pump fails, or the res has completely drained out. Don't think you'll have much of an issue with a D5, it would take a good bit of air to lose prime, but just a general guideline I follow. That's also probably why you see a lot of res/pump combos.

Consider installing a flow meter on a fan speed header with an alarm or something - a lot of people do this anyway, but I usually don't necessarily recommend it unless you do something unusual with your pump setup - your standard temp alarms are going to tell you something very quickly after a flow alarm would sound regardless. And it sounds like your probably putting the pump at the physical top of the loop.... my concern would be after a shutdown period, air coming out of solution or entrained will tend to gather in the high points, and it could bind the pump and the loop wouldn't be able to get started. Without a flow meter you wouldn't know for a few minutes, probably until well after the bootup process is done and your into working on something because it would be a little bit before your block heated up enough (it still holds a decent amount of water to heat up even with no flow) to set off temp warnings.

If your worried about swapping out components a lot, then you probably should have went PVC/Tygon rather than hardline. But that hardline does look good and your install so far looks nice. You will curse the day you need to reapply heatsink compound though.