Water-cooling your PC

Why would you want to water cool a PC? First of all it can much more quiet and it drops the temperature of your computer greatly. My quad core went from 50C under load to 28C Idle and under load! It is also good for overclocking. When you overclock the components of a PC get hot. The more you do it the hotter they get. It gets to a point were air cooling just won't cut it.

I really enjoy water cooling and it recently became one of my new hobbies. A water cooling rig requires maintenance. You need to know your way around a computer pretty well to be able to do this. I've been building computer since I was 10 and this really pushes you to the limit. I want to go even farther and try vapor phase change cooling. It's pretty much building a refrigerator inside of your computer. Drops things to around -20C

Deciding on the parts depends on how much you want to spend. I spent about $275 on my current setup. Its going to be about $375 once I watercool my GPU. A good kit I would recommend is this one from petra's tech shop for $250. It has pretty much every single part my kit has. I didn't even know there was this kit before I bought from them. The people there are really nice. This kit is better for a cheaper build or a smaller system that doesn't throw off as much heat. These kits aren't like ones you will see on newegg or other computer stores. They have a good combination of parts from different company's. The best watercooling rig has parts for all different companies.

You will also need about 10-15 gallons of distilled water. You can pick this up at your local grocery store. You also need tubing. You need to buy the right size tubing according to the type of pump, radiator, waterblock, and reservoir have. They are called barbs. I prefer 1/2 barbs. Make sure all your barbs are the same size. I recommend you use Tygon tubing. You can also use deionized water. I finally figured out the differences, I was pretty confused. Deionized water is less pure then distilled and still has some minerals and things like that in it. Both are still a bit conductive.

You also need some thermal paste. It helps create a strong bond between the CPU and water block so the heat can transfer. You can get a tube of it for about $1
grab thermal paste here

Once you get all your parts I would read through all the manuals. I never read manuals, but for watercooling I would. They have warnings that could really mess up your rig if you didn't pay attention to that. After you do that you need to do what is called flushing. When the parts are manufactured they have oils and grime and other things from them being made. If you just run your rig like that you will have dirt and grime flowing through all your parts and it will start to clog. Get some of your tubing cut it short and hook it up to one end of your radiator. Get a funnel and run about a gallon of distilled water through it. It helps to shake it up and around the radiator. Also heating the water helps it too. Next take apart your water block which should be pretty simple just unscrew a few screws. Get some rubbing alcohol and rub it through all the groves in your block.

Take out all the parts of your computer you won't be using. Such as your ram HDD's and GPU if you aren't water cooling it. Your going to need to pretty much have to take apart your computer anyways to install the water block.


Take the motherboard out of your case and put it in a safe place to work on it where static won't get to it. Put a dot sized dab of the thermal paste I mentioned before only a dot or 2. Get your screws that came with the waterblock and stick them up through the bottom of where your heatsink would screw in. Put the heatsink on and secure it.


It is hard to explain since all blocks mount a bit different. Your block should come with some kind of diagram. Think through where you are going to be installing you radiator and water pump. You might have to drill some holes into your case if you are mounting your radiator outside of your case. Once you found the places mount and screw them into place. Put your computer back together with only the essentials as you won't be needing to be able to boot just turn it on.

Plan out how you are going to do the tubing and connect them all on the valves. Get some hoseclamps and tightly secure them on. You might need to use kind of lubricant to get them to slide on. Make sure have things how you want them because it is extremely hard to get the hoses back off.

Put all the things you took out and put them back in. If you did everything right your computer should turn on and be fine. Monitor temperatures for a bit to see if everything is going right.