water way to go (PC build part 3)

Evening + night 5: Oh no …

This was it. I meandered my way through work with this beautiful liquid cooled monster just waiting for me to finish up and get back to it. I had let the leak test go with nary a drop to be seen for about 18 hours at this point, and I figured I was safe to go ahead and move forward since there were no leaks. So I put a bit of soft tubing on a fitting, attached said fitting to my helpfully added drain plug, and got to draining the distilled water from the system. This went reasonably well, and even though I knew I hadn’t gotten every last drop out, it was close enough for government work and I decided to move on.

After a little bit of cleanup and some more cable management I hooked up all the cables and got the power supply in. This absolutely was not good. I’m using a be quiet Dark Power 12 850W PSU since the brand comes highly recommended and one of the things I was really excited about with this build was the potential for nearly-silent running, so how could I say no to something branded with the thing I wanted my PC to do?! I’m sure it’s a very nice power supply (it had better be for $200 damned American dollarydoos) but I absolutely do not like the cables it shipped with. Specifically, this 3080 TI wants three 8-pin PCI-E cables (which is a lot, video cards are stupid now, I get it) and the thick, inflexible, cables that came with this power supply were made even worse by the fact that they’re all shipped as Y-shaped/split from the power supply (not even polite enough to have a small vestigal dangling segment like most cables). So I had an incredibly fat bundle of these utterly useless dangling bits because there was no way I was daisy chaining into a GPU that wants up to 350W of juice to be happy! I was already kinda gonna get custom cables made but this made me pull the trigger. God, these cables are awful. Just the worst. I’m sorry, be quiet, but they just are. Who the fuck needs three split PCIE cables on an 850W PSU?

Anyway, yeah, got everything crammed into the case. At this point I realized I was buying new custom cables from CableMod anyway so I got a little loose with the cable management. Also I really wanted to, you know, use the damned thing. So in everything went and I mixed up my bottle of delicious purple ooze to properly fill those pumps and tubes and stuff. You can, theoretically, run a loop with just distilled water, but the goo mixtures have useful stuff in them. Specifically color. Also biocide, which is good if you don’t want to grow algae or whatever in your loop (you don’t!) And then I started to fill the reservoir and hit the power to turn on the PC so I could get the pump going and continue filling.

The uh… the computer did not turn on. Like at all. The cute RGB stuff on the motherboard was lit up, and the start button on the board was also… well it was kind of lit, I guess. But it wouldn’t POST, it wouldn’t even get me to a Q-code on the board (ASUS’s diagnostics thingy that helps tell you what’s going on during POST.) So I basically panicked, and got pretty righteously upset. I had spent quite a lot of time on this build, I had been very detail-oriented, and now it sure as shit looked like I had a lemon part. Probably the board itself or the CPU.

So I basically stomped around angrily for about 15-30 minutes, knowing full well I’d have to tear the whole thing apart and test from the ground up. You know, like a bench test. Like I should’ve fucking done from the outset as I was going. You can absolutely bench test your board with NOTHING on it but the CPU and maybe a stick of RAM. No cooler even. Don’t leave it running for more than like 30 seconds, but you’re not gonna wreck your CPU with no thermal solution for half a minute while you wait to see the codes on the board.

And so tear down I did. Of course I had to sort of drain the loop, since there was a bit of the final goo in there. This wasn’t so bad, I actually just looped the bottom radiator right back into the drain valve on the pump/reservoir. Thankfully, because it wouldn’t boot, the rest of the loop still didn’t have the new ooze in it. After that I pulled out the other tubes and generally set about disassembling! I was still pretty annoyed, but it was nice that taking the computer apart was a lot easier than building it in the first place, I suppose.

About an hour later I had disassembled everything and it was time to figure out where the heck I went wrong. So I pulled the motherboard out, plonked it on its cardboard box on my desk, and left a single stick of RAM in it and my old GTX 1080 that I knew for sure worked. Same deal, no POST, but the board lit up. So then I thought “god what if I put the fucking CPU in wrong and just murdered a $750 processor?” Greatly cheered by this thought I pulled off the water block on the motherboard to take a look. My liberal application of thermal paste notwithstanding, everything else looked okayish. I popped the CPU out and re-inserted it, it was certainly correctly installed the first time! Despair had settled on me at this point. It just had to be bad parts. But I said to myself, “well, why not try and power on the board with JUST the CPU in it. Can’t hurt to try one more time, right?” And lo and behold the board gave me Q codes and was sad about RAM. Ho-ly shit it worked??? Why would re-seating the CPU do anything at all?

I popped the CPU out again, inspected for bent pins, saw nothing, it was all good. So this was all very weird and suspicious but alrighty. I put a stick of RAM in, put the GTX 1080 on the board, and fired it up with a monitor attached. Not only did it POST but it got me all the way to the BIOS (where I saw the CPU temps ramping over 60C and rapidly turned off the board again!). This was weird, but alright. Maybe I put that water block on too tight and … I don’t know … squeezed the board funny? I put the block back on, re-attached the RAM and GTX, and … it wouldn’t fucking POST again. And I noticed the start button on the motherboard was not illuminated nicely like it had been when I’d taken the block off. That was … weird?

I finally hit my eureka moment. I was looking at the backplate of the water block and wondering if maybe I mounted it upside down or something, and then it dawned on me … where the hell was the insulation? Slapping bare metal onto circuit boards isn’t usually a thing you want, right? But this backplate had nothing between it and the back of the motherboard. This was when I remembered this weird blue rubber/plastic thing that I had noticed in the box with the block. It kinda looked like trash and so I put it in the big ‘discard pile’ of packing materials for all the parts. It was, in fact, not at all trash and was a vital part of the system.

I want to be clear that, yeah, this was a pretty absurd mistake, but this thing… I mean holy shit it looked like garbage/packing material only. It was clearly cut out from some big industrial material, had random shit printed on it, etc. It looked like just padding or something. It wasn’t well marked in the packing list and the instructions did mention it in a single diagram, but … still easy enough to miss. And miss it I sure did. To add insult to injury, had I realized this earlier, I never would have had to tear down the whole PC. The back of the motherboard with the backplate is easily accessible from within the case (I assume to make it easier to swap CPUs/coolers without pulling a whole machine apart, or for some thermal reason) and so I could have rectified my mistake much more easily.

Oh well! It turned out that reassembling the PC was significantly faster the second time. It helped that I knew what I was doing, my loop was planned, and all my lines cut and ready to be re-attached. Whole ‘rebuild’ took maybe 90 minutes, a lot of the cables had been pre-routed in the case, and so I was up and running fairly fast. I also aggressively tested the system at several stages here to ensure that all the fans turned, the system continued to POST, and so on. Everything was finally coming up Milhouse! It was also something like 2am but I would not be denied!

After re-running the tubing and getting (almost) everything in the PC I got back to my purple liquid business. I fired up the pump again and filled it with that tasty goo for a quick leak test. I probably should have run the test for more than the 30 minutes I gave it but leaking purple glorp was gonna be real noticeable anyway. There was none! It was finally happening!

Sure it was something like 3am at this point but I was absolutely stoked. So I went ahead and hooked up the rest of the power and fired ‘er up to make sure everyting was good. The BIOS gave me lovely, steady temperature readouts and, like, there was no melting plastic smell so that was good right? A Windows 11 install later and I had a real, working computer!

Aftermath and some brief notes on cooling performance

I’ve swapped this computer in as my main (personal) machine now for a few days. I’m actually typing this up on the computer itself! The fans on both radiators are currently stopped because just the ambient heat release seems to be enough for the simple tasks of playing music and writing in VS Code. That, all by itself, is somewhat crazy to see. I’m used to fans that, y’know, spin all the time but these don’t need to.

My personal / gaming PC has been called gondolin for as long as I can remember but this one merited a name change. Given the obvious thematic synergy I went with anduin since, I guess, there’s a great river in here or whatever. It’s … liquid. Whatever.

I’ve run a hefty bit of Prime95 on the system, the CPU package tmeperature spikes as high as about 75℃ in the nastiest bits of the test, but I’ve never seen it crest 80 and even when it spikes the radiator fans/pump kick into gear and rapidly pull the temperature down to about 60℃. I think if I ran the fans/pump hard I’d never see a temperature past 70℃, but again part of this build is here for quietness. The CPU tops out at about 4.55Ghz across all 16 cores in Prime95. No overclocking/fiddling here, everything stock. This is pretty outstanding, given the ‘base’ clock rate for a Ryzen 5950x is a mere 3.4Ghz!

On the GPU side I couldn’t get it over 70℃ either, with the notable exception of the RAM, which will happily torch itself north of 80℃ for some reason. I don’t think this is particularly abnormal, and it’s clocked absurdly high (9Ghz) and I only saw this doing FurMark. In normal gaming / benchmark style scenarios it doesn’t happen.

I do still have those custom motherboard + PCI-E cables coming, but they won’t arrive until the end of the month, and honestly I was just too antsy to wait. I’ll pull the machine off my desk and install the nicer cables when they get here, but for now I’m enjoying a silent, ridiculously fast, ooze-filled computer very much.

I definitely have had moments (particularly during that panic-stricken run of thinking I had bad components) where I told myself I’d never do this again, but honestly? This was a hell of a lot of fun. I learned a great deal about exotic PC building and really enjoyed the last month or so of on-and-off work on this project. The cost was… not great, shall we say, but in a sense it paid itself back in really enjoyable leisure time. Multiple people have asked whether I would do this again. At least for now my answer is “yeah, probably,” although if I am a father in six or seven years when it’s time to build a new killer PC I may feel quite differently! For now, though, I’m going to throw some VMs on this bad boy while I play games at 3440x1440 @ 144 FPS with graphics cranked into the stupid zone. ❤️