Ah continuing on the water cooling experience with article #3, possibly #4 if you want to count my ‘introduction’ article for this little series. If you haven’t had a chance to catch the other articles let me list them here for you to check out without having to search.

Thinking About Summer Time, Temps And Water Cooling – Introduction

Water Cooling Components #1 – Fans, Fan Controllers, And Thermal Paste Remover

Water Cooling Components #2 – Radiators and Tubing

And now today I’ll be covering Pumps, Cooling Liquids, and Fittings. So lets jump right into pumps. When looking into water cooling pumps there is one major thing you need to decide to you want an AC or DC power pump? AS pumps come from people like Laing and other companies with their copy of the pumps like Swiftech. DC pumps will be your traditional fish tank pumps like Enheims etc. Many people shot for the DC powered pumps because they are quieter, push about the same amount of water, and can be connected to a 12v molex supply inside your case. An AC pump will require you to run a power cable outside you pump to a wall outlet and generally push a greater amount of water, however they are much louder. I chose a DC pump for obvious reasons as I planned on having a fully internal water cooling loop, and I pulled it off!

DangerDen sells the most popular range of pumps from Laing from the DDC 3.1 to the DDC 3.25 plus the venerable and probably most commonly used D5 pump. There are different consideration on which pump you will use past the supplying of power, the DDC only uses 3/8″ line while the D5′s use 1/2″, considering that I decided to go with 3/8″ lines and I didn’t want to use tube adapter I chose the DDC 3.25 pump.

As you can see the DDC pump is nice and simple with an impeller an electric induction motor and the top w/ O-ring. It pushed A LOT of water at about 1.5 GPM and is more than enough for a simple single loop. The D5 pushes a good bit more water however it’s a 1/2″ pump and a lot larger than the DDC. The DDC can be hidden just about anywhere and even at it’s highest speed is dead quiet. As I sit here listening to the cooling system it’s quiet, in fact for the first time in a long time the ‘annoying’ sounds coming from my system are the hard drive noises, even with 3x 120mm fans, 1x 200mm, and a pump running wide open at 4560rpm!

If you end up not wanting to run an actual reservoir or you are extremely limited on space you can even get custom tops, the inles/outlet part pictured, that is a reservoir, or you could even look into the dual bay reservoirs that contain this or the D5 inside the 5.25 bay. It does take up some of the space for extra liquid but does allow you to run much more compactly.

As far as the life of the pumps just about all of them are rated for a 50,000 hour MTBF (mean time before failure) so all of them, unless you get a bum one, should run equally long. Noise and water levels are about the same between all the current generation DC pumps and all are excellent choices. My choice was narrowed down to the size of the line being used and the compactness of the pump since I’m filling all this into a ‘mid’ tower case the Corsair 600T. Granted the 600T is quite a bit bigger than the average mid tower. Think of it as full tower size in a mid tower height, excellent case for anyone in my opinion! The up coming 650D is probably more along the lines of someone wanting a traditional square case, but I digress because that could be turned into a complete article in itself. However with that being said the DDC 3.25 is only 1.5″ high and 2.44″ x 3.4″ wide and long including the outlets. VERY compact, and pretty heavy was surprised at the quality and build of this pump but shouldn’t have been considering these are the same pumps they use in health care and laser cutters to supply water and lubricant to the cutting surface.  Look up ITT pumps it’s the same thing but Laing and DD put a different top on them as the stock pumps from ITT have screw on connectors for piping in the machines.

Onward to liquid! You have a vast array of liquid you can put into a water cooling system from anti-freeze, distilled water, or any premix of cooling solution from Feser, PC ICe etc. etc. Anti-freeze believe it or not is not a good choice unless you a peltier cooling a system below zero so that’s a no go. When looking through all the pro’s and con’s of each I narrowed it down to either distilled water (best heat dissipation) or Feser One.

With distilled water you can buy it by the gallon from your local grocery store for possible about $3 where Feser One is $20 a liter. However if you have ever looked at water cooling systems you have seen them filled with pre-mix, those are those are the ones with green, orange, red, blue, or red coolant. You can buy dyes for your liquid choice if it happens to be clear, so how do we pick one?!

Feser One cooling fluid is twice distilled water and advertised as non-conductive. However it is conductive just not as much as tap water with all it’s chemicals and minerals in the water. However when you recieve Feser One you get a premixed bottle you can simply add to your system and you are ready to go. No mixing anything in since it contains several chemicals to help your system and add bling if you are into that.

It contains four different anti-corrosion chemicals to protect your loop from that and for bling factor it contains UV dye which will cause whatever color you pick to glow in the dark if you add a UV light to your system. Under room lighting it looks like the picture here. So it sounds ok what’s wrong with Feser? Well mainly the first thing is the price of the liquid at $20 a liter it isn’t very cheap, and some users report the dye separate from the water causing a gumming up of water cooling components. The main thing when looking at those reports is they don’t report what else they may have put into their system such as additional dyes, extra water, or corrosion chemicals. Several reputable water cooling reviews have done 6 and 12 month tests on it with no side effects!

If you are worried about the separation of what the absolute best cooling liquid (by .5-1c) you go with distilled water. You can’t simply just pour it into the system though because you will end up with algae and corrosion in the system after a period of time. As of this writing the water in my system is running about 103F (37.4C) which is ideal conditions for algae to grow, a warm moist environment. Corrosion isn’t as much of a concern if you entire loop is made up of same metal components like all copper or all aluminum. If you mix copper and aluminum in a system, regardless if you have anti-corrosion chemicals in there or not, you will end up with what they call a galvonic response. Rust. NOT GOOD!

So to combat both of those things you can add some PT-Nuke or a silver coil made up of 99.9% silver into the system which will make the water too toxic for algae to live and help combat corrosion from the water and metal mix. Personally instead of needing to mix chemicals to a certain mixture with the water, or buy and place a silver coil into the system and still have a limit of concerns on the loop I prefer the pre-mix. It cools just as well and will last the full year you need to go without worrying about flushing, algae, corrosion, or any other issue. Not to mention if you have a leak it’s easier to spot when the dye hits a paper towel during leak testing after the initial install.

Now for one of the simplest decisions of the entire setup. The fittings. You really only have two choices a regular barb type or a compression type fitting. Most if not all popular water cooling blocks, radiators, and reservoirs contain a G 1/4 thread so anywhere you want to buy them from will work. Lemme show you a picture of the two types.

On the left you see the barb fitting and on the right is the compression fitting. So which one do I want? Well the first thing is they both seal well if you pay attention, however there are two deciding factors that will make the most sense to everyone. The compression fitting will be about $5-8 piece while the barb style will be about $2.50-5. So price is the first consideration and an important one because going one of the other could either save or cost you another $100 on your build. Even the most simple loop with only a cpu being cooled will need 2 fittings for the block, radiator, and reservoir. If you do like I did with two radiators, a res, and 2 blocks you will need 10 fittings. And yes it gets expensive.

The second thing to think about is to you want to use clamps? I like the looks of compressions fitting on a system much more than gator clamps or zip ties holding the lines together. You do have one other choice if you want to risk it you can get “perfect seal” barbs. They are shaped a bit different are much more difficult to get lines on and off but you won’t have to use clamps on the lines. I don’t feel comfortable risking my hardware to that however.

With compression fittings be careful and read the descriptions on the line sizes it will hold. For instance the ones I bought where 3/8″ compression fitting but only fit a 3/8″ x 5/8″ lines there are also some out there that fit 3/8″ x 1/2″ lines. If you put the 1/2″ OD lines in a 5/8″ fitting it will leak!!

Hopefully this will give you enough information to get started seeking a bit more information to parting together your first build. If you have any question feel free to ask in the comments section, and don’t forget to check out the other parts I’ve already written about. The next section will cover blocks, reservoirs, and thermal paste and will conclude….I think….this series of articles. Hopefully you guys are getting the starting points to get you thinking about your decisions in water cooling.