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Before I built my current custom computer case, I had ran my first liquid cooled loop in a Phanteks Evolv ITX chassis. At the time, all I knew was EK and Alphacool and that they were very expensive. eBay parts looked sketchy, and I had no idea about the world of quality Chinese parts available. I watched people like JayzTwoCents and stumbled across his video on a cheap watercooling solution. This solution was the EK Fluid Gaming A240, a fully aluminum watercooling solution. Aluminum is cheaper than copper, so that was how they brought the price down. I was hooked. I bought an A240 kit on Newegg and got it installed with my R5 3600 and Nvidia RTX 2060 FE.

Fast forward a few months, I was frustrated by coil whine on the RTX 2060, and hit by nostalgia from JayzTwoCents videos on Pascal-era video cards and custom loops. I side-graded to a Titan Xp and luckily found a Fluid Gaming GTX waterblock on Ebay. They had retired that block by now in favor of the 20-series cards. I was able to get some extra fittings and got the new build installed. It sat like this for some time, and I was happy with how it looked (the main reason I went watercooled).

Tight shot on custom watercooling loop. EK Fluid Gaming components on GTX Titan Xp (2017) and Ryzen 5 3600. Build has an overall black parts theme with an amber light scheme. Parts are tightly framed by three brightly lit Corsair LL120 fans. Two are above on a radiator, the other is on the exhaust.
Last form of the build in Phanteks Evolv ITX case.

Some issues remained, however. Draining the loop was an extreme pain made no easier by the case. I also upgraded to a Ryzen 9 5950X, so I wanted another radiator for the heat load. Unfortunately, by this point EK had discontinued selling Fluid Gaming kits and their spare parts. If I wanted any new parts, they would have to be second hand or from some other source. Worse yet, the aftermarket aluminum watercooling scene is basically non-existant. You can get radiators w/built in barb fittings and that's about it. After a lot of searching, I caved and bought a Chinese 240mm radiator with built-in barb fittings. There's nothing really wrong with this functionally, but having got into watercooling from an aesthetic point of view, it irked me. This still did not solve my drain issues though. EK used to sell an aluminum 3-way junction fitting, but it required extra compression fittings to join to it. Even then, there was no aluminum plugs or valves that I could find, so even if I had purchased the junction, I wouldn't have been able to have an easy drain tube. I thought about this over the course of my build iterations, and by the time I decided to just buy a few, they were no longer sold...

That's really the life lesson here. Don't buy into platforms supported by only one company if there's a whole other ecosystem of functionally identical products with much greaty support. Of course, for me, cost was a large factor in making my decision, but had I done some more reasearch I would have found there are cheap copper parts available that are still good quality. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my aluminum loop. The only thing I can really do is give it away, as I wouldn't want someone else to buy into a dead-end platform. My other option is to machine custom parts for it. I could do this if I had reliable equimpent and endless time, but it's to the point now where I don't want to be doing stuff like that for my computer.

Maybe it'll end up in a second PC with my old R5. That's probably it's fate. Now to get that X58 machine together...

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