JackNaylorPE :
Thanks for the quick reply. I'm new to custom loops, so exude my mistakes xD So, what you mean is I have to put it new Mayhem Aurora every 4 months or so? Guess it can't be that bad because I'll probably clean the loop and add new coolant every 6 months, plus it's not that expensive. Is a pastel just a different form of the Aurora?
Damn, lost my post, will have to retype
The Aurora is, as was stated, intended for shows and photo shots .... Aurora has that "pearly" stuff floating in it and the concern was that over time, it would get stuck in nooks and crannies inside blocks and stuff. I think the manufacturer was conservative in their warning, as with any new product, there is no long term experience. They are working on Aurora 2 which I expect will have a much longer useful life.
The response of forum participants and users to the Aurora coolant has run from:
1. "It will clog your blocks, ruin everything in your loop in 2-3 days, make your wife leave you, ya will lose ya job and your kids hate you" ..... OK some of those at the end I made up
2. "I used it for a year no problem" ... Here's a dude who used it for 9 months including a 5 week shutdown while on vacation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7eboct_ckQ
In the early years of water cooling, many vendors looking to make a quick buck, threw various products on the market which, as it turned out, were not well suited to water cooling PCs. On the other side, enthusiasts also suffered from algae build up and corrosion with plain DW. Trying to balance these two conflicting concerns has been the dilemma of WC enthusiasts for quite some time.
Many products did have problems ..... many problems were blamed on coolants which later it turned out were caused by other factors such as plasticizer leaching from tubing.
I searched available resources for several months and came to the following conclusion that ya have three basic choices:
1. Colored plasticizer free tubing with distilled water (DW) with necessary additives as appropriate for your system including something to address bacterial growth and something to address corrosion. While many consider the latter unnecessary, looking at the radiator pics on martinsliquidlab site and the galvanic corrosion at solder points make me lean conservative on this topic. Of course this option is somewhat limited with rigid tubing tho PrimoChill offers various options with more vendors ready to jump in soon.
2. Similar to 1 above with plasticizer free clear tubing and dye .... one which has proven itself over the years to be problem free.
3. Clear tubing with a pre-mix or home-mixed option such as the Mahems X1 / dye and / or Pastel Concentrates mixed w/ DW. Again, these have been in use for quite a while now and while I have found the occasional report of a problem of gunk buildup in a system with these coolants, in each instance, it was later shown to be caused by something else (usually plasticizer leaching).
I can still understand many WC enthusiasts reluctance to use the newer products having been burned in the past when it didn't turn out so well. But from what I have been able to determine, several products which have been introduced in recent years based upon good research, science and thorough testing have performed w/o issue.
In my recent experience....
1. Flushed all components except pump with 5 gpm tap water, alternating hot and cold every 5 minutes for 30 minutes and including cycling a feed valve so as to pulse water thru system at varying pressures to shake anything loose.
2. Soak / rinse each component twice w/ DW .... fill - sit an hour- drain fill - sit an hour - drain .... overnight dry
3. Assembled loop and filled with DW .... would recommend using a measuring cup to determine how much ya put in. Ran for 5 days recording water temps at 4 locations under various load conditions as well as ambient and case air temps.
4. At end of this I observed a bit of black gunk clogging micro-channels on CPU Block (GPUs were clear)..... might have been from pump (which I hadn't flushed) but more likely was paint flakes from assembly / disassembly / reassembly of rads and fittings which were scraped loose as fittings were screwed in / out. Thank the PC gods I made a last minute switch from all copper to copper / plexi Supremacy Block at last minute or I never wuda noticed.
5. Used two bottles (500ml) of Mayems Red Pastel) with what Im guessing was 1400ml of distilled water..... didn't measure on the DW fill and I'm sure I didn't get every drop outta the loop when I drained the DW.... as when I started filling loop with mix, the tubes showed a significantly diluted color as it got down by the pump.
6. Since then I have been continuing to monitor temps and though I was expecting a bit of a temperature rise (maybe 0.5C) with the Mayems, working under the same loads, I'm showing 0.0 C temp difference between the Mayems mix and the DW so far.
7. I do wanna work on the color tho .... going with pics, I was pretty satisfied with the pastel red but up close and personal ....well my son came home the day I filled it and was convinced I filled the loop with a "strawberry slushie" from 7-Eleven.....gonna try and get away from the pinkish / strawberry tint and darken the red a bit to try and better match the Mushkin / RoG red.
You can see the Pastel red here in my build pics in the link below
http://www.overclock.net/t/1286896/mayhems-users-club/4220#post_21338622
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