Custom CPU-watercooling Loop

Thread moved.

Water blocks are generally expensive due to their manufacturing processes. They have to be extremely precise and pretty small. Look at wet side of the XSPC Raystorm Pro for example, and you'll see many many extremely thin fins. Not only that, solid chunks of high purity copper to mill this stuff out of is only getting more expensive as the Earth slowly runs out of mine-able copper. R&D is expensive, and these things don't exactly sell like hotcakes since they're a niche product. The manufacturer usually passes the R&D cost onto the customer just to survive, especially folks like EK, who don't outsource their manufacturing.

Full coverage GPU blocks are even more expensive because of the volume of metal and the precision in cutting out the channels and things. Combined with even higher R&D cost and even lower sales rates with much more variation needed, that's why the cheapest of full cover blocks of sufficient quality are like $150.

If you want to build a "budget" CPU loop, you can always save money by using barbs and zip ties or hose clamps instead of compression fittings, which won't look as nice but get the job done. Soft tubing is cheaper than hard tubing for the same wall thickness and overall dimensions per unit length. You could get an XSPC EX radiator over EK or Alphacool's more expensive counterparts. You can skip the angled/rotary fittings and make the tubing do all the changes of direction. The Raystorm Pro I mentioned earlier is probably one of the best CPU blocks out there, and isn't even the most expensive. The non-pro Raystorm isn't half bad either, and it's around $50. You can get cheaper reservoirs or make your own. Or skip it entirely. The single most expensive part of your loop is probably going to be your pump. And likely a D5 or DDC, which is going to be $100-$150 period. If this is a desk build with very long tubing runs, you're going to want that head pressure, aside from running multiple pumps. If it's a smaller loop, you might be able to get by with something like the $35 Modtek pump off Amazon. I'm pushing water through like 5 feet of tubing (stealthing tubing in an S340 is hard), through a 120 and a 240 rad, and the flow rate coming back into the reservoir is surprisingly good. It's not as powerful as a DDC or D5, but it gets the job done and is still pretty quiet. Well, quieter than my old H100i anyway. RIP H100i.

Now that I think about it, EK, XSPC, and Alphacool all make custom-CPU-loop-in-a-box kits. And they're around $250-350. Usually not the best tubing or pump, but pretty damn close.


Just, whatever you do, don't run coloured liquid if you don't like looking for lumps of gunk in your loop components all the time.