Instead of going with one single cooling brand, I opted for three separate ones, using Phanteks for water blocks on the GPU and CPU, Alphacool for the tubing, fittings, reservoir, pump and radiators and Mayhems for the glorious pink coolant.
Things were a little more restrictive in this build, mostly due to the tight confined spaces and clearances we had to work with, unlike in our Evolv X Anti-RGB system. I had no choice but to run with two slim radiators, a 120mm rad in the bottom, and a 240mm rad in the front of the case. I then paired that with a separate small-form-factor pump and standalone slim res from Alphacool, alongside a myriad of fittings.
Tubing was another area where I wanted to shake things up. I’ve gone for a frosted acrylic tubing, as opposed to clear acrylic or PETG, as it gives the build a bit more of a premium feel. And although acrylic is slightly more difficult to work with than PETG is, it is far more resistant to color leeching.
The Achilles heel however lies in the fans. In the planning stages, because I assumed cooling wouldn’t be too crazy of an issue, I went with some aftermarket Phanteks variants. One 140mm acts as an exhaust near the motherboard. A 120mm in the bottom pushes air into that bottom rad as intake, and two 120mm fans pull air through the 240mm rad into the system as well. These are fairly solid fans when it comes to static pressure pushing up to 1.72mm H2O at full tilt, but in hindsight, and due to a lack of access to unhindered airflow (something Phanteks is addressing with its latest airflow mesh variants of this case), something with a bit more grunt such as Noctua’s NF-F12 PWM Chromax’s, the NF-F12 IndustrialPPCs, or Corsair’s ML120 Pro mag lev variants may have made more sense.
Cooling Components
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