The Z Build(s) 3.0 - Go Big and/or Go Home

Zarathustra said:
Secondly, since this water loop is going to be cooling two PC's (and maybe even more later) and I can't predict when one or the other will be on, I wanted something that could manage the loop independently of the PC's, so I can turn them on or off at will, and have the loop continue to function. And that's the beauty of the Aquaero. You plug sensors into it, and program its profiles, and it takes care of itself. No need for it to communicate with the PC at all.
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Oh shiiiat man, that's pretty awesome!

Zarathustra said:
And this is where I had to stop, because the other Aquaero I need is still in my current workstation, which has provided a bit of a dilemma that has been slowing me down. There are also other things in the loop on that machine I need in the new loop, like the reservoir, some flowmeters, temperature sensors, etc.

You see, once I break into that workstation, it is down until phase one of the project is complete, and I use that thing for work, so I can't have it down during the week.

This fact has made me hesitate when working on the project some weekends. Would I really have enough time to finish it? This has wound up being a large contributor to the fact that this project has been making such slow progress lately.
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Aahh yyyeeeaaahhh, I know how that game goes. It's understandable.

Zarathustra said:
Unfortunately when it arrived there were signs that it had been opened. The bracket had been removed from the bottom and rotated in the wrong orientation, and there were fingerprints on the otherwise shiny cold plate.

Normally this would piss me of and have me initiating a return and replace, but then I'd have to sit around waiting for another cooler to arrive, and miss the opportunity to make progress for yet another week, so I cleaned it off, re-oriented the mounting bracket, and prepared to install it.
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Oh well sh1t dude! Over $100 to deal with that crap?! But I understand that you don't want the project delayed even longer. I know that can be frustrating. But yeah my @ss definitely would have returned that sh1t.

Zarathustra said:
I'm a little rusty at this, having not done good wire management in a long time, especially in a place where it would all be visible (unlike the good old "shove everything behind the motherboard tray, and mash the rear cover closed whether it wants to or not" approach. 😅)
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Hahahahahahahahaha I know that game too!
 
Grimlakin said:
I'm not ready for custom loops. I think I'm aged past doing that at this point.
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Same here. If I'd been doing them 10 years ago I'd be willing to keep moving forward with them but starting from scratch at this point is more time and money than its worth for my setups.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
Same here. If I'd been doing them 10 years ago I'd be willing to keep moving forward with them but starting from scratch at this point is more time and money than its worth for my setups.
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Yeah, I knew already before starting this project that I really don't have the time for this **** anymore, and actually executing on the project has been proof of that.

That was kind of the motivation though.

I want to do it once. Build an overkill water cooling loop that I will never need to upgrade, and make it modular with QDC's allowing me to easily swap out components as time goes on.

With a little luck, I'll be able to go a long time with the only needed work being to replace the coolant every 1-2 years.

At least that is the hope.

Grimlakin said:
Man if it wasn't for the waterblock I might want it. I'm not ready for custom loops. I think I'm aged past doing that at this point. lol.
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We will have to see how that goes.

I haven't listed it yet, as I still need to clean the block a little before taking pictures and trying to sell it.

It is generally in very good condition (pretty much like new) except a little of the blue dye from mu old coolant dried in one spot inside the block and just won't come out no matter how much I flush it. It is going to need to be opened and scrubbed a little.

Traditionally it is nearly impossible to sell used GPU's with water blocks installed on them. Most water cooling enthusiasts do so for high end systems, and are less likely to want a previous gen GPU when you upgrade...

...but with how weird the GPU market is now, and the 4090 still being the second fastest GPU out there, it may be different this time.

I'm going to try to sell it with the block, but if I don't have any takers, I may reinstall the stock cooler.

For someone who does want to water cool a 4090 though, it will likely be a great deal, as the EK water block on this thing was not cheap, and I bet I'll barely get much more for it with it on there, than I'd get for the stock 4090.
 
I thought this was going to be the weekend I fill and leak test the radiator portion of the loop.

The Bad News:
I overlooked some fittings I needed.

The good news:
MicroCenter has them.

The Bad News:
MicroCenter closes at 6pm on Sundays

The Worse news:
I didn't realize this until I got there,

It may only be just over 10 miles as the crow flies, but this being the greater Boston area, there is traffic 24/7 these days, so that was a waste of an hour and 27 minutes round trip :/

I could have sworn MicroCenter used to be open later in the past, but a review of their hours page on the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" indicates they have closed at 6pm or earlier on Sundays since time immemorial.

I must have just randomly made my mid-build excursions to MicroCenter to get the random bits and pieces I needed to finish the job over the years on Saturdays and assumed they were open later all days of the week 😅


Lol btw:

1757961598245.png


There is even scrolling news text 😁
 
Just some bends, adapters and the like getting a much needed bath in a Home Depot bucket.

PXL_20250928_225503569~2.jpg

People forget how important cleaning is, even new parts. It's almost shocking the amount of machining oils have risen to the top, and that's after giving them a spritz of vinegar, a quick brush with a tooth brush and a rinse in distilled water before the soak.
 
Alrighty,


So there has been progress, but it has also been slow.

There has been a lot of last minute making of custom wiring.

The top radiator needs 5 wires:
- Two 4 pin wires for the fans, Fan1 and Fan2
- Pump Wire, with splitter for boiled little pump fan (4 pin extension with splitter)
- LED wire (4 pins)
- Digital (Calitemp) temperature sensor (4 pin wire for Aquabus)

The bottom radiator needs 7 Wires:
- Two 4 pin wires for the fans, Fan1 and Fan2
- Pump Wire, with splitter for boiled little pump fan (4 pin extension with splitter)
- LED wire (4 pins)
- Two digital (Calitemp) temperature sensor (4 pin wire for Aquabus)
- Flow sensor (with integrated temp sensor) one four pin, and one two pin Dupont connector

It doesn't sound like a lot, but once you start crimping them one by one, soldering splices, shrinking shrink sleeving, continuity testing each conductor, it just kind of adds up.

There has also been some last minute noticing that heat shrink sleeving is remarkably rigid after it is recovered down to its final size.

I've had to trim away material from the custom brackets I made to make the wires fit through them where they need to go, and even then it didn't help all that much. For instance, look at the wire coming off the pump (and little boiled fan) It was supposed to be pulled up through the holes and then out through the liquidtight connector, but that just wasn't happening, so now it is just kind of flopping around there.


PXL_20251006_041025091.PORTRAIT.jpg


At some point in the future I'll probably make some sort of cover for that so I don't have to look at it, but for now we are moving forward.

All of the mounting brackets are finally attached. The reservoir brackets are screwed into place, the pumps are mounted and all of the wiring has been shoved through the liquid tight connector, both top and bottom (but I only have a pic of the top here right now.

I've made many trips to Microcenter in the last week or two, to get fittings and bends I need. Sometimes they have them, sometimes they don't. Their Bitspower fitting and bend station used to be much better stocked, but now it is hit or miss. (I presume tariffs are somehow to blame, as these things come from Taiwan)

In assembling this stuff, I noticed that the part of the rotary fitting that peeked through my two layers of mounting brackets was so small that I could not get a good grip on them with my fingers to tighten them down. I only had a few millimeters of grip surface to work with, and once I twisted it, and had to rotate the rotary fitting back, it started undoing itself again.

I did some googling for a solution and found these nifty Japanese non-marring pliers on amazon.


PXL_20251005_023159102.PORTRAIT.ORIGINAL.jpg

They helped get it done.

I was finally at the point where I thought I was going to connect all of the tubing to the radiators and get some water flowing through the radiator side of things today, but then I got stuck again.

Because once I do that, I am not going to be (easily) able to disassemble the reservoirs again, and I want to install hardtube extenders inside the reservoirs to direct the flow of coolant entering and leaving the reservoirs.

You know, have cool water flowing back from he radiator at a similar location that the intake for the water blocks are, to minimize recircling of hot water returning from the block back into the block. That sort of thing.

This is what that looked like in my old implementation, if an image helps illustrate it:

416000_build_Dec2020-crop.jpg


Note the tubes coming up from the bottom and down from the top. This avoids intakes and returns that are too close to each other just circulating the same fluid over and over, and is pretty important considering my loop depends on the coolant "mixing" in the reservoir.


EK designed this to be a press fit, where a little O-Ring sits in a groove on the inside of the reservoir and grips the hardtube you shove into it:


PXL_20251006_041659093.jpg

The top port in this picture does not have an o-ring in the groove. The bottom has one.

(yes, I know I still need to clean this quite a bit. That old coolant gunk is surprisingly difficult to remove!)

I have quite the selection of O-Rings of many different sizes, including standard G1/4 O-Rings and several others from various industrial O-ring samplers, but none of them work. Several stretch around the 16mm hardtubes but they won't go through the hole because the outer wall of the hardtube sits flush with the hole in the reservoir cap. But when they are not stretched around the tube, they are too small to stay seated in the groove inside the hole.

I need a very specific size of o-ring for this to work, that expands large enough on it's own to stay in that groove when I shove the 16mm OD hardtube through it. Of course, the EK Res x4 is discontinued, and none of the manuals say anything about the size of these O-Rings.

An educated guess is that these are the same O-Rings EK uses in their HDC hardtube fittings. With the way things are going for EK, parts are hard to get for their stuff now. I knew this might be a problem, but there just werent any other large reservoirs on the market with the quantity of inlets and outlets I needed, so I took that risk.

Titanrig.com still had two bags (6pcs each) of replacement EK HDC fitting o-rings for 16mm hardtube. Fingers crossed that once they get here they will actually fit...

And thus we have yet another week of "make minor progress, then get stuck and wait for stuff I ordered to arrive". That seems to be the way this project is going.
 
Zarathustra said:
I just realized I forgot to update work on the electrical control box.

First I bought a Delta dual volt (12v/5v) power supply from Mouser.

I bought a large-is (10"x10"x4") electrical junction box to use as a control box for the fans and pumps.

The intent was for this box to house the power supply, two Aquacomputer Aquaero 6 LT controllers a small USB hub and a Farbwerk LED controller (Aquabus version) for the LED's.

The reason for selecting the Aquaero 6's are twofold. Firstly, I already have three of them (two of which are in my current build) and I have come to quite like them. Secondly, since this water loop is going to be cooling two PC's (and maybe even more later) and I can't predict when one or the other will be on, I wanted something that could manage the loop independently of the PC's, so I can turn them on or off at will, and have the loop continue to function. And that's the beauty of the Aquaero. You plug sensors into it, and program its profiles, and it takes care of itself. No need for it to communicate with the PC at all. (You can hook it up via USB and have pretty charts and graphs, and have it read system sensors if you want too, but I won't really be doing that. Well maybe the pretty charts and graphs/.

IN working on the box, I remembered something I had forgotten. The Aquaero can be re-flashed with a dedicated firmware that turns it into a slave-device, that adds additional fan/pump channels to the master Aquaero. I decided to change my plans to do this, because that way only the Master ever needs USB connectivity, and the need for the USB hub goes away.

Even so, between the power supply and the aquaeros, there will be some generation of heat inside the box, so it will need some cooling too.

So it was time to make holes:

View attachment 3880

View attachment 3879


The holes did not wind up being 100% clean, so I decided I was going to come back, sand them, and give them a coat of paint so they didn't look too terrible.

But first I wanted to test fit the fan:

View attachment 3878

Oh, and I would need to drill mounting holes in the C channel bars I mounted to the back of the rack as well, so I figured I'd get all of the metal work out of the way before painting.

I decided to drill the holes with my trusty DTAP kit, so I wound up with threaded holes directly in the bar stock and didn't have to use any nuts.

View attachment 3877

These Greenlee DTAP kits (I got one metric and one SAE) have been very useful!

I also remembered I'd need some mounting holes for the power supply, the Aquaero's and the Farbwerk, as well as a pass-through hole in the back for wires to go to the PC's, so I needed to drill and test fit those too before painting:

View attachment 3876

I then tried desperately to find a good paint that would match the general color of the thing. Some Googling suggested that Rustoleum's "Industrial Choice" in grey was a good match, but it proved pretty difficult to find. I wound up special ordering it from Granger, and picking it up at their local store.

When I got it, I guess I found out why. It is labeled for "Industrial or Professional Use Only". Whoops.

Well, I am a "professional". Maybe not the type of professional they had in mind, but....

And I am definitely not a professional painter. I absolutely suck at it:

View attachment 3875

View attachment 3874

It wasn't as good of a match as suggested, so I wound up having to paint the whole thing, just to cover the exposed metal from my cuts.

There is pretty bad orange peel throughout, but I am going to live with it.

I also had to paint the lid or it wouldn't match, and when doing that, some crap blew in the wind and landed on it, I tried to quickly remove it but it was too late. I am going to have to re-sand it and try again.

And this is where I had to stop, because the other Aquaero I need is still in my current workstation, which has provided a bit of a dilemma that has been slowing me down. There are also other things in the loop on that machine I need in the new loop, like the reservoir, some flowmeters, temperature sensors, etc.

You see, once I break into that workstation, it is down until phase one of the project is complete, and I use that thing for work, so I can't have it down during the week.

This fact has made me hesitate when working on the project some weekends. Would I really have enough time to finish it? This has wound up being a large contributor to the fact that this project has been making such slow progress lately.

I thought I might do it with the extra day over labor day weekend, but I wound up having some other things to do that took my time, and it wasn't in the cards.

But I think I have a solution for that. In my next post.
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Also,

Remember my control box above?

Well there has been another change of plans here.

Originally I was going to use two Aquaero 6's one as a master and one as a slave to give them the fan outputs and sensor inputs I needed. To be clear, I would never have bought them with the intent of doing this. Aquacomputer sells much better and more affordable aquabus expansion devices for this purpose (like the QUADRO and OCTO), but since I already had two, I figured I'd just use them that way.

I even actually installed this configuration, which wound up looking like this:

PXL_20250928_003939882.jpg


I made an incorrect assumption - however - that means this won't work.

You see, on early versions of the Aquaero 6 there was an "Aquabus high" and an "Aquabus low" connector. I'm not quite sure what the distinction was, or how they were supposed to be used, but at some point Aquacomputer made a firmware change that instead used the "Aquabus low" connector as a second flow sensor connector. UNless you had a really early Aquaero 6, you've never seen one with "Aquabus low". They have all been labeled Flow 2 instead.

Now, the manual says that when you flash the salve firmware to the Aquaero 6 you get 4 fan outputs, some temperature inputs and one flow input. I made the assumption that this was just left over old language from back when Flow2 was still "Aquabus low", and that this thus meant that I was actually going to get two flow sensor inputs from the slave Aquaero.

Well, it turns out that assumption was wrong. There is just one additional flow sensor input, which stinks, because in my design I need four flow sensors in total.

I want one flow sensor to monitor the flow of the radiator loop, and then one each for the block loops (workstation threadripper CPU block, game machine 9950x3d CPU block, game machine 5090 GPU block)

The two Aquaero's only gave me three.

So I checked the Aquaero manual, and found that the Aquaero 6 supports up to two Quadro's over Aquabus, and they have one flow sensor input each, so I ordered them, and once they arrived, drilled some new holes in the box, and installed them:


PXL_20250928_032333806.PORTRAIT.jpg


This is not the mounting orientation I would have chosen, but I wanted to re-use the mounting holes from the second Aquaero, so it is what it is.

I'm going to need to do some wire management cleanup down the road though.

There were two minor complications here. One was that unlike the Aquaero, the Quadro does not use a standard fan connector for the flow sensor. Instead they use some annoying little mini-connector. Their newer flow sensors come with both connectors, but since I am reusing some older ones, I had to also buy the special cables.

Once I had everything hooked up, the Aquaero did not detect either of the Quadros over Aquabus. It turns out that when you use more than one of these things, you have to manually set one of them to use the secondary bus address, or they conflict with each other. This involved temporarily installing the included USB cable to one of them, loading it up in Aquasuite, switching the aquabus address to the second address, and then reconnecting everything, and then they all showed up as expected.

Hopefully I will have more updates soon.

I know that at the onset of this project I said it would be a slow burner, but man, it has exceeded my every expectation in that regard. I am ready for this to be done.
 
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