UPDATE 7.0 - ÍTS HERE!
It's been a month since the last update. Which surprised me really! it's felt ALOT longer! So where to kick off... EKWB! HOOKED! ME! UP! I've used their products in every water-cooled PC I've ever built. Well, the first block I bought was the D-TEC Fusion v2, then EKWB was born and that was that. I've used almost every CPU block (family of blocks) they've put out there (except the first couple.. oops, where am I going with this..) for the longest time picking WC components was easy. EK blocks & Bitspower fittings and that ran true until about 6-9 weeks ago (yeah.. it was totally longer huh) when EK started teasing their Torque line of fittings.
BP fittings are still a pain to source in the UK and cost more than they really should. I'd buy from Dazmods in Canada and get slapped with import duty (yeah... I did it twice and recycled the fittings... when you drop $400+ on fittings alone.. you tend to use em over and over). So with EK bringing a new design that finally rivals that of BP I could not wait to get my hands on them.
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I came back from LAN to find the biggest goodie bag from the legends over at EK, waiting for me at work. I'll come back to the fittings later on. However, lets recap. In the last post I talked about how I'd wanted to move to an all AMD build, sold my 2070 and bought the 50th Anni 5700XT. Gigabyte helped me out of a faulty board and sent over the X570 Pro Wifi and I upcycled my 2700X for the spanking value 3600X.
I assembled and hit the UKs largest gaming festival for 5 days of burgers, beer and bugs! (wow being an owner of a Navi GPU was rough those first 5 weeks after launch). It wasn't until I was back playing games in my office with the build 2 feet away that the need for a loop switch loudly became clear.
SO I drained the loop and got to work. Coz EK sent me this!
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Damn thats a great looking block!
Now, my little X3.0 with its single slim 120mm RAD won't do well cooling both CPU/GPU so when I found out that block was coming I reached out to the best in air cooling (NOCTUA) and asked to showcase a couple of products! 48 hours later I had the coolers in hand! yup 48 hours! I've waited 5 months for hardware in the past.. WOW!
NOCTUA NH-L12S (check it out here)
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This was my first choice, JR23 used the same coolers on both his X3.0 Parvum builds and having a nice 120mm fan cooling that X570 chipset would be a huge bonus!
NOCTUA NH-D9L (check it out here)
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This was my backup plan. I loved the idea of a miniature D-frame tower cooler. Now I rather enjoy the colour of Noctuas fans, but with their Redux line available it simply had to be done. It's a perfect fit for this build!
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Couple REDUX 92mm for the D9L and a pair of REDUX 120mm for NH-L12S + RAD. So this got me thinking, something like this....
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Oh yes!
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BEAST!
So back to it, off with the block and on with the NH-L12S! I really wanted this to work! look how cool it is! But sadly, it wouldn't fit with my DDC pump being mounted where it is.. Boo!
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So plan B! Enter the NH-D9L! Now, this worked out better then I'd imagined! Not only did it fit within 1-2mm of the DDC pump but the blow directly over the DDC which makes a noticeable difference.
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Happy with the look I cracked on with the loop. I really enjoy the aesthetic of the original loop as so much of the design of this build was based on it. Swapping out the loop for a GPU block was simple enough (loop wise).
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Time to start playing with these Torque fittings! Oh they are so nice! Wait and see! (it's late... I'll spam the life out of this post tomorrow and then update in the week. I'll share a bunch of final build shots on Insta too)
but for now.
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Goodnight.
J.
