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This is actually my first water cooled build, so I don't have much to compare against. As shown in the photo I posted, I attached a length of clear tubing to the fill port and ran the pump slowly while filling. It was hard enough to keep it from running dry with the tube that I don't think it would work very well without.
Once filled, I tipped the case to various angles to help get air out. Again, that was only possible due to the clear tube. Then I let it run for a couple days with the tube sticking out to get the rest of the bubbles before removing the tube and sealing it up.
The way I removed the tube was to carefully snip the excess length and suck out the water with a syringe until it was down below the level of the fitting.
Not sure how a t-line works exactly, but it sounds like maybe a more permanent version of the above.
Thanks for the explanation on what you had to do.
With a T-line, you have a T-fitting with 2 ends being the normal loop and the 3rd end being a piece of tubing. The difference between this and what you did is that there is no reservoir to hopefully easily trap the air. That is one of the major struggles of using a T-line is that it is difficult to get the air bubbles to go up the tube attached to the T-fitting instead of just recirculating. With a normal reservoir, much more of the air gets trapped in the top and doesn't recirculate, and while it still takes time with a reservoir it isn't nearly as difficult to bleed the air. You just fill the reservoir, power cycle, and repeat until filled then just run it to get the remaining air. At that point, no intervention is generally necessary and with time the smaller bubbles will work their way to the reservoir. This doesn't always happen so easily with a T-line.
Did the tiny reservoir on the block and tubing you set up capture the air bubbles decently well and prevent them from recirculating? It sounds like there was still some difficulty with trapping the air, but perhaps not too much difficulty since the pump is at least directly fed.
The reason why I am asking these questions, is I want to understand how practical the reservoir on this block is. I'm going to be doing an ncase m1 build soon and I would love to get this barrow block if it can serve as a practical reservoir for bleeding the loop and keeping it filled. If not, I may just get the iceman.