Maintaining a custom cooling system is necessary if you want
to swap out your coolant, change a component or you want to redo the whole thing.
Whatever the case, we’ll be doing some upgrades on one of the Hydro X systems
we have here at the office and show you some tips and tricks along the way.
In this build, we do not have a drain port,
so we will need to find a free port on the pump/reservoir combo and lay the system down
so that coolant does not spill out.
In this port we can mount a piece of tubing,
ideally with a valve on the end, so we can drain the coolant into a container. We recommend
changing coolant periodically depending how the system is running.
To easily get all the coolant out of the reservoir, loosen the top stop plug, but remember to
put this back in place before tilting the system, or using compressed air.
Tilting the system back and forth can often help get more coolant into the reservoir for
draining, but unfortunately the way this one was built it is still stuck in the tubes.
To drain the remaining coolant, we can disconnect one of the tubes from the fittings. Make sure
that you have paper towels and a bowl handy to catch the coolant, and any potential spills.
Gravity will do most of the work, so remember to also move tubes into a position so coolant
does not drip into your PC if you have to remove the bowl.
Remove any unneeded fittings from the system, again while having paper towel under the components
you are unscrewing to catch any spills as there will often be a bit of coolant left.
If you have spare stop plugs available, it is good idea to use them on the open ports
to further eliminate chances of spills. To easily drain the entire system for most
of the coolant, you can use an electric air compressor. Before doing this, make sure that
you have plugged all ports except for the ones going into your drain container, or you
can be left with quite a mess. The compressed air will blow out most of the
coolant from all of your components, reducing the chances of coolant spills when you
take out a top-mounted radiator, or a GPU block. However, we do still recommend
using paper towels under the parts you removed.
Be carefull when you pull out the tubing from your fittings as they can be very tight.
pull out the tubing in a controlled fashion using one hand one the tube, and the
another hand on the fittings or block itself. Just as with the pump/reservoir combo, we
remove the extra fittings from the GPU block while keeping a piece of paper towel under it.
Before taking the GPU block out, make sure
that both power wires, as well as RGB wires are disconnected.
When taking the GPU block out, check if there is any extra coolant still in the block, and
dump it in your container. Twisting the block around can help, but be carefull not to let
the coolant drip in between the block and the PCB.
Should you spill a bit of coolant on your hardware while no power is connected, don’t worry.
Clean it the best you can with paper towel and leave it in a dry place for a couple
days before powering it on. It is now time to swap out the components,
and get our new tubing bent and into the build. -
If you have previously used clear coolant, you are now ready to fill your loop and get
going. This build previously had blue coolant in it, so we need to flush the blue color
out of the system before putting in another color in.
To do this we fill the loop with destilled water, and run the pump with the 24 pin ATX
jumper. You can clearly see how the blue dye gets flushed trough the system, and becomes
more and more transparent. Depending on your system, you might need to
repeat this step multiple times, in our case, we had to flush the system twice, draining
it as much as possible between each flush with the compressed air.
Finally we fill the system with our new purple coolant. Since we already leak tested the
system while flushing it with destilled water, we can now enjoy the always cool first time filling.
To loosen large air pockets from your radiators
and blocks you can tilt the case from side to side while the pump is running, but make
sure that you have all stop plugs installed on your reservoir so you do not give your
components an unneeded shower. Pro tip - Disconnecting the pumps PWM header
during the fill process will make it run at 100% speed, making it easier to get rid of
air pockets.
For more information check out corsair.com/hydrox. Thanks for watching!