LENGTH OF TIME: 4-5 HOURS
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM
1 DISMANTLING
RIGHT PEOPLE, we need as much room as we can possibly get out of this case. Liquid-cooling can be a fiddly operation with tight angles and impossible gaps. To make life easier, we start off by taking as much of the case apart as possible. You may be thinking, “well why have you left the front radiators in?” These work in our favor as we’ll be installing a 360mm radiator behind them. Other than that, the side panel wing doors come off with one screw holding each one. The front panel pops off with a gentle pull from the bottom and the same applies to the top panel. Now that’s stripped, on to some more tearing down.
2 GPU TEARDOWN
WE USUALLY FOCUS
on the GPU later on in the build but we need to do some prepping now to get it ready for some liquid cooling. Yep, on paper it’s scary, and if you do this it will probably void the warranty on your card, but it’s actually not as worrisome as you might think. We’re after the bare bones of this GPU so to start off with, we need to remove the screws that hold the casing on. Then we remove the GPU bracket that sits around the processor on the board. Be careful when doing this as it’s spring-loaded so loosen a corner gradually at a time. With all the screws aside, we can take the mighty fans and heatsink unit off our ASUS 3080 OC but unfortunately, we had to then set this aside for now.
3 THE WRONG BLOCK
, we initially ordered the wrong GPU cooling block here. The one we initially chose was Corsair’s XG5 GPU block, and it took us all the way until stripping the GPU to figure that out. After trying to line up the screw holes, I started to feel like I was in over my head a little on this build. The incorrect Corsair GPU cooling block also looks sleeker than our replacement part, thanks to its mainly transparent design, but
