How and what to avoid when building your first water cooled rig !

Why did i build a water cooled mining rig?

I have just made some money from trading crypto and wanted to build my passive income stream. I have a few friends that operate a digital mining farm, after looking at their operations for some time i decided to dive in. But i wanted something without the heat and noise. So that i could mine at home. Many people can’t mine at home due to the heat and noise. The Wife starts complaining about the noise and heat, main two reasons that i hear from follow miners. After loads of research, i than started shopping. why I’m i writing this now, in the hope that i could save other people time and money, by not making the same mistakes as i did. i ended up with

Parts list :

• Radeon Vega 64
• Gigabyte O.C Force-Z87X
• Intel i3–4340
• Corsair vengeance 8gb-4gb x 2
• Corsair ax1600i
• Sandisk ssd 120gb
• Phantek enthoo pro

Ek water cooling list:

• EK-AC Radeon Vega
• EK-FG 360 Expansion Pack
• EK-XRES 100 SPC-60 MX PWM (incl. pump)
• EK-AC Multi-GPU Connector Kit
• EK-RES X3 – TUBE 250 (204mm)
• EK-ACF ALU Fitting 10/13mm – Red
• EK-Supremacy AX
• EK-AF ALU Angled 45° G1/4 – Black
• EK-AF ALU Angled 90° G1/4 – Black
• EK-FG 240 Expansion Pack
• EK-AF ALU Rotary Terminal 90° 2xG1/4 – Black

As this is my first venture into water cooling i of course made mistakes with purchases, the first mistake was the gpu i bought the Vega 56 from power colour with 3 fans, having compare to the list at EK, than only did i find out all gpu had the same parts. So i had to buy those amd cards with a single fan. Blower style. And a few other smaller mistakes like the rotary terminal and the multi gpu connector kit which was not needed.

Picture on TOP is wrong model, on the bottom on the box is the correct model.

A lot of the time was spent waiting for the parts to arrive, the hardest to get where the Vega 64. It was at a time when gpu was out of stock most of the time.

Most parts of the assembly was quite simple and straightforward. I will skip the part where i removed the fan cover from the gpu as there are many youtube videos on this. Also beware the thermal paste and sticker.

Phantek enthoo pro : The Full Tower Case

One of the reasons for choosing this case is that it’s a fully modular and of very fine quality. Has a big 200mm intake fan in front. Back of the plate where the mobo is mounted there is space for the SSD and PWM, with the cables held in place. As you can see (top left) after all the unwanted component was removed. There is plenty of space to fit in all the equipment, psu and 240 radiator at the bottom. With the D5 pump from ek sitting on top of the radiator.

I first ran my rig with 2 Vega and was able to maintain the temperature at 40–42 degrees. Why I didn’t mount all 4 Vega at the same time ? I wanted to test if my rig would spring a leak! Lucky for me it didn’t.

After this i started to mount the last two cards into the system. This is where i started to run into serious overheating issues. I wasn’t able to maintain the temperature at 40 ++. In my first trial, the cards were mounted in serial. Causing the card at the end of the chain to overheat in a matter of mins. I then quickly change to a parallel configuration. At this point of time i had installed 2 radiators a 360mm(top) and a 240mm(bottom). At the same time i remove the cpu from the loop as i felt there wasn’t a need for it, it was actually quit cool within the cpu case. So at this time with 4 Vega 64 and 2 radiators i could use the rig for 25 mins max before the overheat would shut it down.

Another issue i found was than if you use the inlet from the TOP of the gpu the first card does not fill properly due to gravity. If you introduce the cooling liquid from the bottom all the cards get cool nicely.

Spent more time waiting for more parts again, ordered another 360mm radiator. And this time all was well,i was able to maintain 40 degrees under. In some of the online videos it is stated to have 1 fan per component. 1 360mm and 1 240mm radiators had total of 5 fans, for 4 gpu and 1 cpu, that didn’t work fo me, some say its because the Vega cause too much heat, now with 2 360mm and 1 240mm giving me a total of 8 fans.

I started with a Corsair hx1200, but with the Hx 1200, the rig kept restarting when the gpu power draw spiked, i had to use a watt meter to find this out at idle the power draw was 111 watts, when mining stock it was taking 1400 of the wall, undervolting the rig.

Bought me to 1020 watt. So I’m guessing that when the power spikes it goes over 1200 watts, currently using a Corsair ax1600i.

Also a tap should be included into the loop for easy removal of the cooling liquid.

Do not use mid side tower casing if you planned on water cooling more than 1 gpu.

Also the last gpu nearest the psu was having a problem with the connectors and pins. As the modern day gpu are mostly double slot the connector was too high after connecting to the pins on the mobo. I had to remove the plastic sleeves of the connector and bend the insides of the connector to a 90 degrees angle, also needed are some of the thermal sticker, stick these at the bottom of the gpu where there is bare metal above the pins.

Thank you for reading
It took me many hours of research for this article and even more hours to write it. I’d really appreciate upvotes, resteems or donations if you found it useful. for more insights please follow me on Telegram

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CBX-5To9Qkf8642rp4xhNC4WLnFr9draQZiBpM
ETH 0xdF15E9399B9F325D161c38F7f2aFd72C11a19500
BTC 17mMPpySrRFECZRCJGSitcTGmoPL6egFLw
NEO- AaQqK3mG8oKYkLLPKvWSHkj2kk2DFKaEnQ