Anyone here have a maximus formula custom loop?

[MoonFrost]

Would love to see pictures, particularity with a drain valve.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how draining works when the water in the loop is going in all sorts of directions because of the motherboard block. This is going to be a hardline tube build.

This is what I have planned atm. The black squares and arrows are just to indicated 90 degree fittings and their direction for my reference, pay no attention.

This is with the drain attached to an inlet port on the pump, since I'm using the top of the resevior as the actual inlet.

Alternatively I could plug up that extra inlet and do this :
However I changed this one slightly and was going to put a piece of soft tubing between the T splitter and the drain valve, and just tuck it away under the radiator.

[Menthol]

I have never used hard line tubing myself, looking at the loop you have laid out I believe on the video card block you have the inlet and outlet switched, the left side is typically the inlet side.
The front radiator will never drain because the fittings are at the top and unless there is a way to force air in the water cannot drain out
There are always compromises that need to be made and using hard line tubing increases those since you can't use quick disconnects
The VRM block on the motherboard is not a necessity but I understand wanting it in the loop as it's one of the features of the Formula board
All you can do is put the drain at the lowest point but it will never drain very well without a way to blow air through the loop

[MoonFrost]

Menthol wrote:
I have never used hard line tubing myself, looking at the loop you have laid out I believe on the video card block you have the inlet and outlet switched, the left side is typically the inlet side.
The front radiator will never drain because the fittings are at the top and unless there is a way to force air in the water cannot drain out
There are always compromises that need to be made and using hard line tubing increases those since you can't use quick disconnects
The VRM block on the motherboard is not a necessity but I understand wanting it in the loop as it's one of the features of the Formula board
All you can do is put the drain at the lowest point but it will never drain very well without a way to blow air through the loop

Thanks for the input, yea, based on the instructions it said any configuration worked, but in another site it said it would maybe make a 1 degree C difference. But yea, I'll be switching it because I believe that your way makes more sense with the jet plate.

I originally had the radiator with the ports on the bottom, but was told it would be hard to bleed the air out. Unno. In that picture I actually have it with the ports on the bottom, but I drew ports on the top because right now the bottom ports are in the way of the pump mounting.

And that's what I've been hearing, I may buy a cheap air compressor when it comes time to drain.

If anyone can recommend a cheap air compressor that would be useful. I know nothing about them, and don't want to explode my loop if I buy the wrong one lol

[Menthol]

I just blow air into a line, no compressor needed, but I use flex tube and quick disconnects so I can remove CPU or GPU blocks, without draining completely, but my build does not look as nice as hard tubing

[MoonFrost]

Menthol wrote:
I just blow air into a line, no compressor needed, but I use flex tube and quick disconnects so I can remove CPU or GPU blocks, without draining completely, but my build does not look as nice as hard tubing

That's what I originally was going to do, but was told blowing into the loop isn't a good idea as it introduces a lot of bacteria from your mouth and might increase chances of growth? Unno if it matters when using EKs fluid. I think it had biocides and stuff in it

[offthewall69]

Can you provide a little more info? (case model, radiators, etc.)

The thing to remember about draining your loop is that you need to allow air in; simply putting a drain valve on the bottom of the loop doesn't work well unless you can open a port at the top. For hardlines you ideally want a fill port at the top and a drain port at the bottom (with soft lines you can simply pull one of the top hoses of the compression fitting). Put a T fitting on one of your ports (doesn't matter which) of the 360 rad. Run a soft line from one side of the T to a bulkhead fitting like this. If you want to do a complete drain of the rad, invert your computer and drain out from the fill port. As menthol suggested, swap your ports on the GPU block.
A rotatable 90 before your drain valve would be helpful; when you drain just remove the cap, put on a barb fitting and hose, open the valve and open the fill port.

[offthewall69]

BTW, here's a video of a mod upsnef did for ROG last year when the board first came out. He put the GPU and CPU in parallel, through the upper rad, then through the board. Awesome build!

You can see he went goofy-foot on the GPU block, but he's using the older EK block. They didn't have jet flow on the blocks back then, it was just split flow, so it didn't make much of a difference in cooling.

[MoonFrost]

This is what I ended up doing, had to drain it already because of troubleshooting my pc not booting. It ended up being because of the backplate on graphics card causing a short somehow.

Draining was a bit of a pain, but doable.

[jab383]

I had a formula in the water loop with a drain. The radiator is mounted along the top of the case. Reservoir and pump are in two 5 inch drive bays. The drain is at the lowest point in the water line between CPU and VRM blocks. The radiator has plugs on unused inlet/outlet ports. The loop drains like a champ when one of those plugs and the drain cap are opened. This was so much easier to put together with flexible tubing than it would have been with hard tubes.

[MoonFrost]

jab383 wrote:
I had a formula in the water loop with a drain. The radiator is mounted along the top of the case. Reservoir and pump are in two 5 inch drive bays. The drain is at the lowest point in the water line between CPU and VRM blocks. The radiator has plugs on unused inlet/outlet ports. The loop drains like a champ when one of those plugs and the drain cap are opened. This was so much easier to put together with flexible tubing than it would have been with hard tubes.

Yea, extra ports on my radiator would have made things easier, but I needed slim ones in order to fit inside my case, with fans being able to squeeze both above the fitting on the motherboard. As well as being able to fit the resevior between the 1080ti and the frond rad. The EK slim radiator didn't have extra ports unfortunately.