About a year ago now on my previous build The Orange Plague, I was upgrading the GPU to a Zotac GTX 980Ti Amp! and needed a block for it. Now I have been an admirer of Watercool's GP blocks for a long time and the Heatkiller IV CPU block I had got the previous year has been amazing, so I hopped straight onto their shop to check out what blocks they did for the 980Ti. I wanted something nice and coppery to go with my Pure Copper CPU block, but the XL style block I had coveted for so long was only available in Nickel plating. I sent a message to Jakob from Watercool asking if they'd ever done a copper version as I couldn't find one anywhere. He came back and said they hadn't....... but they could! So i put in an order right away for a one off custom version with a backplate. A few days later Jakob advised there might be a slight delay in the order as they were waiting for some backplates to be returned from the powder coaters, I told him how ironic as I was going to be sanding that off anyway. The very next day my order arrive and I was a little puzzled after Jakobs message about the delay, only the open the package to find a gorgeous, unplated backplate and my custom GPU.


Now I'd done something very stupid in the last build with the Mayhems Orange Pastel, something they've warned against time after time. I added Aurora concentrate to it. It looked amazing for a couple of weeks but then faded away. On tearing my loop down I found it again, it had gotten into EVERYTHING. All the threads of the blocks and fittings, all the nooks and crannies, it had stuck in and to the pump impellers and then along with the orange pastel, stained them a dirty brown when they should be bright blue. It was such a PITA to clean out. So yeh, when Mayhems say don't use Aurora full time, listen. lol



After I'd cleaned everything out and built the loop again, I was just in love with the blocks, but the window in the side panel has a funny brawn tint and is a bit small, covering a lot of the loop up. I considered modding the original panel, but it's got that horrendous locking mechanism that requires at least 3 hands so I thought I'd have a crack at making a fully custom one. I ordered a piece of 10mm acrylic a couple off mm less than the dimensions of the existing panel to account for the aluminium angle I was going to use to frame it. I cut the alu angle at 45 degrees with the aid of the shoddiest little mitre box and hacksaw I got from a local shop. It didn't do too bad a job though. I stuck the alu angle to the acrylic with super strong double sided tape and then stuck magnetic strip to the underside. The tape that came on the magnetic strip wasn't too good, so I put my own on them as well to make sure they stuck. Turned out ok for a first attempt.




That's all for this one. Next thing for my rig will be simplifying the loop and downsizing into a smaller case, possibly a case mod. So stay tuned Crapfans. Same crap time. Same crap channel.