Today I’m building a high-end RG blinged out custom water-cooled gaming PC. I’m actually pretty fired up for this one because this is going to be the first custom Loop I’ve built in quite some time, but not without a few hardware blessings from the PC Gods to make this the quickest and easiest Hardline build ever.

A lot of the parts we’re using today, including a brand new cooling kit from Corsair, make the custom water cooling process so idiot-proof not even I can mess it up, and that’s saying a lot.

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Now, before we talk about the cool new fancy cooling kit, I first want to do a test boot with all the core components because there’s absolutely nothing worse than firing up your brand new custom Loop build that you’ve just assembled only to find out that it doesn’t post. That’s already a pain in the ass for a standard build, but if you have to drain a loop and take apart all the tubing just to troubleshoot, that’s a royal freaking nightmare that I’m not going to let happen to us today. So, test boot it is.

Plus, this will let you get acquainted with all the specs that we’re using for this glorious build. Our CPU is the super powerful AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 3D, a hell of a gaming chip. Slotting that into an Asus Prime X670 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard that supports PC Gen 5 and DDR5. Speaking of which, 64 gigs of Corsair Dominator Titanium DDR5 at 6400 speed will also be slotting into a 2 TB MP700 Pro PCI Gen 5 NVMe M.2 SSD from Corsair into that board, along with an Asus ROG STXS Gaming RTX 480, all being powered by a Corsair HX1000i. Did I mention I’m giving this away? Yeah, giveaway link in the description. Go!

Alright, everything’s wired up and ready to go. We’ve got all our core components set up, and for the record, I am using an AMD Wraith cooler, just a little stock cooler there, so we don’t fry our chip. I’m going to go ahead and short the pins… okay, GPU fans look good, power supply fan check, LEDs are on as well. Do we get a video signal though? That is the ultimate question right now. It doesn’t look like it, is the monitor even on? Hold on… okay, let’s try this again. Come on, man, come on, don’t do me like that, don’t do me like that… uh-oh, I don’t like this. Oh, thank God, that gave me my heart skipped a beat there. Good Lord. Alright, we got our CPU recognized, we got our memory recognized, even the M.2 drive is showing up. This looks good to me, I think we’re ready to move on to the next step, which is to put all this hardware and more into our case, which is the Corsair 6500X. Bam, baby, oh, she’s a beauty.

So, as you probably guessed from the looks of it, we’re dealing with the dual-chamber design with this case. We got the board assembly and all the fans and radiators on one side, and the power supply and drives on the other. Obviously, this is the White Version, there is a Black Version as well, but on top of that, there are optional accessories and alternate panels that you can buy and swap out for the ones that you see here, going up and down on the sides and the top. Those can all be replaced and swapped out to your heart’s content. Here’s a quick look at the front I/O, or top I/O rather. We got a nice power button, feels very tactile, super high quality, 3.5 mm combo audio jack, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, you get one of those, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and then a reset button.

A quick look inside, I like that, that’s tool-less and just opens up really nice on those hinges. By the way, this case is large, this is closer to like an XL size than it is to the standard, so bear that in mind, but lots of room for cooling and activities. We’ve got 360 mm radiator support on the top, bottom, and the side, and if you want to do 140s, you can do up to a 280 mm rad at the top or the bottom. Another interesting thing about this case is that you’ll see a lot of cutouts around the motherboard tray. These are not for cables, people, these are for cable-free motherboards. The ones that are coming out, the Asus BTF, the MSI Project Zero, those boards are supported with this chassis. It’s kind of nice to see a big case manufacturer like Corsair starting to support these types of boards more and more.

The right side panel is completely meshed for ample ventilation and dust filtration. There’s two thumb screws that you got to undo and then boom, it pops right off. Back here, you’ve got a drive cage for two 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives that can pull out right from the back there. There’s just a little panel with the thumb screw that pops off. There’s also a pair of trays for 2.5 inch drives on the side of that cage. Overall, it’s an incredibly spacious interior, and based on the amount of hardware that we’re cramming in here today, I’m not complaining.

Alright, let’s talk about this cooling kit from Corsair. This is the XH405i RGB. If you’re looking to build a Hardline Loop for your CPU, this is CPU cooling only. We’ll talk more about that in a sec. If you’re looking to build your Hardline Loop for the first time, this is a great starting off point because of two main reasons. The first one being it includes everything you need to create that Hardline Loop for your CPU. As far as I can tell, the only thing missing is a heat gun, which you’ll need to bend the tubes, so you can pick one of those up on Amazon for super cheap. But apart from that, it does have every single thing you’ll need. And the second big reason that this kit is great for beginners is because of the IQ Link smart ecosystem. With all of the wired components like the fans, the CPU block, the PWM D5 pump, they’re all IQ Link supported and compatible. So you can link them together very easily. Each device only has one connector on them. You string them all up together within seconds and then plug it into the IQ Link System Hub. It is extremely easy and completely eliminates any headache factor with a custom water cooling build.

Here’s a look at all the hardware that’s included. We’ll go over it really quick. We’ve got an IQ Link XC7 RGB Elite CPU block, got the XD5 RGB Elite D5 PWM pump, 360 mm radiator, along with an IQ Link starter kit featuring three QX120 RGB fans. However, we will be swapping these out for a bunch of RX10 RGB fans simply because they’re a bit more high-performing. Nothing wrong with these, these just produce more airflow absolutely. The kit gives you a few extra fittings so you can do that as well. Now, since we are adding a GPU to our water cooling loop, I did go ahead and pick up an additional 360 radiator from Corsair just because I’m not super confident that a single 360 rad is going to be sufficient cooling for both a 7900X 3D and an RTX 480. So just to be sure. Plus, we got tons of room in that case for it anyway. A second 360 radiator will be added. For the actual GPU block, we’re going to use a Corsair XG7 which, all the other custom water cooling hardware inside of the case until we’re ready for bending tubes. Let’s go.

All right, the fittings are installed and we are ready for tube bending. But really quick, I wanted to give you guys a rundown of well, the runs that I plan on doing because this is a little bit interesting. Oftentimes when I do a loop like this, I think a lot of people, especially like beginner or novice builders, their loop will just kind of go up underneath the 24 pin. I thought it’d be kind of cool to actually kind of hide it like a little stealth tube underneath the 24 pin, underneath the USB cables, and then hook right into the top rad. Originally, I was going to go straight up, but that kind of covers up the nice tank of the reservoir. Instead, we’re going to go a little bit behind here, and then it’s going to come out of the radiator, it’s going to go down, left, and straight back into the CPU. So, that’s going to be a T-bend run or anything we need to have enough clearance there. So, we’re going to go in here, out of the radiator, and into the GPU, and then out of the GPU. These are also going to be parallel lines. I think that’s going to look nice. Out of the GPU, and then straight back into the pump res where we started. It’s uh, it’s going to be a wild ride. I uh, counting five, five runs in total. Most of them will be simple, but there will be two very long runs that require two bends each, and uh, I’m a little nervous about it. It just makes it, it’s so nice. Quick little demo here.

Done. It makes a super clean cut. Get rid of all that crusty stuff, and that’s it. I’ll put a link for that in the uh, in the description below in case you’re interested. But without further ado, let’s bend some tube.

All right, many hours later, many, many hours later, the build is done. Why don’t we talk about some of the challenges that I faced when doing some of these runs? Because uh, you know what? It might look better, might look a little cleaner if we went back and then behind the pump res and into a fitting that I’ve placed way over here, thanks to a bunch of extenders and stuff. It would have been just a little bit awkward with the pipe, with a pipe going down here. I actually did do that run, and it looked okay. I just thought this is going to look a little bit better. I was hesitant to do it at first, though, because it’s the most complicated run of the entire build. Since cosmetically this bend was uh, it was the very back bend, which you don’t really see it too much cause it’s kind of tucked away. So, I was actually okay and ready to live with that. However, it snapped off shortly after I fit it into the loop because uh, that’s what air bubbles do.

Air bubbles, they put air into the uh, the walls, the side walls of your tubing, and that makes it more brittle and uh, decreases its structural integrity and all that. That being said, it made the sec rom every angle and I I honestly think it’s it’s partially experienced but I think I just got lucky as well because I I haven’t done a Hardline Loop like this in quite some time. I wasn’t expecting it to turn out quite this good. I really love how our stealth runs turned out, the one that’s going underneath the 24 pin, you almost don’t notice it, especially because the coolant is clear, it just sort of blends in against the motherboard tray. But once you notice it, you’re like oh, look at that, this some o I potentially left it uh, undone so I could pull these out and show you what’s going on with IQ Link and how easy this ecosystem is uh, to wire up. We’ve got 13 devices in total, we’ve got 10 fans and three HydroX components which are the pump res, the CPU block, and the GPU block in the traditional build. You’d probably have at least two cables coming off of each of those if they’re RGB. So that’s what 26 cables that we’d be dealing with and that doesn’t include all the cables that you’d then have to ures a quick look at idle temps, the 7900 X 3D is getting around 46.5 de C at the moment up to 48.5 at the max. We’ve got cinebench R23 fired up, let’s give it a go and see how the thermals perform here and also what kind of score we can get. So, 78, 79, we’re almost done, we’re almost done, 79.8, oh, we hitc it’s practically done, boom, boom, we are done. ADC was the max temp, not too shabby for a

7900 X 3D that’s a 12 core 24 thread processor we’re looking at with a beautiful score, multi-threaded score of 26 temps are going to be much lower in the majority of games than we saw in C bench because that’s more of a stress test specifically designed two tax the CPU which is not going to be the case in most titles. Really quick note about the PC itself though it is completely silent if you put your ear really up close to the top of the case you can kind of hear some faint worring going inside but apart from that it is freaking quiet I love how stealthy everything is the pump especially I mean I set it at just it’s a ghost it’s a white ninja if it weren’t for the LEDs and the fan spinning this system would show no signs of life it’s awesome and I know the system looks a little cloudy right now because I haven’t taken the plastic peel off I’ll probably do that once I uh shoot the Montage which you’ve already seen so a little bit of backwards filming there but overall this is the build you can win it enter enter this the link below if you don’t enter this one I mean I could understand maybe you did and what you want to see next and tell me you love me all right guys I’ll see you later bye.

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ENTER TO W1N PC HERE: https://gleam.io/vQVCp/hardline-pc-giveaway

-Tools-
Wagner Heat Gun: https://geni.us/QHiPDAA
Mini Cut-Off Saw: https://geni.us/EHc73Z

-PC Parts-
Corsair 6500X: https://geni.us/arwsJd
Corsair iCUE LINK XH405i Custom Cooling Kit: https://geni.us/Jvt7
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D: https://geni.us/v7ncxpO
Asus Prime X670E-Pro WiFi: https://geni.us/Lvcj
Corsair Dominator Titanium DDR5: https://geni.us/IoBNNT
Corsair MP700 Pro M.2: https://geni.us/h8iE
Asus ROG Strix Gaming RTX 4080: https://geni.us/JbPt
Corsair iCUE LINK XG7: https://geni.us/clXj9
Corsair HX1000i: https://geni.us/w0X1QQW
Corsair iCUE LINK RX120 RGB: https://geni.us/r0uE1xk
AsiaHorse Sleeved Cable Kit (12VHPWR): https://geni.us/f77qg

-Timestamps-
00:00 Intro
00:35 CDKeyOffer: Reliable OS Keys
01:42 Test Boot
02:39 Corsair 6500X Case Overview
05:01 Custom Cooling Hardware
07:27 Pre-Loop System Prep
07:46 Tube Runs Planning
10:14 Build Montage
11:41 Last Minute Decision
14:23 Cable Management
15:17 Temperatures
16:31 Acoustics
17:14 Closing

MUSIC CREDITS
Epidemic Sound – http://www.epidemicsound.com