We saw Alphacool’s Eisball at Computex 2019  and this week we got the chance to use Eisball in a full PC build. Dave Alcock of Alphacool brought a huge box of Alphacool hardware to our studio and be quiet! sent a white Pure Base 500 case and a Straight Power 11 power supply. Add an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU and we had pretty much everything we needed to bring Alphacool Eisball to life.

System Hardware

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite
• Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200MHz
• Graphics card: Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition 8GB
• Case: be quiet! Pure Base 500 White
• Power supply: 850W be quiet! Straight Power 11
• SSD: Toshiba RC100 M.2 NVMe
• OS: Windows 10

Custom Loop Cooling

• Reservoir: Alphacool Eisball Digital RGB
• Pump: Alphacool VPP655
• CPU Block: Alphacool Eisblock XPX Aurora Edge Plexi Chrome
• GPU Block: Alphacool Eisblock GPX-N Plexi
• Radiators: Alphacool NexXxos ST30 V2 360mm and 120mm
• Fittings: Alphacool 13/10mm, extensions and 45 degree adapters
• RGB: Alphacool Aurora LED ring 13mm chrome
• Soft Tube: Alphacool 13/10mm
• Coolant: Alphacool Eiswasser

While Dave was building the Eisball system we discussed custom liquid cooling, starting with the  benefits of liquid cooling and moving on to questions about fan sizes, radiator area, different types of pumps.

Here are the key points on which we agree:

• Liquid cooling on graphics cards is a winner.
• Prepare as much of your system on the bench as possible before you start building.
• Calculate how much radiator area you require and then add one for luck.
• PWM pump control is good news while modern pumps such as VPP755 combine a variable controller with PWM.
• Addressable RGB is excellent.

and here are a few extra points from Dave with which Leo does not necessarily agree

• There are very few problems you cannot solve with a Dremel.
• Orange is the colour of kings.
• Free space is bad – add another radiator.

KitGuru Says: Thanks to Dave from Alphacool for showing us the Eisball reservoir and giving us the benefit of his knowledge.

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