GeForce Garage: Cross Desk Series, Video 3 - How To Bend Copper Pipe for Liquid Cooling Loops

By Logan Decker on Tue, Sep 30 2014 GeForce Garage, Videos, Guides

If you’ve chosen to go the route of liquid cooling for your gaming rig, opaque rubber tubes do the job just fine. Case lights that illuminate the coolant coursing through transparent, flexible tubes kick things up a notch. And nothing beats a custom-built liquid cooling loop fashioned out of rigid acrylic pipes—except, perhaps, a custom-built liquid cooling loop made of powder-coated copper pipes.

Powder-coated or not, a rigid copper cooling loop not only looks better, but can also make working inside your case easier, and is less prone to the calamity of tubes popping free and spraying coolant over the interior of your rig.

Like many PC modding projects, it sounds more complex and impractical than it actually is, as you’ll see in our third video in the GeForce Garage Red Harbinger Cross Desk Series. The tools and materials are available online and from any decent hardware store, with the exception of the optional Pipe Straightening Tool from Kwix UK that host Richard Surroz demonstrates in the video, so there's nothing stopping you from doing this at home.

In fact, the most complicated part of the whole procedure is sitting down in front of your open case and deciding how you want to route your pipes. It wouldn’t hurt to measure the interior of your case and the position of your components on paper so you can experiment with paths (or even using Google SketchUp if you want to be really intense). And don’t forget that you’re working in three dimensions, so you can bend pipes in any direction to route around components or through holes drilled inside—or even out of—your case.

If you’re still on the fence about the project, download our accompanying cheat sheet (PDF) that’ll walk you through the process shown in the video in greater detail, and if you still have questions, ask away in the comment section.

And keep checking back here at GeForce Garage as we update the site with more videos and cheat sheets in the Cross Desk Series. There’s a lot more to come!

For other skill guides involving the Red Harbinger Cross Desk:

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