Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop

Installing New Tubing & Distilled Water
The first thing I tried was simply changing out the tubing for some Fesser UV blue tubing distilled water instead of coolant.

When doing liquid cooling you want to be very careful about what you use for the liquid.  As a general rule you should never use tap or filtered water in a closed loop electronic environment. There are two reasons, and the first is a danger to your components.  There is always a chance that you will spring a leak, or have something break and spill fluid onto your expensive electronics.  While water itself is actually non conductive, the minerals found in water are.  Distilled water has had all of these minerals and deposits removed, it will give you some hope of not frying your components if you have a spill.  Coolants meant for use in computers are also intended to be non conductive, but many are still conductive.  The second reason not to use regular water is that it will have nutrients in it that will promote the growth of algae.  Even though it seems closed off from the outside, a watercooling loop unchecked will grow all sorts of funky plant life.

Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop

When replacing the tubing, the first thing to do is to decide how long you want your tubing to be and to cut it to length.  I wanted mine to be slightly longer than than stock, so I lined them up and cut them a little longer with a pair of sharp scissors.  Scissors will work, but there are also tube cutting tools on the market for relatively cheap prices that may give you a cleaner cut end.

Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop

With the tubing cut, start connecting it starting with the pump.  I mentioned in the main review that the clamps that come with the H220 are designed to work only with to stock outer diameter which is ⅝”.  Our Fesser tubing is ⅜” inner diameter and only ½” outer diameter, so the clamps won’t work, our tubing is too small.  There are a couple of options; you can order some clamps from one of many water cooling supply websites, you can go to a hardware store and pick up some hose clamps, or you can use zip ties.  I went with zip ties for a couple of reasons.  Firstly they are cheap, second they are easy to work with, last they are actually quite low profile and mostly unnoticeable which equals aesthetically pleasing!

Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop

With the tubing attached it is now time to fill the loop.  You will need a G1/4 barb or compression fitting, a piece of tubing, and a funnel.  Screw the fitting into the fill port, attach the tubing to it, and the funnel to the end of tubing.  With that put together it’s simple enough to pour the water in the funnel till the loop is full.  The loop will fill slowly like this.  The water going in, is displacing the air inside.  There is no way for the air to escape other than the fill port, so both must go through the same hole.  This also makes it difficult to bleed the loop of air.  I recommend holding the radiator higher than the pump so that the air will make it’s way out and into the reservoir.

Testing
With the tubing and coolant swapped out I installed the loop right into the same system with the same overclocked settings that I tested in for the main review.

Results from the review testing:

Ambient temps: 22.22C/71.99F
Max overclock: 5.0 ghz/1.488V vCore
IBT temps: 77.25C/171.05F core average

Results of the tubing and coolant change:

Ambient temps: 22.22C/72F
Max overclock: 5.0 ghz/1.488V vCore
IBT temps: 78.75C core average

Swiftech H220: Adding to the Loop

As you can see we had some higher temps this time.  There could be a couple of reasons.  One could be the mount of the block, as simple variations can cause a couple of degrees difference.  Or it could be attributed to the stock coolants higher heat dissipating qualities.   But I’m leaning towards the fact that it is very difficult to remove all the air from the loop and ours likely still had some stuck in it.  Still not a huge change, and we were able to keep our 5.0ghz overclock and in my opinion it looks a bit better with the thinner UV blue tubing now.