Do you work at a shop or a PC building company? Beautiful work, though not a fan of the side sticker given your cards inside look so much better than that Titan pic.
Question about those hard tubs: How does one do maintenance on that water setup? Like if you want to change a GPU or upgrade the processor, looks like it would be a pain in the ass to get it out, you'd basically have to disassemble the whole water rig, is that right? Or is that planned for and ways to disconnect individual areas without spilling water everywhere?
That is not a sticker. That is airbrushed. I've done an Asus red theme before, changing to green for the Green Team.
I'm with a local outfit called
Lucro PC.
There is a drain port at the back of the case, at the lowest point of the custom liquid loop, where the liquid coolant will drain out by gravity, or using the two coolant pumps. Liquid coolants dont need maintenance as it does before, coolants now have anti-algae buildup solution in them, and once the coolant has drained out of the drain port, you just use a squeeze bottle with a narrow nozzle to add in diluted concentration of distilled water and vinegar into the reservoir via its top entry port to cycle that concentration to clear out the liquid coolant inside. A day's worth of rinsing and draining out will clear whatever coolant that is left inside. I use pastel-based liquid coolant, and because of the thicker looking nature of the pastel coolant, whatever excess liquid coolant of differing color I have used before will dissolve into the new pastel mix and get color-neutralized.
It's no different than you blowing off dust and doing spring cleanup on your rig with compressed air and removing your cards to get into the clingy dust bunnies.
As for how long do I use the liquid coolant in the loop, that depends. I dont place my rig next to the window where direct sunlight will dull the PETG tubing, or leave the rig unattended for a long time that sediment of the coolant color dye starts building up. The rule of thumb is 6 months, but I got away with 1 year from my last build before this, because I was using a color dye + distilled water mix instead of pastel-based coolant. Some versions of coolants are pre-mixed, all you have to do is just dunk it into the reservoir and turn on the pumps to pipe it thoroughly into the loop. I like to play around with the pastel concentrate so that I get the right mixture ratio and look.
If all of these sounds a little intimidating or a hassle to do, All-In-One (AIO) liquid coolers are good enough these days to provide the cooling and performance you need to overclock. I'm more into "matching the look with the performance" line of thought. It's a bit of a shame that rigs gets assembled with huge heatsinks and aircoolers with rigs sounding like jet engines taking off just to get the performance you need, not to mention aesthetically unappealing (to me personally) with ribbed tubing and wires dangling all around. I should know, I have a secondary rig for VR with an ID-Cooling FrostFlow 240L AIO liquid cooler and an aircooled 1080FE that I had to keep the fan at 80% so that I can get it acoustically contained inside the Phanteks P900S case it's in.
In short, it's a personal preference. Some don't care enough about how it looks as long as the performance is there. That's where the AIB card vendors come in, they're factory pre-overclocked and ran with low RPM silent fans on them that gets the job done (provided you have positive airflow in the case to exhaust the hot air these cards are producing). I prefer the minimalistic look of a waterblock on these cards, and my own determination of how much I can overclock these instead of relying on pre-OCed settings. Not really into the "aggresive" looks of these pre-OCed cards, and when the manufacturers are turning to RGB lighting as this year's "feature", I groaned loudly.