Looking for advice on what to do with a 4-year old dormant rig

Hi everyone, I'm new here. Almost 5 years ago I built a water cooling rig for the first time that included a Black Ice GTX Xtreme 360 Radiator, a GPU Block - Nickel + Acetal, EK Supreme HF Universal CPU block, a dual bay reservoir, with Feser blue dyed coolant. It worked fine for a while, but I neglected to maintain it, and probably due to shoddily putting it together, shortly after about 8 months or so I sprang a leak, luckily not damaging any internals in the process. Unfortunately I was unable to repair at the time and sadly it bacame a giant paperweight for the next 4 years, up until now.

I've recently wanted to get back into PC gaming. It being my first rig, I barely knew what I was doing in the first place. Now I know you should drain and replace every 6 months to a year. My question is, what to do about an old *** rig like this? Everything looks to be fine, the coolant looks fine upon cursory inspection, the tubes, etc. I know I need to drain and clean it, but I'm concerned that I might need to replace a few things. After so long sitting dormant, will algae be a concern? Will I need to replace the tubing? Will I need to break down all the blocks and clean each one because I'm really hoping to avoid that.

I ran a few searches but couldn't find anything for older rigs like this. Would appreciate any advice, or any thing I should look out for when cleaning it out.

First off, Welcome to the Forums.

Generally we discourage the use of colored dyes here as they tend to cause more issues than they're worth. To answer your question, Yes, you will need a complete tear down. 8 Months seems about the right amout of time for a system to fail with colored dyes. We generally recommend every 6 months to a year, but with your dye every 6 months for sure.

Pull all your blocks apart and clean with a soft bristle toothbrush and vinegar. Here is EK's recommendations for cleaning. If algae is present I would replace all the tubing. You can't really clean the tubing properly and you don't want the headache of having to redo all this in 3 months if you don't get rid of everything (assuming there is any).

If you know you're bad at maintaining a custom loop I would stick with one of the big air coolers. Almost no maintenance involved and you can get some great cooling with them. If you decide to keep the water loop then go with Primochill Advanced LRT tubing and fill your loop with distilled water and a biocide or a silver kill coil or both. If you want color then just go with colored tubing. Some of the UV tubes look really cool with the UV lighting.

I hope this helps.

As blay said, complete tear down.

You'll be throwing the tubing away.

The radiator is most likely internally stained as you can't get into there and clean it as you can with the WBs, pumps, etc. If you use the same water cooling components on a next system, chances are it will release that silly dye to your new loop.

Dyes need a tear down maintenance of about 1-3 months. Distilled water only needs to be changed every 6 months with a complete tear down annually.

If you're too lazy or busy or w/e for custom water cooling but still want water based cooling, I would honestly look at AIOs (All-In-One) water cooling coolers. They not only have it for CPU cooling but for GPUs as well. They are maintenance free and easy to use. Just have a good case to store them all in.

If you're truly looking to get into water cooling, I'd advice on taking the time and reading our water cooling stickies. A lot of valuable information that you missed since you jumped into this right away.

Hope this helps and to OCFs.