reservoir placement

[pgdeaner]

I've been reading a lot of the build threads and question and answer threads and I was thinking about the significance of reservoir placement.

Some thoughts that I had:

• The top of the water level must be above the intake for the pump. An easy way to accomplish this is by placing the reservoir above the pump but if for aesthetic reasons you want to have the pump horizontal or in another position the water level in the reservoir must be about an inch or so higher than the intake of the pump to allow for turbulence in the reservoir.
• Loop order generally does not matter for cooling, but it does impact the ease of removing air pockets from your loop. If the top of the reservoir is the highest point in your loop, it will be somewhat easier to remove the air from your system. The alternative is to do some serious tilting of your system, running it on its sides, etc.
• The orientation of the reservoir should be considered when tilting the system (I call it burping for those of you that have had kids). You do not want the pumps to pull in air when you tilt your system.

What else needs to go on this list? Agree or disagree with any of these points?

 

[EarthDog]

Have you read the water cooling guides we have here? This info is all there I believe.

 

[pgdeaner]

The beginner guides all say that the reservoir comes before the pump in loop order, and it talks about dry pumps, but I was thinking from a new watercooler perspective this subject does not get enough coverage from a "why" perspective. I see lots of system builds with the pump mounted to the bottom of the case and a small reservoir mounted directly to the pump with the radiator at the top of the case. This can present a challenging configuration for completely removing air from the radiator and the blocks on a custom loop and I have read a lot of threads where the solution to a cooling problem was getting all of the air out of the loop. With the surge in AIO usage, this may not be such an issue anymore.

 

[EarthDog]

That's digging into minutia to me...but at a high level, good info. I've had pumps/res at the lowest point without bleeding issues. It's also tough in most cases to have a res higher than a CPU block. My current setup the waterline is below the CPU block.. it bled fine. It sounds like an 'in a perfect world situation and still good info.