G20CB Water cooling project

[six4bravo]

Your assumption about the colors makes sense to me. Of course you can solder wires of any color to anything so they could have changed all of the colors just to mess with people while keeping the electrical pinout the same. Probably not.

The only thing I can think is that maybe these are the connections ASUS is currently using in laptops. I can't imagine why they would bother coming up with a new standard just for G20 machines.

You are right, I looked up the laptop fans and connectors, they are the same. Its a shame Asus didn't use standard fan header design and connections to make this easy. Anyways, I'll just repin the H60 pump and fan to the Asus connectors and see what happens in Bios. Case modifying is going to be interesting, the H60 should barely have enough space to clear everything, but it'll be close. New SSD and ram should be here today, H60 along with a few other things looks like Fedex won't deliver until Tuesday for some reason. Thanks for the help so far everyone. I'll post pics and updates as everything falls into place.

[xeromist]

It's because standard connectors stand perpendicular to the PCB which is problematic for compact spaces. I'm not sure of the exact clearance in a g20 and whether it was entirely necessary but I'm sure that was the reasoning.

[six4bravo]

Installed the Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD yesterday along with the Gskill ram. Install was very simple and no issues at all with the 1TB SSD. I set the 2TB HDD as storage drive for downloads, pics, videos, etc.

This thing absolutely flies now. Can't wait until Tuesday for the H60 to get here. The arctic silver 5 thermal paste is working really well also with the stock air cooler.

[six4bravo]

Teaser time. Just a small update bc I'm so excited that I got to fire her up today, well, I have the first, I think, water cooled g20, and it runs very very cool. ~18C idle max 48C under stress test from 35-45C idle and 65-75C on load. I'm actually very impressed. Still cleaning up the build but it does work, and very well. I had to cut and solder the fan and pump to the Asus plugs, they are way smaller than generic CPU fan plugs, but my guesses were right on the wiring. Those temps are also on the stock corsair thermal paste which is actually good stuff. Disabled q-fan for the CPU since that's the pump header now and it's running exactly as it should at 4200 rpms. Chassis fan is the radiator fan and is still controlled by the bios PWM, I set it to 600rpm minimum and it's silent and still runs very cool. More details later. Just a couple teasers for now.

[xeromist]

Sweet! I think that's even better than I would have expected.

[six4bravo]

Did some painting and laser etching today on my fan/radiator bracket I made. Came out decent. FYI, the assembly simply doesn't fit inside the g20 case, I had planned on making a hole and mounting it inside but the depth and hoses on the h60 made that impossible. So this is mounted outside the case, some people like the idea of mounting outside, some don't. But imho it adds to the alien like look and is fine, the cooling air outside the case is also much better for the radiator too, you don't have to worry about inside case temps, venting or things like that. So I'm sure some people are going to not like how I did this when I reveal it in the next few days, but I don't care tbh, go try to watercool your g20 then lol. I didn't have to modify the case at all in this build. Just sayin.

[six4bravo]

Well here she is, this is the only way to do water cooling on this case, it must be outside. There is absolutely no room inside for the tubing to go anywhere but out the top where the old heatsink sat. You need to modify the pump and fan plugs to the stock fan ASUS plugs to get aftermarket stuff to work. On your stock fans, red is 12V+, black is neg, yellow is tachometer signal, and blue is PWM for fan control. Each fan header has 4 pins for the CPU fan header and chassis fan header but they are specialized plugs found in ASUS laptops, likely used for their small size. This was actualy pretty simple to do, the only interior mod is bending the tab that the CD readers screws to (single small screw) it is in the way of the water block. So basically your CD tray is going to stick out a tiny bit but its secure and theres just enough room for the water block. The water block mounting studs screw directly into the stock G20CB or AJ board, no aftermarket backplate require, we have a pretty beefy stock backplate because of the custom ASUS stock heatsink. I'm using the stock corsair thermal paste, its working just fine. You need to disable Q-fan control in the BIOS for the pump header and leave the Q-fan control on for the radiator fan header, the BIOS will control the radiator fan just like the stock fans. Mine never spin above ~900 rpms because the cpu stays so darn cold. The pump speed with the Q-fan control disabled in the BIOS is ~4200 rpms, this is perfect and what it is supposed to be. I went from having ~35-45C idle temps to about ~17C idle temps. under load it would get up to 65-75C before, now peaking around 48C under load. I never expected this mod to actually work THIS WELL. Is it necessary? Nope. I did it because i was bored and wanted a new project and I like doing stuff nobody has done before. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

This mod was done with the $59 Corsair H60 water cooler from Newegg and the fan is setup to blow up through the radiator.

[xeromist]

I've had a top mounted rad on a small case for a number of years now. It definitely works well. Only downside is you have to be very careful of the radiator fins because they bend easily. I'd recommend putting a fan grill on there just in case.

Also, for anyone else interested in this mod I'd recommend a Swiftech Radbox:
http://www.swiftech.com/mcb-120radbox.aspx

I'm not sure exactly how you'd place it but since it has slots for mounting it's very versatile. Basically as long as you can get a few screws up through the top of the case you can mount a radbox.

[six4bravo]

I've had a top mounted rad on a small case for a number of years now. It definitely works well. Only downside is you have to be very careful of the radiator fins because they bend easily. I'd recommend putting a fan grill on there just in case.

Oh it definitely works great. I have a silverstone grill for it just have to find longer screws.

I don't know if I'll attempt to add a water cooled gtx 1070, I'd need the tubes out the top again and all the hybrid 1070s have the tubes out the bottom, so I may just leave that alone and stick with a founder's edition 1070 later this year, we'll see.

After a lot of use today rendering videos and some editing, It never got above 49C. Well worth the $59 spent.

[Isildur]

How about other components? There are two coolers one deicated to cpu but other cools chipset, power circuits, etc.
Also memory and other stuff being cooled by throwing fresh air from the bottom to the top.
Now whole case being cooled by lonely videocard which blows air to the rear panel outside of case. Am I missing something?