cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

G20CB Water cooling project

six4bravo
Level 10
Hi guys,

I've been bored lately and was throwing around the idea of water cooling in a custom loop on my G20CB,
or using an AIO type and modifying the case, or even making a base station for the custom loop to house everything in matching the design of the G20 with a PSU, fan
controller, radiators, reservoir, etc. I will be adding a GTX 1070 soon as I game in 1080P at 144Hz and find the 970 only slighlty lacking sometimes.
I was thinking of maybe waiting for a water cooled version of the 1070 or adding a water block from EK and into a custom loop with the CPU.

My CPU idles around 45C which is great actually, peaks at 65C gaming, the 970 peaks at 75C max with a custom fan curve. The cpu really doesn't even
need water cooling IMO, but like i said I'm bored lol. The graphics card I'd like to atleast do this to, my 970 sounds like a PS4 fan full boar, but it stays
decently cool, never seen it above 75C.

Has anyone attempted this yet on a G20?

I poked around in the BIOS, noticed that under the monitor section, it seems really really neutered for options. The fan control is just enable or disable q-fan control,
which if disabled just spins the fans up to max. The options listed shows in the info section PWM mode, DC mode, and a few more options,
yet you can only choose to enable/disable q-fan control. I wonder if this will cause issues with the AIO systems that have a 3 pin connector for the
pump and a 4 pin PWM for the fan on the radiator if I'm going that route plugging into the MB for the power. The MB has a cpu fan header, chassis 1 and chassis 2 which is
down by the gfx card, all 4 pins looks like and I know you can plug in a 3 pin onto a 4 pin.
51,242 Views
65 REPLIES 65

Gengaku
Level 9
Good luck with the project would love to see the end result! 😉

I finally found a pic of the back of the motherboard, we do in fact have a nice backplate it looks like, so for water cooling, it s not necessary to install a backplate from the kit IMHO. I'm gonna go with a corsair H60 unit.
and I'll show you guys how i plan on mounting it, it should look pretty slick when done. Also adding a samsung 1TB 850 EVO SSD, 32GB of Gskill ripjaws ddr4, and laying some artic silver 5. I'll keep the post updated with pics.
But heres a pic of the back of the MB incase you're wondering, it took some google digging to find as I really didn't wanna take the MB out of the case, seems like a pain just to check for a backplate, but looks like we're good.


Another thing, just prepping for the SSD install. Not sure why stock setting for the 2TB HDD is in RAID instead of AHCI. I switched it last night to AHCI just to be setup right for the SSD install and keeping the 2TB as secondary storage. Simply, Select
safe mode minimal and do a safe mode reboot, while booting up press del to enter bios, set SATA control to AHCI from RAID, save and exit. The computer will boot up in safe mode and automatically install the AHCI controller driver. Once you finish booting,
restart again in normal mode and it should boot back up no problem and if you check in device manager, you should see you're running in AHCI.

I'll be adding a gtx1070 later this year too.

I look Forward to the pictures. I was wondering how everything could fit.

xeromist
Moderator
You don't want the motherboard messing with your pump speed so you should disable q-fan for whatever header is powering the pump. If you don't want to do that you can use a sata/molex power plug with a fan power pigtail.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

Well i completely disassembled the computer last night, and it appears Asus uses a propriety pinout for the fan power, and uses a gpu style fan plug..... So...... I'd have to repin the H60 pump and fan plugs into these Asus plugs and rearrange the wires to match how the MB is setup.

Red= power , blue = PWM maybe , black = ground , yellow =tach maybe . I checked this with a 9V battery, but am not sure if the blue is in fact PWM and the yellow is tach, but they should be like every other PWM 4 plug colors unless Asus really wanted to do something crazy.
Traditionally it should go black, red, yellow, blue, but Asus has to be different......

I can't find the pinout for these fans anywhere online, adda part numbers point that these were also used in Asus laptops, and the G20AJ, but no pinouts.

I could go for like you said and adapt the power, but I'm pretty sure i can just repin the H60 3 pin pump and 4 pin fan into the Asus connectors and switch the wires around to where they should be for power, ground, PWM and tach.

The 3 pin pump, I planned on plugging into the CPU_FAN header, and disabling Q-fan control so it runs full speed all the time as the pump should. The radiator fan would go into the CHASSIS_FAN header and still use Q-fan control for variable speed. Unless anyone sees an issue with this.

We'll see what happens.....

If anyone needs pics of the MB or anything specific just ask, I have plenty, and I know the G20CB is not very well covered on here.

Ravenholme
Level 7
hmm cool I'm using the G20AJ i don't think i can install more than 16GB of Ram on that board. (h97 board) still would be cool to see how you upgrade your version with water cooling.

xeromist
Moderator
Nope, I don't see a problem with your plan. It sounds like extra work and you'll have to remember that you re-pinned the pump if you ever move it to a new machine or sell it. Maybe make a short adapter so you don't have to alter the pump?
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

Do you guys think I'm right about the yellow and blue wires though? Yellow being tach signal and blue being PWM? Thats the only thing I'm unsure about so far. Biggest issue would probably be no reading from the fan in bios for rpm then just switching those wires, but still.

Yup H170 board, SODIMM ddr4-2133, max 32GB on the G20CB. Gskills and hyperX i think make some decent ram for this, no fancy heat spreader but still good ram and decently priced.

I was just checking out VGA fan adapter cables, yeah its doable that way, but even looking at the connector, it looks just like a mini VGA connector, but still slight differences, Asus really made this stuff super proprietary as i haven't found any standard pinout that matches the MB. The fans seem normal, but they switched the wires around on the stupid connector. I'll post pics later in the thread explaining all this and what to do.

xeromist
Moderator
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.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…