For those of you lucky enough to have brought a water-cooling kit back in the day (2008 :D) when there where just a few choices and prices where very high you probably heard of Cooler Master Aquagate Max. Or if you where lucky enough you actually got one of these bad boys:

Well after 8 years of continues operation cooling a Q9550 + GTX 260 and later on an i7 4790K + GTX 970 the water pump has finally given up and called it quits. I have to say i was very impressed with this product and regard it as one of the best pc purchases i have ever made. Lets face it 8 years of operation and being probably the only part i haven’t upgraded over the years it has stood the test of time and it’s a real shame it’s was discontinued. I never imagined it would last this long and by now i expected it to either leak and destroy my pc or brake.

So i had two options either buy a new kit or replace the pump, i decided to go with option two (because i am sentimental). In this article i will go over what you need while the chances of this article actually helping someone are very remote some might find it interesting.

So obviously the best option is to buy a direct replacement, the original kit is powered by a S-Type Jingway DP-600 which delivers 520L/H which is very quiet and long lasting :D. The good news is the company still operates http://www.jingway.com.tw/en/products.html and you can buy the pump, now me being me i couldn’t wait for the shipping from china given my computer was out of action and decided to do this the hard way and get a different pump.

 

 

After some searching i found out that the Phobya series are the best replacement and there is a good reason for this, it seems it’s either a sister company or they have brought the designs from jingway. Now if you want a perfect fit go for the Phobya DC12-220 (400 l/h), which will fit nicely in the gap i however decided to go for the more powerful model the Phobya DC12-400 (800 l/h). One note to make is that i am not entirely happy with the Phobya DC12-400, it does cause a few vibrations and being in the metal case produces a lot of noise at 100% power, so much so that i decided to plug it into the mother board and run it only at 50%. At this speed you can’t hear the pump at all and still keeps the temperature quite low. One very important note you will also need to purchase two G1/2″ to 3/8″ Barb Fitting, do not make the mistake of getting G1/4, while the tubing on the outside is 1/4 the tubes used inside the box are actually 1/2. Don’t worry if you make that mistake as i did 😀 you can stretch a 1/4 tube and get it to fit as show later in the photos, i was lucky enough to have one spare G1/2″ to 3/8″ Barb Fitting so only need to stretch one tube the clear one.

Before:

After:

 

 

So here is a quick post on how to modify the Alphacool NexXxoS GPX – Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 M01 heat sink so that it will fit newer versions of the 4GB Zotac GTX 970 Gaming Ed (ZT-90101-10P). The problem is that while this water block does support the older version of the ZT-90101-10P, the newer models have had a PCB redesign as mentioned on the Alphacool website:

Now there is no way for you to tell which version you will get unless you already own the card, in my case i was buying the card and the water block at the same time so i decided to take a chance. Lucky me i got the newer version :D. But as a person who likes to come up with solutions to problems i decided to enhance the water block compatibility by trimming “some of the fat”. Apologies for not taking pictures of the cards PCB and the modifications but i was too excited and forgot.

So in order for us to make the heat sink fit we need to carve out some metal from the heat sink. The new PCB version has 3 extra components which hit the red spots show in the above picture. I used a rotary tool (you could use a drill might be more difficult) and after 2 hours i had made enough space and clearance for the heat sink to fit as intended. Please note that you may need to file the hole circled in yellow above towards the red circles, the component on the board was a little offset and it needed a bit of filing. There are also two extra VRMs below the red rectangle and since the heat sink for the VRMs is raise they will not make contact, while not necessary it’s nice to have them cooled so i could recommend that you place a thin heat sink (as i did) so that it levels out and makes contact. Keep in mind that VRMs can withstand 125 C no problem and while people do say that if you run them above 90 C it shortens the life time (cooler components last longer which is true) my GTX 260 which was heavily overclocked, was running the VRMs at 110 C on full load and after 7 years it is still working (but now replaced because it outlived it’s usefulness).

The back and everything else fits perfectly  and i get a cool 28 C at idle and 38 C at full load.

Bellow i have taken a photo of the components which have changed, we can see that there are extra capacitors on the above row (4 in total in the red rectangle) and the addition of one more squire component (not sure what it is maybe a resistor).