Fractal Design Define R5 Dual Loop Water Cooling Build Log

After we posted our look at Fractal Design’s Define R5 a couple of months ago, it didn’t take long before Matt was craving not just a chassis upgrade, but a water cooling one, as well. With the chassis in hand, join him as he takes you through the process of setting up a dual loop setup, and tells you what he thinks of working with the Define R5.

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Life has a funny way of presenting things to you. About 5 months ago I wandered into my local Micro Center in search of a 120mm fan to replace the stock intake fan on my aging Silverstone TJ10. While I was there I happened to stumble across the Cooler Master HAF XB EVO, a smallish ATX cube case that just captured my imagination. I’ve been running water cooling in PCs for so long that I was beginning to tire of the added complexity inherent to loops, plumbing and the seemingly endless upgrade cycle of blocks versus sockets and graphics cards. I had an epiphany: I’ll make the move to air cooling and be done with liquid cooling altogether. Heh, as if.

After purchasing my XB I started perusing Newegg in search of the perfect CPU cooler, one that wouldn’t block my ram slots and that didn’t require three hands and a small child to install… and one that didn’t sit sideways on my board. I was running AMD at the time (still am at the outset of this build guide but I digress) and many of the coolers on the market are made so that the fans face the PCIe slots rater than the rear of the case when used on the rectangular AMD socket. On the square Intel socket you’re free to face them top to bottom or fore and aft to your heart’s content.

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