Repairing/maintenance on my PC

It’s been quite some time since I last gave any real attention to my PC — the system I use daily for gaming, general use, and photo editing for the blog (albeit poorly).

During a routine gaming session the other day while playing Battlefield 6, my PC hard locked several times. I glanced over at my Turzx 8.8" LCD screen and noticed my CPU temperatures were sitting in the mid-80°C range. That immediately raised concerns since the system is running a custom water-cooling loop.

After rebooting the PC, I ran several stress tests and confirmed the temperatures remained consistently in the mid-80s under full load.

Following some diagnostic work, I discovered that the EK DDC 3.2 pump mounted to my EK/Lian Li distro plate was failing. To be honest, I was never particularly impressed with EK’s variant of the DDC pump. It lacked PWM control, and the head pressure was noticeably weaker compared to the original Laing DDC 4.2 12V pump. Unfortunately, sourcing a genuine Laing DDC 4.2 PWM pump proved more difficult than expected. On top of that, I also noticed the coolant in the loop was beginning to break down.

After thinking it over for a few hours, I decided to retire the custom loop altogether for several reasons.

First, the cost of replacing the pump — assuming I could even find one — plus purchasing roughly two liters of coolant would have been close to half the price of a modern AIO solution.

The second reason was simply time. Now that my daughter is getting older and requires more of my attention, I no longer have the same amount of free time to dedicate to another hobby. At this point in life, I’ve reached the stage where I just want my computer to work reliably without additional maintenance.

I spent hours watching YouTube reviews on various AIO coolers until I was practically blue in the face. Eventually, I narrowed my choices down to two systems:

• Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme
• Tryx Panorama SE 360 ARGB

Both units utilize the 8th-generation Asetek pump and are 360mm AIO solutions, but that’s where the similarities largely end.

The Ryujin features an integrated fan within the pump housing designed to provide airflow across the motherboard VRMs (Voltage Regulator Modules), which can run quite hot without active cooling. The included fans are also regarded as exceptionally high quality, with many reviewers commenting that they wished Asus sold them separately.

The Panorama SE, on the other hand, offers longer radiator tubing and a substantially larger 6.67" curved AMOLED display compared to the Ryujin’s 3.5" LCD screen.

One major consideration was pricing. The Ryujin was listed at $397 (on sale), while the Panorama SE came in at $279. That’s a significant price difference and certainly made the Tryx option appealing.

Ultimately, however, I decided to go with the Ryujin.

The deciding factor was software. I simply did not want to install another piece of bloated control software just for an AIO cooler. Personally, I think hardware ecosystems have become increasingly obnoxious. Since I already run an Asus motherboard and Asus gaming keyboard, staying within the same ecosystem made more sense. While many reviews noted that the Tryx software only consumed around 2% CPU utilization, I still questioned why I should need an entirely separate application just to manage pump and fan curves when I can already handle everything through FanXpert within Asus Armoury Crate.

Would I have liked to save over $100? Absolutely.

But in the end, being able to manage all of my fans and cooling controls through a single software suite outweighed the cost savings. I have no particular brand loyalty, but the current state of fragmented hardware ecosystems ultimately forced my hand.

As you can see in the picture below, the tubing length is fairly tight. I plan to remedy this by installing a Lian Li vertical GPU mount. Once installed, it should eliminate the obstruction caused by the GPU and reduce the tension currently being placed on the radiator tubing.