Sublime Subaquatic

Question time

• Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your background
  Glass Tube Tech is a budding small business offering custom glass water loops to the public at an affordable price. GTT also creates high-end super custom hand-blown glass water tubing with artistic, one of a kind, and sometimes over the top decorative themes. We hand-craft custom water loops, reservoirs, and “Schnubs”...
• Are you modding alone or are you part of a team?
  We are a team of 2 for both glass blowing and PC building/modding. Someone once called us “Dudes with Tubes”, and that stuck…LOL!
• Tell us a little bit about the team?
  Jason is a 2nd generation professional glassblower with over 30 years’ experience, and Christoph is an avid computer techie, gamer and apprentice glassblower. Together, they developed the remarkable skill of combining high tech with old school glassblowing to create beautiful, functional computer art.
• How did you get the idea behind this mod?
  We saw an opportunity to improve the water-cooling experience by moving to glass tubes. However, they do not utilize ordinary glass; it is a highly specialized imported glass from Europe that can handle temperature swings of 900 degrees F (480 C) without bending or cracking. In addition, the glass is extremely resistant to any microbial growth inside the tubes and will never fade, get brittle, or stain.
• How long have you been modding for?
  Christoph has been modding since 2015 after taking a college class on PC repair and maintenance. He then worked in a PC repair shop for a few years and really developed his knowledge of PCs from the inside out. Jason has been glassblowing for over 30 years and has been building custom PCs since early 2019.
• How did you decide what hardware components to use?
  We had some components in mind, and after having some excellent experience with Corsair iCUE software and hardware, it was an easy choice to make. Choosing the Meshify 2 XL took some time and after we heard some great feedback from GamerNexus we chose to go with it when it finally came out. For the CPU and GPU components, we felt compelled to use high end hardware - the 5900X was a little easier to obtain than the 5950X at the time and it has a better capability to achieve higher clocking frequencies. The GPU choice is the Nvidia 3090 Founders Edition as it helps fill out the case nicely and makes for an interesting illusion that the case is smaller than it really is.
• If you did it all over again, is there anything you’d change?
  There is always something to add or change – our imagination is endless! For this build, we would probably add more to the case including vertical mounting of the GPU and have the same pattern perforations as the metal on the side glass panel to help the GPU intake fresh air. Adding in some more glass artwork to the tubes inside the case as well as adding a hand-frosted pattern on the side glass panel of the case.
• Do you have any plans for future mods, if so: what are they?
  We have plenty of future ideas for more mods with our high-end custom glass tube designs! We would love to share some of our ideas, but that would spoil the fun of being surprised

Specifications

• Case
  Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL Black Light Tint
• Motherboard
  ASUS - ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero X570
• CPU
  AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
• GPU
  Nvidia RTX 3090 Founders Edition
• PSU
  Asus Thor 1200W Platinum
• RAM
  TeamGroup - Xtreem (3600MHz) (ARGB) 16 GB (X2)
• SSD
  Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 1TB (X2)
• HDD
  Seagate Baracuda 4TB (X2)
• Cooler
  Alphacool NexXxoS XT45 Full Copper 420 mm Radiator V.2 - Corsair HydroXSeries XC7 RGB CPU Water Block - Corsair HydroXSeries XD5 RGB Pump/Reservoir - Custom Blown Glass w/ Aquatic Creatures Sculptures and our own custom frosted glass tubes from our shop, Glass Tube Tech