Worklog: Project Thief - Fully Watercooled Dual PC

[General Kenobi]

Nice - what kind of led/lighting scheme do you have in mind for the interior? I'm just trying to figure out how the lighter interior paintjob is going to turn out in that regard. It should reflect light better at least.

 

[stren]

Nice - what kind of led/lighting scheme do you have in mind for the interior? I'm just trying to figure out how the lighter interior paintjob is going to turn out in that regard. It should reflect light better at least.

I'm not sure to be honest - I have some led strips I can reuse. The windows are somewhat tinted so I'm not sure exactly how it will turn out. I may have to try a few things before I get it right.

 

[General Kenobi]

Heh, good luck with that. A case that big deserves a good show led arrangement.

 

[stren]

Heh, good luck with that. A case that big deserves a good show led arrangement.

Indeed - I may end up getting the clear window if the tint is too dark. The white LED lights I have are pretty bright though, but with a case this large it'll be tough to get it lit evenly and still look good. Let me know if you have any recommendations :thumbsup:

 

[stren]

Some parts came in -

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Ooo, excellent choice in sound card. What headphones are you planning on pairing with that?

 

[stren]

The headphones I have right now are sennheiser pxc450's. They're not really audiophile headphones, but they're still pretty good considering the limited choice in noise cancelling headphones - I chose them a while back because my wife likes to listen to TV loud so when she does that I turn the noise cancelling on and it does a decent job of getting rid of the worst of the background noise. Hopefully next winter I'll pick up a 2nd hand pair of sennheiser 800's or something - at that point I may need a better source though - I'm not sure! Hifi is even more of an expensive hobby than computers haha!

 

[stren]

Thought you guys might want to see some pics of the existing hardware that will be *partly* reused as well as some of the new pieces. Apologies that the photos aren't that great, my wife took the camera with her tonight so I had to use my phone.

Here's my modded Antec 300 that contains my gaming rig (i7-920, Rampage III Extreme, 3xGTX480, Xonar STX, AX1200). When the workstation gets SB-E this will get the 990x. Note that one gentle typhoon is stopped - I unsoldered the power wire because it's out of balance so the noise is annoying.

Here's the front of the case with the space efficient but bubbly Koolance dual D5 reservoir as well as the dual 24V controller. I'll be using this reservoir until the 18 bay FTW reservoirs come in. No dvd drive, I removed it after installing windows and a couple of games. Most other games I have are on origin/steam.

Here's the interior - cable routing isn't perfect because I knew I was moving to the TX10 soon. I'll also be replacing all the blue LEDs with reds to match the ROG theme a bit better:

Here's the workstation in it's current temporary incarnation in a DD torture rack. i7-990x on an asus p6t. LSI raid card, 3 ssds and 3 hard drives and a 8800gt to drive the monitors. It has the H100 cooler temporarily and as you can see it needs some sleeving work:

Here's a front shot showing the push/pull AP15's on the H100, they perform about as well as the stock 2600rpm corsair fans at max, but with a *lot* less noise

Trident + turbulence memory - back in the day this was sweet stuff 3x4gb @ 2000-8-9-8, now of course you can get better for a lot less money haha such is progress!

And now for some parts waiting to be installed - vintage EK gpu block:

My old rasa block - I'm hoping to not use this and instead get a second raystorm soon - note the o-rings on the barbs seem to be dying:

EK 250 res and DDC-1 for the worksation gpu and motherboard loop that will be self contained on the motherboard tray.

That's about all the fun stuff I can show for now!

 

[stren]

sneak peak

 

[T_Yamamoto]

cant wait!

 

[stren]

Another teaser:

 

[General Kenobi]

Nice. The end product will no doubt be something special.

 

[stren]

Thanks ben!

My testpack of monsoon fittings arrived today, these are the 3/8 ID 5/8 OD

With primochill tube:

 

[stren]

Seeing as my boss gave me the week off (why not a raise?) for having to work like crazy the last month I decided to test out some of the components that came in on my workstation. for the last few months it's been running the H100 cooler, now it's time to switch it to partial watercooling.

In the end the workstation will have two loops:
1 - CPU (raystorm) - mora 140.9 - dual D5 varios
2- GPU (8800gt) - GPU (9800gt) - motherboard - DDC-1 - RX360

The GPU's only do 2D, so there's very little heat on loop2. Both loops will eventually run with low speed yates and I'm hoping it should be close to silent while giving excellent overclocking performance on the cpu.

As I don't have 4 D5's yet (still one short) I'll be temporarily running this loop with a DDC. I picked up one of the NOS ones from bmaverick, they're not that powerful but this won't be driving a critical loop. I picked up an xspc acrylic top (later I'll run some dye for the money shots):

However the XSPC screws don't fit the old DDC's so I had to drill out the holes a bit larger

Done:

Then with the EK 250 res fitted. I used a bitspower shining silver male to male rotary fitting to attach them:

Also remember that talk about the acyrylic vs delrin 8800gt blocks, well I ordered the acrylics and they arrived the other day:

They do look sexier!

Taking apart the 8800gt:

 

[stren]

Then I realized I didn't have any non-conductive TIM left, so I put it to the side and put the 9800gt in for now. Built up the temporary cpu loop in the torture rack

Kind of a funky radiator setup - the torture rack only supports 240 rads, so I ran 2 fans in push and 2 fans in pull. I have 12 more gentle typhoons coming from the ocn group buy:

Then more stuff came:

Fan adapters for the gtx 560, plus rubber fan isolators. Not sure if they'll do much but they were cheap if I bought the adapters, so I picked some up:

 

[General Kenobi]

Heck, that thing really eats up a lot of stuff! Looking good, although there's still a long road to travel.

 

[stren]

Thanks general - yes a very long road - still feel like I'm in the pit lanes getting ready to start. Gotta place a big order from performance pc's while their valentines sale is on.

In the mean time I've been suffering wrist pain after pulling 20 hour days working on CAD stuff. This isn't unusual when I'm forced to use a bad mouse or a bad setup, but my trusty G5 on a bare desk wasn't cutting it. I decided to try a "gaming" mousepad and thought I'd check out a razer deathadder while I was doing it. After a few weeks of it I actually prefer the feel of it despite the construction feeling less sturdy and having less features than my trusty G5. The G5 now gets relegated to the gaming rig as I game less than I work 🙁

Also parts for my lightsabre came in 😉

 

[lsv]

How many QDs did you get?

 

[stren]

Only one pair so far, it was the tester, about to order 5 more pairs though

 

[General Kenobi]

Indeed - I may end up getting the clear window if the tint is too dark. The white LED lights I have are pretty bright though, but with a case this large it'll be tough to get it lit evenly and still look good. Let me know if you have any recommendations :thumbsup:

I was just thinking about LEDs and the (at least temporary) name for your project, and I thought that you could possibly draw some inspiration from the Thief series. The games always have great lighting/shadow levels, so you could easily find some inspiration there if you were so inclined. Thief: Deadly Shadows doesn't cost much anything these days if you don't already have it.

 

[stren]

I was just thinking about LEDs and the (at least temporary) name for your project, and I thought that you could possibly draw some inspiration from the Thief series. The games always have great lighting/shadow levels, so you could easily find some inspiration there if you were so inclined. Thief: Deadly Shadows doesn't cost much anything these days if you don't already have it.

Thanks I haven't played that I'l have to check it out for inspiration.

While we're waiting for the case to come home, here's some more hardware:

 

[Rubycon]

Why D5's.
Should be using Iwaki RD30 or even RD40 (cough!) :biggrin:

MORA creates quite a bit of back pressure, along with multiple QDC even a dual D5 is going to scream like a girl who just saw her hamster eaten by the neighbor's python that got loose the night before...

 

[stren]

Mainly for noise - the Mora 3 is not as restrictive as the Mora 2, also there will be only 2 disconnects on that loop of the VL4N series which is a lot less restrictive than the others.

The D5's on that loop are D5 strong's with a dual 24v controller, they're a good bit stronger than mcp35x's and a dual mcp35x is similar to an RD30 at 21V according to Martin of MLL. However the noise and tone should be better than either the mcp35x's or the iwaki's.

We'll see, I need to get a flow monitor to really see how I'm doing and compare the pump setups.
The loop I worry more about the is the gaming loop rig, 3xgpu, motherboard and cpu, with five discconects and two gtx radiators and two other radiators. I was thinking about running that with a mcp35x2 possibly adding another D5 vario

 

[Rubycon]

Comparing those pumps (basically toys) to Iwakis, hehe. Yes it will work and yes Iwakis are very quiet if properly mounted and isolated too. 😉

 

[stren]

From martin's liquid lab:

RD30 @ 24V = 13.7psi @ 1.5gpm
PMP450s @ 24V = 6.7psi @ 1.5gpm

Assuming perfectly scaling in series then 13.4psi vs 13.7psi @ 1.5gpm, pretty close really plus you get redundancy. I've haven't heard how loud an Iwaki is so I can't comment, but the D5 strong isn't that bad at all (again assuming you have it properly mounted and isolated), I was just going off of Martin's comments about comparative noise:

Nothing will beat the build quality of an RD-30, but the noise was pretty bad at anything over 18V and the size and external PSU need was a bit of a challenge in the past. The power of an RD-30 at 24V though is still amazing, it is a power house, but it also consumes upwards of 60 watts at that point so not very practical for heat dump reasons. I think that's a big part of why most people ran them at 18V, it was more of the optimal between flow gains and heat dump losses. Still a really cool pump, but the size, noise, and PSU need is what made it difficult for me to want to use as a daily pump.

Good to know that isolation and and proper mounting helps though.