Worklog: Project Thief - Fully Watercooled Dual PC

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Time to put the 2nd 7990 under water:

I'd already taken the shroud off this one to cool it with some AP15s instead (quieter and cooler than the stock fans). So this will look a little different when getting naked. First the backplate:

Then the gpu coolers:

No wonder the cores get so hot when this is all they have:

And suddenly done:

Took em to work and set them up in a temp loop:

Massive air bubbles because the temp pump is a xspc 750 that's super weak. Bleeding was easy because I prefilled the rad so there was already a ton of coolant in the system.

I won't actually use BP sli fittings in the final build because I get nervous about them coming loose. Instead the cards will be spaced in slots 1 and 3 and then hardlined. Oh yes and dat temp x58 clown board.

 

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Dat monsta 560 - the nice thing about QDCs and the CL side mounts is that I can just take it from here and place it right into the case and be done in about 30 seconds.

The mess of air mining - 3x290s on the board and an undervotled 7970 on a riser cable. The GPU bracket has a hook cutout for the screw that rests nicely on the top of the motherboard tray:

Dat precarious balancing and dat dark:

Let's start with the 4th 290 that isn't even running:

Take dat air cooler off:

Clean it up and nearly forget thermal pads on the other vrm area:

Test fit:

Looking good:

 

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One thing I love about the EK backplates are that the screws are countersunk and that only a few are used so that it looks minimal and clean:

Ok time to unplug the other 290s and block them up:

But first let's put the first 290 in:

Normally I'd start with slot one but I have one 290x that will go in slot one. Speaking of which there it is:

Add another 290:

And done:

Hmmm but maybe not quite done:

Something is missing and it's not just the power:

 

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Nope got the backplates on:

Ah yes that's what we need:

Take off dem bridges, I like to mount the bridge with the cards in the slots as it gives the cards something to stabilize them while you mount the new bridge. The downside is that the o-rings can fall out when you turn the bridge over to put it on top of the cards:

Moving over the o-rings:

Mounted:

Looks sexy but only really two of the ports are usable with standard fittings, the alternative ports are recessed so that stop fittings are hidden, but the stop fittings are narrow so that means a normal fittings can't fit in the hole. Which means you pretty much have to use the bottom side port and the top port. This is fine for most builds, but I wanted to come out to the bottom of the chamber and pass through the floor.

I ended up with a very temporary hilarious setup:

SO that's how the GPUs will stay for a bit while I finish up some reviews and make extensions. Then the next part after that will be hardlining the R4E and the res's, and then it'll be time to slot it all back together!

 

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As some may know I have a temp workstation while some of the hardware mines and some of the hardware gets built in the case. It was time to pull the R4E board from the temp workstation so I swapped it out with a Gene board instead.

Now for RMAs - Corsair's RMA on the AX1200 went swimmingly and I have a shiny new one already. Asus on the other hand took a long time and then decided that the board was unrepairable and was phsyically damaged so I have to pay $175 + ship for a "new" one that is probably refurbed. I'm pretty annoyed with Asus, I've never had a succesful RMA with them. I love their boards and I really do think they are the best motherboards out there but their CS is horrible and always leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. They seem to be incompetent and go out of their way to find ways to blame you and then try and charge unreasonable amounts for what they do. After owning two asus boards and 6 ROG boards, I'll be trying to avoid them in future. Luckily EK support many motherboard manufacturers with blocks now so I have more choice than ever before. I had bought a new impact from MC for $180 so that I could continue testing while the other board was RMAing. I guess I knew deep down that Asus' motherboard warranty is basically non existent:

So I swapped over the parts for the review/benching rig:

Quickly done:

Then quickly back to testing:

So now I could move on to "actual" thief work. I had bought a cheap 4820K from MC which gave me $50 off the impact, but was also useful so that I could test stuff and keep my 4930K on the temp workstation for now:

It was time to open that sucker up:

and start assembling the r4e based hardware:

No idea on clocks yet, I haven't even got around to ocing my other 4820k on the x79 dark board.

 

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Now it was time to polish the csq to better match the 7990 blocks. Time to dig out my old supremacy:

The supremacy takes forever to polish well because of the deep machined channels:

Because of that I focussed on the vertical rather than the horizontal:

The nickel also needed a clean:

a minute with some brasso and it was shiny again:

Then reassembled and installed:

Remember to always thoroughly check for leaks after diassembling blocks! I'm going to use the monsoon fittings which use glued end caps to acrylic hardline in order use the o-ring shown here. The end caps are then compressed using the lockring against the o-ring to provide a very secure seal! As long as the glue joint is good and lasts then this is the most secure way to hardline possible!

 

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Next up was the motherboard block:

Some of you may remember I had the original non csq blocks, but they suffered from nickel flake so I RMA'd (succesfully unlike Asus) and received these in return as the old design is end of life now. Still at least the motherboard/cpu/memory blocks will match now! Frozen csq can look nice when done right, but often it can look too busy. Polishing really helps to break that busyness up:

disassembled:

Polished:

Reassembled:

Again not perfect but good enough. If you really want to perfect it you're going to want to also take machining marks out of the nickel, but you'll probably burn through the nickel, so I would buy the copper version and then custom plate with chrome if you really are OCD and care. But that's also pricey!

Time to take off the OEM heatsinks:

I love that Asus use a gloop of TIM on the southbridge, then cover it with thick aluminum foil, then more tim:

 

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It reminds me of my R3E a bit where some worker had left the wax paper on the TIM so the south bridge woudl constantly overheat. Dat quality control....

Anyway block fitted:

The astute might notice the EK badges are upside down because this one is going reverse atx.

Next up VRM block:

Then add the RAM - these are the older Corsair Dominator GTs - the last and possibly the best. Platinums look sexy for air cooling but these were so much more compatible with water cooling and air cooling is for wusses...

Symmetrical product placement:

GTs do look ugly without their red hats:

Time for new shiny hats:

 

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Polished up:

Reassembled:

Mounted:

Polished enough to get reflections of the circles from the other side of the plexi:

Time to figure out the tube routing:

 

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So I did try and make a custom bend curve for tighter 180's:

As you can see it worked - though I found that 180s are just harder to get perfect than 2 separate 90s. The hard part is getting the sizing right. I was stupid and measured center to centre as you should for the monsoon kit, while my custom one needed to be measured inside to inside. So in the end it was a waste of tube. So I figured out a new strategy that used less tight bends and started with the easiest section with the widest apart bends. Set up the mandrels ready to bend:

The kit really makes this easy when the mandrels fit the bends you want to do. Two quick bends later and this looked ready:

Looking good so far:

Except....

The mitre box wasn't giving me particularly good cuts as the hacksaw blade was so small in both thickness and height that it was easily able to go at an angle. As the seal mates to the end of the tube then the cut needs to be perpendicular, chances are that the glue joint and end caps will hide this but I didn't want to chance it. Overall this was disappointing so I got out my big hacksaw with a much bigger blade and it was much more consistent. So after that I redid that section again:

Here I've also used q-tips to mark the other sections I would be attempting to make. The second attempt though had me getting cocky with the heat gun and so I ended up blistering the tube around the bend area:

I also experimented with some silicon oven mitts I had but they left dimples on the tube also:

 

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Third attempt however was looking promising:

And so when it checked out I decided to practice the glue on this piece before doing any more:

This was glued up and you can see how transparent the end result should be - bubbles are definitely bad! Always remember to tape up your lockrings before glueing the end caps on though. Finished:

Woohoo - all of that for one bent piece of tube! One thing I realized though was that section of tube was not quite horizontal. While the Monsoon measuring devices make measuring easy you want to check that any horizontal sections are actually horizontal as even with perfect 90 degree bends you can end up being off. First I took the spirit level:

And then shored up the south end of the board with paper until the memory block was horizontal:

Good enough! Now let's check that section of tube we already did:

Yikes! Not really good enough - however after doing three of the same I decided to move on and possibly replace this one later!

Moving on to the next section I discovered that it was already too short a link to use the mandrels in the way I already had. I could set them up so as to do each bend individually without firmly fixing the other bend. This felt against the whole point of the mandrel kit which was to get perfect repeatable bends. The real problem was that the extra material around the mandrels which ensured good straight lines after the bend also stopped the next mandrel from getting close. My solution was to chop the 180 degree mandrel in half - I now had a 90 degree mandrel with zero straight edge meaning I could now do much tighter u bends than the two individual mandrels would allow.

You can see my cutting was a bit jagged because I was cutting from the far side with a jigsaw which are notorious for not cutting straight. Still it was good enough for my purposes:

That was the setup for the 2nd bend, and this was the one for the third bend with the tube post bend:

Now the last shot of the day with those two extra pieces in place double checking alignment. I'm a little nervous that the final piece may rub against the other tube coming out of the cpu block, It looks but I may add in a third bend on that section just to kink it over. That's it for now!

 

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So I never covered the measuring sticks that you get with the full monsoon kit:

Initially when I saw them I was like really... they seem kinda lame. Then I used them and honestly for a simple idea they work very well. Here you can see a pretty complex 3/4 bend setup that you can measure easily. The harder part is then bending it. With compound bends like this you're never going to be able to setup quite as you'd like with the mandrels. I did the 45 degree bend first, of course you have to start with an end, I'm not sure if this was smart or not. The 2nd bend was the trickiest, because it was a 90 degree bend in one dimension but had to be 45 degrees in another. My first attempt to lay the mandrels out was incorrect:

Luckily I realized this before bending. In the end I had to bend by pushing into a corner rather than around the mandrel itself:

It took a couple of reheats to get this better. Sadly I didn't take a shot of the setup for the last bend, but basically I had to prop strips of thin MDF under a mandrel that supported the 45 degree bent leg until it was parallel to the floor, then I could do the last 90 degree bend such that they were parallel. This again needed some rebending but I got there in the end without kinks though there was a bit of a twist which you can see in some of the photos. So now that the bends were done it was time to prep to glue. Managed to remember to put the lock rings on before glueing so that was good:

Here they are after glueing and fitting:

Then the next project was to get the 7990s upgraded. They had been mining at work on an x58 board. Returns are so low now that even with free power it's almost not worth the effort, so it seemed like a good time to pull them and take that rig home for stripping:

Drained the loop - I had used the EKoolant which left quite a bit of residue sadly, This doesn't totally surprise me as I used it in another rig and the red has totally gone. Pretty disappointing as I have another 8 litres to use lol:

I should take them apart and clean them properly but today is not that day:

 

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The dye even stained the clear primochill lrt advanced a surprising amount:

So it was now time to change the backplate:

Elmy had upgraded to dual 295x2's like a boss and sold me his custom chrome plated backplates for the 7990s so it was time to swap out the originals:

This is nice because I can keep warranty intact while getting a cleaner and much sexier look. The shot here doesn't show just how mirrored they are - you'll see that in a bit. I ordered replacement screws as the EK ones are black and I wanted to match the backplate better than that. I ordered two different types from mcmaster with the same head type and thread but different finish:

The left one matches the mirrored finish better even though the color isn't perfect:

Sadly I forgot that two of the screws are longer so as to attach to a nut on the far side of the PCB - I'll have to order some longer matching ones:

Time to replace the thermal pads:

All done:

 

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Still not showing the mirror well. So here's one of the test fit:

And with the rest of the tube back in:

You can see I'm missing the IO plate for the R4E. I couldn't find it, most likely at work as thats where I have the boxes. I'll have to take everything out to fix that later.

Ok time for number 2:

oh yeah

reverse atx yo!

Dem reflections:

 

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Dat spaghetti:

Time to finish the hard tubing runs:

dayumngirl:

Bottom fittings are for soft tube to run to QDCs panel mounted to the walls of the motherboard chamber.

As always a big thanks to sponsors - shown today: CaseLabs, Corsair, EK, Monsoon!

 

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While I waited to get wood, hehe, I thought I should finish the front mounted 360s as my 4 UT60s had been sitting in their boxes untouched for about 18 months. For a while I had been waiting to order screws, and so I finally did and they came in and so I could actually screw the wood front panels to the flex bay rad mounts. However you have to attach the rads first, so it was off to the land of sleeving. First I sorted through my mix of ap15's and ap16's to see what I had. I had 20 new AP16's, so I started off using those:

Then got out the rads:

Used the monsoon red stop fittings that lovely Monsoon provided to dress them up a bit:

Time to get to work:

One side done:

Test fit:

Don't worry we don't only run one set of fans, that would be too normal. Normally you'd mount the fans then the flexbay mount then the rad, but I wanted a bit more space so that the fans were a bit more subtley hidden behind the grill, it would also provide less restriction that way from the grill:

 

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One rad done with the exception of screws:

Checking that I could fit the two flexbay mounts into the 18 bays:

I then started drilling the front panels and countersinking the holes for the new screws so that the panels could be secured. Previously they were held up by the outer clip on panel. Hardly ideal:

Mounting two 360s leaves no maneovering room to get them in or out. Ideally you'd take the front frame panel off to get them in easily, but I refused to do that. Instead I put the case on it's back, attached the flexbay mount with temporary screws, and attempted to screw rad and fans in while balancing them with the other hand.

One side done:

The rad clearance:

 

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To get this to work you have to use the flexbay mount the correct way round and preferably have your rads rotated so the end tank caps don't clash:

Not sure how I want to hook up the tube on these rads yet, so I'm procrastinating that decision. Probably 2 in parallel in series with another 2 in parallel.

Hidden fans:

I had thought at some point to put red led's behind the grill to give a light glow. Any thoughts?

Once again thanks to sponsors - showcased today: Alphacool, Caselabs and Monsoon!

Oh one last thing - managed to break another PSU - AX850 this time the 8 pin connector stopped working (rest of the PSU still works which threw me off the scent for a long time). Looks like it had a bit of an "incident". The plug has fused into the socket so you can't pull it out. I did think I could smell something funny while I was working on thief and this PSU was testing GPU blocks in there at the same time:

Not sure this one will be covered by RMA as it was a refurb and possibly out of warranty 🙁

 

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After finishing the rad sleeving, I went on to the back panelling. I had bought some thin MDF from home depot the other day:

Got out the big scary saw:

Ripped it to shape:

Now time to carve out the section for the motherboard:

All marked up:

Time for the jigsaw:

and done:

Test fit:

 

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Bit too tight on the south side:

Fixed:

Now I've got to work out what to do with sata connectors:

I can't connect a cable as it is. I only really need one cable, and I swap drives around quite often, so I had planned to use an external esata dock. However the one I have seems way slower than a regular sata port.

I could however use something like this:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...ckCP&rrindex=0

Mount two in the pedestal, one for each rig. It would look ugly, but the front mount usb3 would be a nice touch, and I have a USB card reader for the camera too, so I'm tempted to go that way. If I did that I'd need to carve a channel for the sata cable to get to the motherboard port as I wouldn't then use esata and instead use the internal intel 6gig ports to connect.

 

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Well yes, getting wood normally does make a difference! I ordered two different veneers - one was two leaves of birdseye maple, which is a famous type of burl. A burl is kinda like a tumor on a tree that distorts the grain and makes it more fabulous and more desirable. It's a pain to work with though, but veneer makes life a little easier.

I also got a big sheet of ebony for the dark side. The ebony is kinda cheating - for those that don't know ebony comes in real thin sections so if you're veneering you have to join lots of sections together which is a nightmare. I wanted an easy life seeing as this was the first time I did any veneer work since I left high school. So this ebony is man made from ebony offcuts. Yeah not ideal, but it should still look good. The other bonus is that it's about 1/4 to 1/6 the price, and the rest of the huge sheet can be used to back the boards. You want to apply veneer to both sides of the board so that the glue drying doesn't cause the board to warp.

For the ebony I wanted the stripes running vertically, which means I will still have to do one join, I might be able to get away with leaving the end bare though as that section of board may not be seen behind the radiator:

I pencilled in how I wanted to use the maple - whacked the contrast out to try and show you - but it's hard to see;

Before we can use it though we need to flatten it a bit more. Burls are usually warped in a bubbly fashion and require a bit of pre work before use.

Essentially you get your wood nice and wet by rubbing it down with a damp cloth, then get a bigger piece of wood and put it on top:

Once the two woods are touching, then you can muscle up and add some iron:

Now my wood has been squished and is nice and flat:

 

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For the backing sheet you normally want the grain to run the same direction as the front sheet. However with a burl the grain is every direction so it doesn't really matter. Therefore I chose an easy life:

I had ordered a veneer saw as I'd heard they were useful, really though I had better luck on thin veneers like these with a sharp knife:

You want to leave a bit of overhang that you can trim off later.

At this point I also cut the extra cutout for the sata cables. I did not take a photo as I was too distracted by my sideways wood. As the sideways wood was done getting ready for action, it was time to cut the burl to size. This is more tricky as it's less flat and had a join. Even after flattening it was not exactly flat:

I lined up both pieces and taped them down:

Marked out the piece I wanted and got to cutting:

Two identical pieces with very similar patterns:

 

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They will be put back to back so as to create a reflection effect:

Test fit:

The join in the middle wasn't perfectly straight so I had to trim it down. To do this I again lined up the pieces back to back and put the questionable edge just peeking out from two pieces of MDF held down with dumbells:

It was then ready to be planed with a block plane which is more tolerant of wild grain:

The edges then lined up better:

One other thing I had bought was real veneer tape. When I was a lad we just used masking tape, but veneer tape is easier to use and as it dries will pull the two pieces of wood together. Then to remove just get it wet for a bit and it will come off. It was not time to prep for glueing both veneers to the board:

I stacked up three 3/4" plywood pieces and topped off with a 3/8" MDF board to give a nice perfect surface to squish the veneer with. I then layered clingfilm/wrap on it so that the glue wouldn't stick my panel to the MDF. Above the panel would get the same treatment, MDF followed by plywood and then the weights to give the clamping force. Tools ready:

Water and paper towel to dampen the non glued side, roller to spread glue, glue and more clingwrap for the top side. Then do the dirty deed and leave for 24 hours with a bunch of iron on top:

And now my watch begins...

 

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I hope you're all ready to see more of my wood! I couldn't show pics as I did the glue up because I was worried about it drying, so here are the pics taking it out:

The veneer gets protected with clingwrap so you don't glue it to the boards that squish it.

The veneer started to tear as I lifted it to put it on the board, so I added some veneer tape to make sure the tear went back together.

The good side worked out as well as could be hoped for. There was a bit of a gap along the mirror line but a bit of filler should make that less noticable:

First step was to trim the excess veneer - again a sharp blade can cut right through until you're very close to the substrate. Then you want to use a block plane most likely to finish it off.

Trimming end grain is much harder:

Soon you're done and then the veneer tape can be removed by getting it damp with a wet cloth and letting it sit for a minute:

Test fit:

 

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Looking good! Now for the dark - it had been at work mining on the 290s. I brought it home and removed the 290s to drain them and flip the bridge:

Drafted out the cuts on the substrate:

Sanity check with the R4E panel

The dark must be a little less wide than the R4E:

I was a bit more aggressive on fit around the motherboard this time as the other side had a slight gap:

Sanity check again with the R4E panel and the X79 dark:

Board would hit the VRM heatsink which we are not going to use - seemed like a good time to swap it out:

Board removed: