Upgrades: a half-assed worklog

[C38368]

Half-assed, because I hate taking build log photos and writing posts about them. But the good folks at Sidewinder Computers are off for vacation this week, so I won't get new tubing until next Monday. Bummer, but it means I've got a mostly-finished box, just waiting to be shown off. So, here it is.

Background recap: I blew a hose on my last build while I was out of town. As a result, virtually all of my coolant wound up sitting on my motherboard. (This was build on a Danger Den Torture Rack, so the board was oriented horizontally.) I doubt the initial explosion was to blame, but rather the corrosion that followed because I wasn't around to clean it up. Regardless, my motherboard died, though everything else was fine.

Seeing the opportunity, I set about trying to 1) source a new LGA1156 board to replace my ASUS M3F (harder than you might think) and 2) sell off my old case and rads so that I could rebuild into a Danger Den Q20, which I've been lusting over since they were launched a year ago.

As luck would have it, a good friend of mine had traded someone else for an "Abyss" Q20, ATX configuration with dual 5.25" bays. Exactly what I was looking for. He owed me $100 on an old video card trade, so we swapped debts and I walked away with a case to match my new motherboard, a particularly crotchety Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R, a gift from the same friend. Another guy I know offered to trade me a Black Ice SR1-360 for my old Torture Rack, and I'm off to the races!

Here are a couple of quick snaps of it. Nothing special, details after:




Flash artefact off the rear plexi panel. Hopefully it'll get a wicked paint job someday...


Black acrylic case with an aluminium faceplate on the res. It looks much better in person, as does the opaque grille. Neither are nearly so bright.

So like I said, the two big changes are the case (Danger Den Q20 in place of the old Torture Rack) and motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R in place of the old ASUS Maximus III Formula). CPU is still the solid 4.3GHz i5-760, 2x2GB OCZ Reaper memory, Sapphire HD6850, M-Audio Audiophile 2496 and a Seasonic X-560 PSU.

Cooling got a pretty big shake up, as well. My old system ran a pair of Laing DDC3.2 pumps with XSPC vertical-intake tops in series; CPU, GPU and full cover motherboard blocks, and two Black Ice GTX240 radiators. I used two pumps for the sake of redundancy; if one went down, there was still a second to keep coolant flowing. But DDCs with aftermarket tops are killer performers, and two in series produce head pressures and flow rates that approach Iwaki territory. And that's probably what caused the blowout. The irony of it all. Bonus: one pump died as the result of running dry.

The new loop is a little simpler, and probably much cleaner looking. A wild morass of tubes looked pretty slick in the Torture Rack, with it's sort of industrial look from the start, but not so much in a full tower case, and having a DDC pump on the bottom of the case made for some ugly routing problems. Solution: XSPC BayRes One. Apparently, someone finally hit on a great idea, and now several companies produce bay reservoirs with integrated pump housings. This particular one mates to a single DDC, but there are other options out there which take two DDCs, or one or two D5s. I happened to have one DDC, so this was a no brainer. Other single-DDC options out there, but none as affordable. So there's that.

Anyway, now cooling now exists of the BayRes One with a single DDC3.2 attached to it, feeding an EK Supreme-HF block, which will then go to the GPU block, into the rad, and back into the reservoir. As a bonus, the res fills from the top, and this case has a removable top panel. Ease of filling; not sure what I'm going to do when it comes time to bleed, though...

So, yeah. Just wanted to brag a bit. I'll be using 7/16" Masterkleer tubing, and hopefully soon replacing the opaque and retardedly bright blue front and rear grilles with more subdued, translucent panels in cobalt blue to match the top and bottom.

[MrFancypants]

Looks nice. Hopefully this will work better than your previous setup.

Water cooling seems like an interesting hobby. The cost of some of the components is a bit of a turn off for me though.

[C38368]

Thanks! Don't misunderstand; my old system worked just great. Perhaps too great, even. I just needed a change of scenery more than anything.

It is definitely a hobby. Dollar for dollar, air gets you much further. But water is just so much more fun, and a little better at what it does. It's one of those things that tends to get into your system and then stay there. I really don't have any desire to go back to air, and that's why I've not had a desktop for the last three months!

[Pethegreat]

Neat case layout, but don't the hard drives get hot? There is no fan blowing over them and you are exhausting your radiator into the case. Post more pictures once you get the system running.

Currently I working on installing a "new" heatsink on my processor to replace the stock heatsink. I have had an older(2009) Xigmatek heatsink. I never used it because I could not mount it properly. You needed to mount it east-west in a case for the heatpipes to work. I could only mount mine north-south with the included bracket. Getting a screw mounting kit for the sink tomorrow which will allow me to mount it properly.

The stock finish on the heatsink was awful. I got a 4 pack of wet/dry sandpaper and lapped the heatsink up to 1000 grit. I am going to lap the processor tomorrow to 1000 grit.

Spoiler:

An idea for the future would be to extend 3 power cables to allow for better cable routing in my P280. The soldering would not be too hard, but I would like to have it look as nice as the stock cable.

[C38368]

No, they don't really suffer that much. And the air coming off the rad isn't that hot, either. Maybe in the summer, under load, it's moreso, but not sufficient enough to cause a problem. The drives are spaced fairly far apart, and that's not enclosed enough to cause a major concern. My old Torture Rack build had them in a dual 5.25" hot swap cage. The cage I have now is studly, but the original one I used had two utterly crap 60mm fans that died in short order. The drives survived in there for over a year before the control board started to fail in the case itself.

Here are a couple more pics, then a story:




Radiator installed. Love the matte finish.

I also got a 10' run of 7/16" Masterkleer two days ago, so I packaged everything up, started to fill the loop of a leak test and... WHY THE FRACK IS THERE WATER DRIPPING DOWN MY RAD?

I got complacent. Or lazy. Maybe both? When I took down my old loop, which had run dry for god knows how long, one pump was obviously failed; I could clearly see coolant leaking from it. That pump got tossed, but I kept the other, which actually seemed intact. (It was oriented with the outlet pointing up, and the inlet directly from the other pump.) Because of the angle, I presumed that enough coolant was left in that pump to maintain the integrity of the bearing. Turns out, that was not correct!

So now I have to wait on a new DDC, and dry the hell out of my case. Dammit! It can also be a very frustrating hobby...