Project P182 Watercooled V2!

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Finally Finished!

Post by DMB2000uk »

So I'm afraid I was so eager to finally finish this rig, that I didn't take anything else in the way of assembly shots, but I hope the final product shots will make up for that :)

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I took that long to get watercooling up and running that swiftech brought out a new CPU block in the mean time. So this is just the Apogee GTZ, else I'd probably be running whatever the new one is.

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Spot the GTX480!

If you're wondering what the extra metal things sported in the middle of my tubing, they're Koolance Quick Disconnects, so that I'll be able to remove either the GPU or CPU without having to drain the entire loop and faff about with un-barbing parts of the tubing.

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I'm rather pleased with how clean I managed to run the cables here. The pipe on the left is the return pipe from the CPU/GPU loop, and it has the T-Line filport on the top. While the pipe on the right is the flow towards the CPU/GPU loop, straight from the radiator.

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I was just sat looking at this picture wondering why I decided to cross the inlet/outlet over on the radiator, and then realized it was so I could make smoother bends that were less likely to kink.

That on the bottom left is a T-Balancer BigNG fan controller thing. It's pretty awesome actually, and there is no end of customization you can set on the fan profiles and temperature sensors. I modified the power connector on the Laing DDC Ultra to use a 3pin header, so I can use the fan controller to power the pump speed as I see fit. :D

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I'm running a Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD for boot, and a Samsung F3 500GB for storage. They're suspended using elastic, so any of the HDD's vibrations wont get passed through to the case (which amplifies the sound). I know SSDs don't vibrate, but I was going for a uniform look with suspending that one too :P

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(Click for a very large view)

And that's how she looks. :cool:

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And the outside. With some internal lighting, you'll be able to see through the tinted perspex which should look pretty sweet.

You can probably see that the outside of the panel is kind of distressed. Not to the point where it's obvious looking at it in normal lighting, but enough that I'm kind of miffed with it. The distressing happened when I had to separate the aluminium from the plastic inside of the case to cut the window hole out. It was stuck on pretty good and the aluminium kept bending as I tried to ease it off, hence the distress marks. I've considered trying again with a new panel, but I can't think of a way to get it off cleanly or find a clean way to cut the inside plastic hole larger than the outside aluminium hole. So I'm going to leave it for now.

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I like to think that even my cable runs are tidy :D




So that's my mod pretty much complete. And it only took me just over a year!

I blame Fermi's delay for my lack of reason to get it ready quickly.

Hope you enjoyed reading it.

Dan


PS. I'll probably still post a couple more updates at some point if I ever get round to spray painting the Noctua's and lighting the inside up like it deserves! But with how long it took me to get to this point, don't hold your breath :P
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by XstollieX »

=P~ Nice!
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by bubba »

Dan, yah need to turn your block 90*CCW so the swifty logo runs the same direction as the lock lever

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Looking good though :)
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by DMB2000uk »

Hah, I was hoping no-one would notice :-P

Yeah, I read the instructions once I'd finished and filled the loop, so realised my error! Will mess about with it when I
cba'd. Thanks for pointing it out. :-)

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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by bubba »

LOL Thought I should say something, it will affect your temps slightly.
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Thread Resurrection!

Post by DMB2000uk »

I always felt kind of guilty about getting this project to 90% of it's potential and then settling at a stage where it just worked.

While I'm still happy with the hardware in my PC, I've decided to give this project a lot of love, and finish off that last 10% of cosmetic touches.

Starting with getting rid of the awful tan colour on the Noctua fans (sorry Noctua, you've got nice fans, but a horrible sense of colour!), replacing my tubing with something a little more customised (a secret to follow), and upgrading my CPU waterblock while I've got the loop apart.

Anyway, these arrived today:

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Watch this space ;)
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Sorry Noctua, It Just Isn't Working Out

Post by DMB2000uk »

I tried to love the Noctua fans, I really did, but their colour never grew on me and I've longed for stealthier black-framed fans this whole time. So, out come the Noctua's, and in go the Scythe GT's I pictured in my last post. :D

First thing on my agenda was to sleeve the fan cables, can't have messy wiring when the whole point of this phase of my project is about aesthetic clean up! From before (right) to after (left):

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Second on my agenda was to get rid of some cable clutter at the back of my case. All the red and yellow wires in the below picture are from my Scythe Kazemaster fan controller. I'm not sure if I bought the Kazemaster before deciding to get a T-Balancer Big NG, but seen as though I do have a Big NG as well, I'm going to run all my fans straight from that from now on.

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But before I can do that, I need a couple of fan splitter cables. I couldn't find any short ones, so I had a go at making my own.

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I just so happened to have a bunch of fan adapter cables (I love hoarding things like that, and what do you know, they came in useful!) and with a little soldering work...

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(I didn't pose this shot, I was actually soldering where I'd set up my photobooth! >_> )

Anyway, once that was done, I had a custom cable to daisy chain 3 fans from one connector that wasn't 30cm+ long. It reads the fan rpm from the first adaptor, so I can still have an rpm readout on my BigNG.

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Removing the Kazemaster, and using my adapter (plus one I did buy that was 60cm long) I was then able to drop the cable clutter down to this:

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Which is already a big improvement without the hassle of having to sleeve all those Kazemaster cables from before! And, the shot I hope you've been waiting for, my rig with sane coloured fans.

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So much better already! :D
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Where Does The General Keep His Soldiers? Up His Sleevies!

Post by DMB2000uk »

Got a very nice package in the post the other day :D

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Paracord! I'm going for the sleeveless paracord look, and while it might be a lot more effort than normal heatshrink sleeving, I think it looks a lot better. :)

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One down, a bazilion to go! This is a slow process!

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Finally after two hours, a sleeved 8pin EPS connector! :D

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I'm very happy with how it's turned out, and I am going to like this very much! :)

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Even the back of the cables at the back of the case are going to look a lot nicer!


Now all I've got to do is another 51 PSU cables like this. :-/
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by bubba »

Did you buy the cord already gutted or do it yourself?

Thought about doing my system with 550 paracord, but make this stuff with it instead LOL

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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by DMB2000uk »

Just bought the regular stuff and am gutting it myself, it's easy enough to do.

If I've got enough left over, I'd be tempted to make one of those bracelets too. :P
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by bubba »

The orange stuff is my rifle sling. Have made zipper pulls, my kids each a bracelet, daughter a couple necklaces, working on a bullwhip.. great for clearing the mind of tech crap. :mrgreen:

Good place I use for learning the different knots is this guys channel, best tying how-to vids I have seen.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TyingItAllT ... eos?view=0
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A Delivery From Nils

Post by DMB2000uk »

Got a nice little something in the post this week from MDPC-X :)

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While I'm not going to use their sleeving, I did need a decent molex crimp and replacement ATX remover to carry on. My sunbeamtech remover had left me needing to replace several crimp pins with now broken wings, and not long after the remover broke entirely on me!

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So with the tools to carry on again, I started on the PCIe cables. Seasonic cheated with my PSU and drew 2 pins for the 8 pin adaptors from the same slots at the PSU side, so I had to make some horrible sleeving joins on 4 cables like this

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These joins ended up being a little messy at the end, but once pushed back into the PSU connector actually hid pretty well. I had to use that much force to get the wires + sleeving back into the connector that it's warped the plastic a bit!

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So this is the progress so far:

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While the 24pin ATX cable is going to take forever to sleeve, I can't wait to see it done too!
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Yucky, Gunky Plasticiser

Post by DMB2000uk »

So here's why being lazy with watercooling is a bad idea.

As you can no doubt tell from some of my recent WC photos, plasticiser has leached out of all my pipes and into my loop. Being lazy and knowing I was due to replace the tubing later as part of this project, I didn't do anything about it until now.

Here's the state of my CPU block:

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Yeah, it's pretty grim. Worst part is that the block shouldn't be black at all! I think that's burnt on plasticiser from the CPU heat (I might have forgotten to plug my pump in at one point too, causing a thermal shutdown which can't have helped!).

So after lots of soaking in vinegar, tomato ketchup, then vigorous scrubbing with a toothbrush I've been able to mostly restore it's proper state:

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The rest of my components aren't anywhere near this bad, but they're still in need of a clean up from the white plasticiser film all over everything. Hope the inside of my radiator is in an alright state. :-/

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Really glad I've gone for some plasticiser free tubing this time round. Should stop a lot of potential headaches down the line.
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by skier »

Classy system you have there now :)

Good to know about plasticiser! I plan to watercool my next system in similar epic fashion

I would be kind of scared not to replace the rad myself though! though I suppose letting it sit in vinegar for a while or at least flushing with vinegar would have taken care of it

One question about the cabling- Color coded by voltage?
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by DMB2000uk »

Some people don't tend to have much of an issue with it, the biggest factor is the water temp of your loop. When it hits somewhere between 40-50oC water temp (someone studied it but I can't remember where I read it) then the plasticiser begins to break down and come out of your pipes. But still, if you can get the newer tubing without it then it's one less thing to worry about.

Nope, just did the wires in a pattern that I liked the look of. Had to pay attention with making sure I did them back the same way I took them off though, nearly did one cable backwards before I noticed.

My case was built around the radiator, so I really don't want to have to get a different one! It's not going to be in too bad of a state, even with the messed up water block temps were acceptable. So yeah, hoping vinegar will get the most of it, and even if it doesn't I'll put up with it. :-P
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Case Stripped Down, Once Again

Post by DMB2000uk »

While I had my case partially stripped down to remove the PSU, I decided now was as good a time as any to make a couple more case adjustments I had wanted to for a while. So out came everything else...

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I've always used a T-Line to fill my WC loops in the past, mostly because I didn't have the space for a full sized reservoir and I felt T-Lines gave me a cleaner looking system, but I did sorely miss the quick-bleed ability of reservoirs.

Due to this I've been keeping my eye out for a suitable small res for a while now, but I had not found any that would fit that wasn't a bay res (something I didn't want to go for as it'd make my WC run use more piping and runs than I wanted).

However I recently found this, and decided it was perfect for my build:

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It's a FrozenQ FlexTank and is both really nice looking and small enough for use in my system.

I don't know if I'd got one from a bad batch, but the mounting hardware was crap, and not even finished off properly (there should have been screw holes where there were none and the acrylic clips snapped the first time I tried to use them!). But that didn't matter as I wasn't planning on using them anyway.

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I was going to just stash the FlexTank just under this bit in my case (where a FDD would have gone a long time ago) but realised that I liked the look of it too much to hide it like that, and I really could do with being able to see it to know when I need to top up the coolant.

So I had the epiphany of keeping the res stashed away there, but cutting out a hole in the case surround to see the top of the res.

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So out came the trusty dremel (and safety goggles, don't forget those!) to cut up my case ...

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I made the cable routing hole bigger round the back of the motherboard tray at the same time, as I wasn't going to have enough room after sleeving all my cables to fit them through the existing slot.

And once I'd put that part of the case back together again...

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With a couple of LED screw-in caps to the un-used fillports, this is going to look very nice indeed.
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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by DJ Tucker »

loving the look of this beast. done a great job and nice to see your still rocking the system and updating as you go :) gota post some benchmarks soon?
MSI Z590 Gaming Edge Wifi
Core i7 10700KF 5Ghz @ 1.25v With Alphacool Eisblock XPX Aurora Edge
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Blood Red Tubing

Post by DMB2000uk »

I've had an idea in the back of my mind with what I wanted to do about the tubing in my rig, having been unable to find any deep blood red available to buy outright.

But I've not had chance to check if it was going to work until now, and now that I know it is going to work, I can't decide if it's more of a tease for you or me to see a taste of what is to come!

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Re: Project P182 Watercooled V2!

Post by DJ Tucker »

hell yes blood red. my case was meant to be red but got blue and the returns was a nightmare and yet still got a blue in returned. so stuck with it. fortunatly my previous case had blue fans so used them in this one lol. oh quick question, can you watercool my system blood red :lol:
MSI Z590 Gaming Edge Wifi
Core i7 10700KF 5Ghz @ 1.25v With Alphacool Eisblock XPX Aurora Edge
Gigabyte RTX 2080 Super 1980Mhz @ 0.925v With TechN GPU Block
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Aqua Computer Ultitube 200 Pro D5 Next
Corsair XR5 240mm x2 & 360mm
Intel 670p 2Tb & WD Blue M.2 2Tb
Corsair HX1000i
Philips Momentum 3000 24" (Main) & MSI Optix G241V E2 (Second)
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Motherboard Nip & Tuck

Post by DMB2000uk »

Even though my case layout has always been pretty clean, I've never felt the look of my mod kept up with other newer builds, and I realised it was because of all the different coloured plastic components on my motherboard:

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So they had to go:

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Yeah that's paint :cool:

Now I have to wait until I've reassembled everything to see if my motherboard still works!
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