Project P182 Watercooled V2!

[bubba]

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

If not you have an excuse for a new board

[DMB2000uk]

I'm so close now, but there's still loads to do.

I soldered/wired up 2/3 of the LEDs last night....



Man this thing's going to look pretty.

[DMB2000uk]

So I don't think I mentioned yet that when I got my Seasonic PSU back from RMA, they had replaced it with a newer version of the X-Series lineup, which has completely different modular connectors for all the cables.

Which meant all my sleeving done so far was useless with this PSU.

I've been able to re-sleeve the 8pin and PCIe cables again, so am back to where I was before my PSU setback, but now need to order a bunch more paracord, and my supplier is out of stock of the silver colour (for another 4 weeks).

In a tiny bit of positive news, I'm really proud of this custom FDD modular power cable I made:



I was able to use my new toy's hot-knife attachment to melt the insides of the connectors out a bit, allowing me to tuck the heatshrink into the connector for a no-wires-visible finish.

But I'm dreading working on this nightmare:



I've already re-wired the cables so they don't cross over each other to the PSU-split connector (as much as I can), but there are 4 two-wires-on-one-pin connectors on the motherboard side which I'm going to have to find a way of hiding or cleanly sleeving, and yes, that is a wire pair twisted together for some inexplicable reason.

[DMB2000uk]

I was finally was able to finish my sleeving yesterday. :D

Had an amazingly timed postal delivery a few days ago too, I had literally just run out of paracord when the postman knocked on the door bringing me my ordered resupply!

The nightmare of a 24pin cable came out like this:



While I'm not able to get straight cables all the way down (due to the cables crossing towards the PSU side), I'll at least be able to get the motherboard side looking clean.

Rather than try and run two sleeved cables from one pin (like I had done on the PCIe PSU connectors), to keep it looking clean on the motherboard side I chose to sleeve the two wires as one, and then split them out with some heat shrink hiding the join near the PSU side:



Whatever I did here I'd have had to have a join somewhere on the cable, and this way saved me having to break out my soldering iron.

I took back everything I said about the 24 pin cable being a nightmare when it was time to do the SATA power cable though, how have I not come across people bitching about sleeving them before?!



It's not 100% perfect, but I'm sick of messing with this cable, so it's close enough!

[DMB2000uk]

I'm so close to finishing this build now, but have agonisingly little time to work on it this week!

I was finally was able to get all my fittings installed (after getting the last two in the post on Saturday) and so got around to cutting the tubing to its needed lengths.



But plain tubing isn't good enough for this time round, so lets try a little magic



Rit fabric dye apparently works really well on tubing, and not being able to find any tubes in a deep 'blood-red' colour, I had to give it a go.

Needless to say, I'm really pleased with the results...







Now to wait a week before I can re-assemble everything and take some nice photos

[skier]

That coloring looks awesome! can't wait to see it pumping

[bubba]

That coloring looks awesome! can't wait to see it pumping

That's what she said

[DMB2000uk]

Stay tuned for final project photos, this is the last update before everything is done... ;)

[DMB2000uk]

The pictures can speak for themselves on this one... ;)

[skier]

Phenomenal!

[DJ Tucker]

that has to be the most cable tidy rig i have ever seen. not seen cables looking that tidy on the back of motherboard for a long long time, so congrats on that achievement. Unfortunatly my non modular psu is horrid for my new case. don't get me wrong i finally have 80% of my cables hidden behind the motherboard but will never get it to look like yours. jealous indeed

[DMB2000uk]

Phenomenal!

Thanks :D

that has to be the most cable tidy rig i have ever seen. not seen cables looking that tidy on the back of motherboard for a long long time, so congrats on that achievement. Unfortunatly my non modular psu is horrid for my new case. don't get me wrong i finally have 80% of my cables hidden behind the motherboard but will never get it to look like yours. jealous indeed

Worst part is, I feel like the cable bunches at the back of the case should be tidier >_>

I am proud however of how well I was able to hide the LED wires, they're pretty much invisible on all the photographs!

[sbohdan]

Realy neat setup! Congrats! Is it ready yet?

There should be a completely see-through sidepanel on both sides to show-off all this

[Sporg]

Haven't been on in forever and come back to find this! Freaking awesome, Dan!

[DMB2000uk]

So you know how you never really finish a mod...

[InspectahACE]

Simply gorgeous work on this Dan.

[DMB2000uk]

The tollerances on fitting the Alphacool Nexxxos Monsta 420mm (3x140mm) in my case are going to be down to 0.5mm. Before I bought the radiator I had no way of knowing 100% if it was all going to fit.

I always said I liked a challenge though!

As there is quite literally no room to fit 140mm fans on my case configuration, I need a way to step down to 120mm fan fittings, and a new way to secure the it all to the case...

...and I need to do all that in under 2mm. >_<

Here's the beginnings of my solution:



Next up, I need to find a '120mm fan hole' sized hole saw, and borrow someone's bench press drill. :D

Simply gorgeous work on this Dan.

Haven't been on in forever and come back to find this! Freaking awesome, Dan!

Realy neat setup! Congrats! Is it ready yet?

There should be a completely see-through sidepanel on both sides to show-off all this

Thanks guys :D

Not sure this will ever be 100% complete, but after this cooling upgrade (and hopefully case window take 2) there'll not be much left for me to mod that hasn't already been tweaked in some way! In fact, the only panels on the whole case I won't have cut anything out of after this will be the case roof and front door!

[DJ Tucker]

this system looks amazing. can't wait to see the full rig up and running. however, that is going to be a tricky mod for your fans on that raditor. as long as you can get the parts you need you'll be fine. you've overcome all obstacles so far so congrats on that to

[DMB2000uk]

Next month marks the 5 year anniversary of this mod.

And it's still not finished. >_<

I'm going to try a little harder to make some time to finish it off, but I got engaged at the end of last year, and am currently neck deep wedding planning, so don't hold your breath.

---

Ok, first up, I've gotten hold of a second P182 to replace some choice parts from my original case. I want to clean up a lot of the cuts I originally made, and need to expand others in ways I couldn't do.

I'll get back to the radiator mount on my next update (ended up getting one laser cut out of steel).

First under the chopping block again is the motherboard tray. The old one had been through 3 motherboard revisions, so I had to expand the CPU cutout in an ugly way to still have access. Redoing this for my 4th motherboard for this mod so it'll be nice and clean again.







Compared to the mismatched angles on my last one, this should look a lot nicer:



---

Next up is something I'm going to let you guess at what I'm doing:









Can you tell what it is yet? ;)

[DMB2000uk]

Oops, realised I haven't updated this in a bit, so I'll drop in my current progress updates below!