Sporg Watercooling Work Log (56k warning)

[Sporg]

First of all, a big thanks to everyone who chipped in with advice (especially martini161 and Bio-Hazard).

I have been experiencing high temps lately. I have never been happy with the CPU temps since I put this rig together and adding the HIS Radeon 4850 HD (Thanks LR!) has had an adverse effect on my temps. I am not sure where my screenshots are from before the upgrade to after and I’m certainly not going back now.
From Memory (all temps Celsius):
CPU (no load) = 58ish
CPU (load) = 65ish
GPU (no load) = 60ish
GPU (load) = 66ish

I had to use the ATI profile hack to get the temps to that level on the GPU. Prior to the hack I was in the mid 80’s. With the hack I set my fan default to “65” which I assume means 65% fan speed when my profile was active. I never tried a higher number to see how low temps would go.

Some of you know what I decided to do, but for those who did not know… In the spirit of experimentation I decided to take the plunge and drown my computer. or
System Specs:
Case: Thermaltake Armor
CPU: Intel Core2Duo X6800
MB: Intel 975XBX2
GPU: HSI 4850 HD
Audio: Sound Blaster Audigy 2
PSU: Antec TruPower 650 Trio
RAM: 4GB Corsair XMS2 (5-5-5-18 800MHz)
OS: Win XP Pro (32 bit)

Shot of the front


Shot of the side (with the old 7950 GT and my ghetto zip-tied fan)


I spent several weeks reading and researching what others were doing and using. I didn’t really have a good solution prior to calling up my buddy Aaron (redneck fabrication specialist! plus he has a lot of tools) and enlisting his aid. After hitting up the LR forums and asking a lot of questions I finally had a parts list and was ready to order.

The meat of the list:
CPU Block: Swiftech GTZ (new to the market and is compatible with the new Intel chips)
GPU Block: Swiftech MCW60
Pump: Swiftech MP665
Tubing: Tygon Silver ½” ID x ¾” OD – only ordered 4’ and was not enough to complete the job
Heat sinks: Bought a Swiftech heat sink kit for a different graphics card (NVIDIA 8800 series), but it contained everything I needed.
Heater Core: Swiftech MC320
Fans: Yate Loon 120mm – 12v (total of 3)

I found the best overall prices at two online e-tailors. I ordered everything on a Friday and by Tuesday I had both packages.
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com
http://www.jab-tech.com

Day 1
I took Friday off and went over to Aaron's with the items that would make this project a challenge (think radiator). The greatest challenge was where to mount the radiator. I originally had thought that maybe I could somehow mount it on the side, but half-recessed into the case. Once we got the case apart it didn’t seem like a fun idea. Another idea was to mount on the top. Andy (another buddy) suggested mounting it perpendicular along the top. The more I thought about it the less I liked that version. So I decided that I wanted to mount the radiator parallel with the top of the case and have the hoses come in (and out) over the drive bays.

Top of case with holes drilled.


Aaron and I spent at least an hour walking around Westlake’s Hardware looking for ideas on how we could mount it on top. We decided on something, but I changed my mind and returned everything later in the day. Fortunately the holes Aaron drilled would work perfectly with what I had in mind. Earlier Aaron had suggested using springs and mounting the screws through the centers. I really liked that idea and went with it. What I got was about a 10" long compression spring and just cut sections off to length (1 5/8" I think).

Radiator mounted on springs.


Must be careful not to screw in too far! Don’t forget to look at that sexy, shiny fitting!!!


We also cut a square out of the back so that I could make sure the back plate for the CPU block would not fall or move when installing. I copied this idea from Dan's log.


So with the radiator mounted it’s time to work inward. I installed the motherboard and loosely mounted the CPU block. Then I installed the pump. I love this case because there is just so much you can do with it. I had to route out two holes to fit the screws for the pump.

Next up the vid card… I had to take off the stock cooling solution.

As with many things in life it’s important to remember that often-times things come apart easily when everything is removed. I barely pried on it before noticing the back side!


For anyone who is curios and wants to see what’s underneath the stock cooler I have a fuzzy picture for you.


The pads that came with the little copper heat sinks are absolutely worthless. Luckily the kit I ordered came with an Arctic Silver Compound that is rather permanent. There are numerous notifications on their website about how you should never EVER EVER use it on a processor.

Water block on with heat sinks. I bent the prongs on the heat sinks directly below the water ports so that I could later install the hose and clamps. I later found that you could just snip the ends off, if you actually had a pair of nippers in your possession.


After midnight I got the hose hooked up, until I ran out…


I was irritated and stepped out for a smoke. This little guy is probably doing his part to try and get rid of some of the bugs.


Day 2
Visited Westlake’s hardware again and found some hose that ended up working. So, anyone who is familiar with this particular CPU block may see a mistake I made.


Okay, if you didn’t notice in the previous pic, then you should notice here. I sure was proud of myself for the next 30 minutes of flushing (until I realized what I did). At this point I was flushing everything out with a 50/50 mix of White Vinegar and warm distilled water.


There we go! That should be a bit better… The water block has a specific inlet and outlet side. I had the hoses backwards. Easy fix and was my biggest mistake (next to not ordering another 2’ of tubing).


After several hours of leak testing it’s time to throw everything else back in. This actually took much longer than it should have. I had a bazillion tiny bubbles that took forever to get rid of. On the flushes it did not take long at all to get all of the air out. I'm assuming that I didn't mix something quite right, so probably a little bit extra corrosion inhibitor.


Front of the tower. I repositioned a few things because the hoses run right through the top area.


A couple pics of the finished product.



With no load at all CPU is at 29-30 degrees and GPU is at 34.5 degrees (again Celsius). Firing up the fold@home GPU2 client and with a 95% load I’m getting 37 degrees. Fired up two iterations of SuperPI and set the affinity so that I have one running on each core. Temps went up a bit, but nothing like before. The highest I saw here was 39 degrees.

Please note that the fans on top of the heater core were not running at max speed. I have them set at about 50%.

This project took a bit longer than expected. Mainly due to initially not knowing how I wanted to mount it (the radiator). I also spent a few hours getting rid of air bubbles.

This was a fun project and I wish I had done it long ago.

[DaIceMan]

nice job. I have been kicking around the idea of water, but I go to LAN parties at least once a month, and 400 miles with the water seems like a bad idea to me. I might give it a shot on the server in a future life to cool it down a bit more since it's SLI 2x 8800GTs, 3 wd 640gb hard drives tend to heat up a bit.

[stopthekilling77]

Looking very clean! I plan on doing exactly that asap!

[martini161]

nice job! And you should order a couple of feet more tubing from jab tech, but thsoe tubes will work for now. and are those fans pushing or pulling?

[Sporg]

Thanks guys.

And you should order a couple of feet more tubing from jab tech, but thsoe tubes will work for now. and are those fans pushing or pulling?

I plan on ordering some more hose. The fans are pulling.

[martini161]

Thanks guys.

And you should order a couple of feet more tubing from jab tech, but thsoe tubes will work for now. and are those fans pushing or pulling?

I plan on ordering some more hose. The fans are pulling.

Good man

[Bio-Hazard]

Not bad lookinf at all...............

Seems to be working well for you.

[DMB2000uk]

Having that hole in the back of the motherboard tray makes a whole world of difference in making it easy to swap out CPU things. Good choice

If you had said in advance that you were going to use AS Epoxy on the RAMsinks I would have told you to mix it 1:1 with AS5, so that you can actually get them off in the future. It would have come in handy if you ever wanted to sell on the 4850 (or just for that matter put the stock cooler back on if it goes in a different machine). I guess you can always pick up something like an AC Accelero S1 to use if it ever gets taken off of the water.

How much cable do you have left on those rad fans? It would look a lot cleaner if you were to get some heat-shrink/braiding stuff and route the sleeved cable down the side of one of the waterpipes going into the case. Of course, there might not be enough cable to reach that far round, but sleeving them all in one bunch would tidy it up nicely.


Looks like a job well done though. I would love to have a triple rad (much jealous).

Dan

[Sporg]

If you had said in advance that you were going to use AS Epoxy on the RAMsinks I would have told you to mix it 1:1 with AS5, so that you can actually get them off in the future. It would have come in handy if you ever wanted to sell on the 4850 (or just for that matter put the stock cooler back on if it goes in a different machine). I guess you can always pick up something like an AC Accelero S1 to use if it ever gets taken off of the water.

I would never put the stock cooling solution back on, so for me it's no big deal. If/when it goes away from liquid I'll go with an after market solution like the Accelero.

How much cable do you have left on those rad fans? It would look a lot cleaner if you were to get some heat-shrink/braiding stuff and route the sleeved cable down the side of one of the waterpipes going into the case. Of course, there might not be enough cable to reach that far round, but sleeving them all in one bunch would tidy it up nicely.

There isn't a lot of extra cable, but I was thinking about getting some black tubing of some kind. I also considered clipping some of the wires and just make the leads longer. We'll see how motivated I get with that. My first priority was just getting everything back up and running correctly.

[Sporg]

It's actually kind of warm this evening. According to the laser temp gauge that I borrowed it's 85oF in here (that translates to approx. 29.4oC)

I've had F@H running for a little while now on the GPU and CPU. I still have the fans running below 100%. I may move this thing out from under the desk to let more of that hot air escape. I think I'm going to hook up the case fans to my fan controller too. The system is only running them between 500 and 600 rpm and I'm wondering if they aren't moving enough air around in the case. I still need to order that replacement hose, so I may just get a couple of Yate Loons to throw in there and then hook those up to the controller.

Loaded_Temps.jpg (191.02 KiB) Viewed 8687 times

[DMB2000uk]

16/17 degrees above ambient is a very nice result ^_^

Dan

[Sporg]

Thanks Dan, I've been pretty darn happy so far with the temps. I haven't let the fans run at 100% to see how low the temps will go. I also might pull out from under the desk to let the air flow better and keep that heat from getting trapped under there. Then again I may just make a heat baffle to put on the underside of the desk.

Took this screenie this morning. Room temp was 75oF (approx 23.89oC). I did find some 'before' screenies that I took. They are in a word doc at home, so I need to convert to jpeg. Will try to post tonight.

Loaded_Temps_Lower_Room_Tem.jpg (197 KiB) Viewed 8659 times

[Sporg]

I found a before pic of the temps. I think it was only running F@H GPU client and nothing else really, so keep in mind that the CPU cores weren't really loaded. I think that screenie was taken around mid-summer when we had a ton of heat. I'm not sure what the ambient room temp was either, but those temps were 'normal' at that time. I was also on the 2nd page still, but we've moved on since then.

Before_Temp.jpg (222.83 KiB) Viewed 8641 times

[Skippman]

Looks great man! Does the springs help damped vibration from the fans on the radiator?

Do you have a rez somewhere? I couldn't see it in the pictures.

[martini161]

nope he uses a tline.

[Sporg]

Thanks! The springs are mostly for looks, think of them as spacers. I will say that there is no vibration. I took one long compression spring and used my dremel type tool to cut specific lengths (so to not damage the rad).

I used a t-line instead of a res. Just to the left of the pump you should notice a clear tube that is vertical.

I did have one leak, and that was totally my fault. For the GPU water block I had a very slow leak. I am planning on throwing different fittings into that block. I'm due for a system flush and need to replace a section of hose. If you notice the hose from the rad to the CPU waterblock is not silver. I didn't order enough and had to visit a hardware store to get by. Figured I'd give the system a good flush and touch up a few things.

If you do end up going with an Armor case, do what martini161 did in his thread and cut/drill some holes in the motherboard tray. He ran most of his cabling on the back side and it looks a lot neater. I would also recommend cutting out the area behind the CPU if you have a block/cooler/whatever that requires a backplate. Got that idea from Dan and am glad I did it.

[Sporg]

I made a few changes a couple of weeks ago so figured I'd post up!

I finally got around to swapping out the fittings on the GPU block. I went with a pair of Bitspower.


During the cleanout I figured I'd take a shot of the layer of dust under the rad...ewwww!




Prior to the hose upgrade and use of velcro:


A couple of shots of the guts. All of the hoses are now silver and I used velcro to clean it up. Picked up a couple of rolls at Home Depot several months ago. I'm not a freak when it comes to cable tidiness, so don't expect much better than this! I'd still like to cut a couple of more holes in the motherboard tray and paint the interior black. We'll see how motivated I get this summer.




Also replaced the stock fans with highspeed Yate Loons. I put both blue fans inside the case and replaced the front intake with a black fan. So I now have all 6 fans hooked up to the fan controller. The top 'blowhole' fan only gets used when the room is warm or if I happen to be taking a night shot.








I'm still looking at one of two things for the rad grill. I found some black 120mm grills that would look good, but forgot to order them when I ordered the upgrade parts recently. I also thought about making some sort of skirting, but haven't decided what to do with that.



Some night shots.







The workspace.

[DMB2000uk]

Any advantage to having the shorter bitspower barbs?

If you do paint it black this summer, you are going to have to make an effort to hide the rest of those cables (and sleeve them too )

Good job otherwise.

Dan

[Sporg]

Thanks Dan. The reason I went to those fittings is for convenience. Those plastic barbs really annoyed me when I had to move stuff around. When I drain the system I pull the line from the GPU waterblock that is connected to the T-Line. My first leak happened because I didn't realize that the barb had loosened after handling. I learned a few things with that leak, and only lost an audigy card, so it was in inexpensive lesson.

As far as sleeving goes I considered it. I saw how nice Skipp's turned out and it really made me consider it. I might just go with a different power supply that already has the black sleeves though, so that is something I'm considering. It looked a bit cleaner before I threw in the lighting, you can see the mess at the bottom of the case along with the controller box. One of the PSU's that I'm looking at is a modular Corsair (HX620?). I used one when I built the folding...errrr..the wife's rig and really like it.

[Skippman]

Sleaving definatly made mine look nice and clean on the inside, thanks for the props Sprog. I learned a lot building my latest PC. Even when you think you know everything there is to building you learn something new. If you do decide to sleeve take a look at the write up I did a while back. Sleaving kits can be had for less than $20 from places like Performance PCS. The one tip I can give you, don't use a soldering iron to melt down the heat shrink, use a lighter. I used to use a soldering iron all the time until I started working on these smaller wires and man does it melt the bejesus out of the shrink.