Project Rained-On [2011-Rig Rebuild || completed]

[skullbringer]

Got the 24pin done yesterday evening, aaand I noticed that I am going to run out of black and white sleeve again soon...

I overestimated the length of 5 feet, you Americans...

 

Also pump top and mod are on their way, as is the coolant and the waterblock for the graphics card. As I will have to wait for rma'ing the reservoir, that had a scratch when it arrived, and like said for the newly ordered sleeving, I plan on doing the actual rebuild at the end of next week

 

 

 

I want to do the graphics cards cables with the same pattern as the 24pin. Its 8+8+6 pice connectors, so 22, missing 2 of the black wires on the sides, and of course split into three strings, but the pattern will be the same.

 

Is there a way to safely test my cables for errors without a psu tester and except double and tripple checking ?

[skullbringer]

 

...still waiting for a new 100m of 0.75mm2 (~awg16) cables to arrive

[skullbringer]

everything seems be here now, except the wire for the cables.

assuming it arrived tomorrow, I will do the rest of the cabling on the weekend and probably start doing the build on monday.

the mounting for the pump and res config, as well as the ssd acrylic seems to be working, everything should be good to go. maybe I'll get an 8th fan just for the sake of having more positive case pressure

 

 

[skullbringer]

cable wire arrived! YAY, time for some more custom cable making! Woopwoop!

 

the new paracord from amazon is even more awesome than the lutro0customs stuff, as it has a lower melting point, ideal for heatshrink-less sleeving.

hurray for splitting pcie cables!

 

 

[skullbringer]

sleeving for the sata power cables got done as well. Also I ordered some 100cm sata data cables for the acrylic panel drives, 30cm standard cables were WAY too short.

going to be doing the usb 3.0 and sata data cable sleeving tomorrow morning, as Im still waiting for the heatshrink.

so the actual build process is postponed until tomorrow for now. I just want to have as little downtime as possible.

 

here are some shots of the new ssds test fitted, like said, sata cables will still be sleeved with mdpc-x black.

 

 

going to clean the acrylic afterwards

 

 

apparently, Imgur cant do portrait mode thumbnails... oh well, just click on it to see the larger portrait version

[Tearass]

 

 

 

 

 

Really like the way the SSD cables stealthily disappear under the SSD/Case bezel. 

[skullbringer]

Day #1 of the actual rebuilding process:

 

hey, more sleeving !!!!!!! seems like you cant get enough of it !!!

short 30 cm sata data for 3 hdds

 

 

 

the 100cm sata data cables arrived, but unfortunatley the metal clips on the connectors are gold plated.... lets go painting, before:

 

 

after:

 

 

why do sata cables not just come with black anodized clips in the first place?! would look much cooler imho than the standard silver/metal clips... chinese no name cable manufacturers, Im talking to you!!

sleeved:

 

 

 

ok, so much for sleeving... STUFF IS FINALLY HAPPENING

disasembled the water cooling loop and components. I was running red coolant before and it shows as it stained all components in a pinkish color... also the cpu block is gunked up like crazy, eventhough I did all the prepparation flushing with isopropylalcohol and deionised water before using wc components the first time

 

 

Q-tips and isopropylalcohol to the rescue!

After cleaning the EK Supremacy for like 2 hours, I managed to get most of it out, lets hope the coolant doesnt turn pink later o.0

If it does, I'll just call my self a hipster and run it pink

 

 

also I put all the fittings in a 1/10 isopropyl/water mixture for about one hour and Q-tipped them afterwards, again lets hope it did the job

 

 

mainboard, bottom rad and some cabling installed

 

 

the black acrylic with the 840 evos is also installed, now also with the sleeved sata data cables. you can see some molex connecors hanging down from the top of the acrylic, thats because I did a test fit of the led strip in the bezel on the right side. I will do the cables and sleeving custom later

 

 

 

The sticker on the Corsair RM1000 PSU didnt fit the color scheme, so I just removed it, looks much cleaner now, doesnt it?

 

 

 

Getting quite tight at the modular interface of the psu down there already and still all drive, lighting and pump cables need to be connected... o.0

 

 

configuration of fittings with the drenage system at the bottom rad installed

 

 

 

pump and reservoir installed, still need to test whether I can run the tube from the top radiator to the pump behind the motherboard tray. It will be tight, but I do have a lot of 90° single and dual rotary fittings spare for that, so it could work out

 

 

the outlet on this side will be used to connect to the bottom rad, then the tubing will go up to the gpu and further towards cpu and top radiator, then the long tube behind the motherboard tray will connect the top rad with the pump at the inlet on the opposite side of this picture. I hope you get what I mean, more pics will follow this evening or tomorrow morning (Europe)

 

[skullbringer]

just trying the new camera, more pics will follow

anyways, hdd sata power push in style cable done

 

 

btw, the new camera is a oneplus one

[skullbringer]

fans will be powered by this little spitter pcb, and the cabling for all the other molex devices like lighting and pump will be there behind the 5.25" bays as well

 

 

Im basically live blogging here more stuff is one the way, not sure if I am going to fill the loop still today, but I plan on getting my system up and running until next wan show. thats the deadline.

[skullbringer]

Sooo... Im kinda done for today. Top rad is installed and everything is prepared to start tubing up tomorrow, cya

[MattBoxer]

NICE!!

[anthonytran7757]

HAHA if you keep ordering stuff you're gonna have a crazy nice computer and a bunch of cavities 

[josh7678]

lookin goooood

[skullbringer]

Short update before the final steps

 

When I saw how gunked up some of the fittings were, I went for another cleanout. Anti-pink measurements

 

 

I managed to get the tubing to run behind the top radiator and behind the motherboard tray down to the pump

 

 

Time for graphics card installation, before

 

 

 

without backplate

 

 

cooler removed

 

 

 

*missing picture of applied thermal pads and paste*

 

EK Classy 780ti applied

 

 

Unfortunately I couldnt reuse the backplate, as the screw that came with the block dont fit into the srewholes of the backplate. Because the block is using M4 threads the old M3 screws also didnt work... I might just get the EK Backplate down the road, or some M4 screws with a slightly narrower head.

 

Time for tubing everything up and getting some liquid in there.

I will do a one hour leaktesting and cleaning run with deionised water to make sure all red dye is out before Ill drain the loop again and fill it up with Mayhems Pastel Ice White.

[skullbringer]

IT IS DONE ! pics will be on tomorrow

[Ralphington]

that looks amazing!!!!! and the gpu is just WOW.

[skullbringer]

Here is the update of the rig in its state as I made it before the deadline as in yesterdays WAN Show. I couldnt do it yesterday as I was so exhausted from basically building the whole day about 14 hours non-stop...

But see yourselfs, the pictures should be a bit better now. I have played around a bit with the new camera, tuned the iso and shutter speed.

 

Of course, after mounting a waterblock, always store the stock cooler with all its screws somewhere safe, so you dont lose it in case you need to refit it. TTL style in cling film

 

 

 

gpu installed into the system, all components in for tubing up the rest

 

 

Im quite happy with how the tubing runs turned out

 

 

oh, just throwing this in here. The top rad (360) only came with silver screws, as opposed to the bottom (240) rad that came with black ones, eventhough they are the exact same model number o.0 Hardwarelabs wtf? Anyways, I just painted them, cause thats what Linus told me in his last build guide

 

 

Ready to fill up the loop! I actually had to remove the reservoir top to get some sort of fill tube in there, as there is not enough room to connect a fitting. Also the drenage system is hooked up and ready.

 

 

At this point the loop was in full circulation. I went with deionised water for the first fill up to clean out any red dye that might still be in the radiators or fittings from the coolant before. And only one of the LED strips is installed right here, as I still had to mod the cables of the others and I decided to do that later for optimized time management.

 

 

Still managed to drain the loop after about 2 hours of leak testing and possible red dye flushing and refilled it with Mayhems Pastel Ice White.

 

You can tell from the lighting this shot was actulally done at like 10pm my time and build day 2 was coming to an end...

 

 

I managed to get the cables for the two other LED strips going and just laid/hung them in to see whether they actually worked. After about 2 hours of stress testing (gameing with a friend) the coolant had heated up to about 60°C which caused some red dye to dissolve into the coolant... and it turned pink

 

 

So I plan on doing about one week of continuous stess testing to just get all the red dye into the cooland and do another swap afterwards. I still have about 2 loop fills of Pastel Ice White spare so I should get it to stay white eventually.

 

Also I will completely rearrange my whole desk and gaming setup. On the first page with the HUGE images I posted a shot of the before and I plan to also do one after. Its still holiday time where I live so I have plenty of time to get this done.

 

hope you like it so far. I appreciate any kind of feedback you have, it really helps me to keep going 110%!

[skullbringer]

Some more daylight shots

 

waiting for more led strips to decide on the final lighting layout, so they are just laid in there for now

also you can see the strawberry yoghurt-colored coolant... Plan is to repeatedly heat up the fluid in the following days to get as much of the red stuff to dissolve, and then drain the pink stuff out and replace it with new white pastel

 

 

cant get the air bubble out of the cpu block... maybe it is because currently inlet and outlet are swapped for a cleaner cooling run, but I may just turn the pumptop 180 degrees and just reverse the circulation

 

 

fan spliiter pcb/molex lighting daisychaining mess... and the tubing run across the back side

 

 

I might also install some more white nb eloops for addiinal positive pressure inside the case and also better cooling for the hdds. as the hdd cage is touching the reservoir the harddrives did get up to around 65°C... o.0

 

 

currently tilted the pump on its side, so I could change the speed of the d5 vario for easier bleeding out of air bubbles. you can see that those ek uni mounts come in really handy here

 

 

and the fan screws for the top rad which I painted black and dried over night are now put to use

 

 

I also got the lighting for the ssds working ...broken molex pin. with the side panel on it gives the ssds a really nice underglow effect, but pics of that will follow later in the build log, as I still need to polish the panels.

 

For the gpu backplate I might have a solution in mind. My initial plan to reuse the kingpin backplate didnt work out as the screws for the ek water block were m3, as opposed to the m2.5 that were used for the stock cooler and backplate... The idea now is to just sand the head of some m3 screws that I have spare so they fit the block and the backplate and paint them afterwards matt black. They are only about 3/10 of a mm to wide, so it shouldnt be a big deal to get them to the right size.

 

For the peripherals, I have some usb a and mini b connectors on the way. My plan is to just make a lot of the peripheral cables from scratch and use the same white paracord sleeving as with the power cables. Should fit the general white/grey/black design of my computing desk corner...

[skullbringer]

Scavenged some mainboard screws from my assortment of spare case hardware and sanded the heads about 0.5mm narrower. Now they fit in the holes of the k|ngp|n backplate.

 

Also I will do a complete remout of the gpu block, as I am experiencing vdroop issues, possibly due to vrm overheating. This was my first gpu waterblock I assembled, so I could imagine some thermal pad not beeing seated correctly. Also I did not use thermal paste under the thermal pads before like EK recommends, so that will also be changed.

 

More EK Uni mounts and lighting strips are on the way, re rebuild sheduled for wednesday.

 

 

of course, the screws will also be painted

[skullbringer]

Ready to drain the strawberry yoghurt out

 

[Ralphington]

You might wanna eat that, its healthy and nutritious and a good source of unsat. fats. 

[skullbringer]

As already mentioned I did kind of a re rebuild today. But there will also be a re re rebuild at the end of this week. I swear, Im not trolling.

The reason for doing all that today was that I had problems with the graphics card crashing after 10 minutes of load, even when not overclocked. So I figured since this is the first gpu block I ever mounted, some thermal pad could just have gone slightly off or something.

 

So remounting the gpu block with the stock backplate was the plan. These are the screws that I sanded down so the heads would fit the holes of the backplate, now also painted and ready to be used

 

 

Pulling the card appart, this didnt look like a bad mount to me. Maybe a bit too much thermal paste on the gpu, but since there is no ihs as with cpus, this shouldnt have been a problem.

 

 

Also all thermal pads were seated correctly, all with a slight dent of the component they were sitting on before.

 

 

Well, I figured to just try reapplying the block as I had done a few days ago. Just now with a bit less tim.

 

 

Put the backplate on, encluding the stock thermal pads positioned around the gpu area. Painted screws dont look bad imo

 

 

Reinstalled the card into the system. As I will be doing another drain a few days from now, I just went with deionised water, instead of wasting pastel ice white.

 

 

The bottom rad was still full of liquid since the drain port is physically above the radiator and I didnt bother pumping it out. So now the coolant is a semi translucent white with a slight pinkish touch. Gotta love dem hipsters!!

 

 

But seriously, I will do a complete loop drain including the bottom rad when I get the last few parts I am still waiting for. Those are more lighting strips, additional ek uni mounts to mount more intake fans and (NEW) a quick disconnect system.

Atm the loop is an absolute pain to drain, as no air can get in from the top. So I thought I could just put a quick disconnect into the long tubing run across the back of the motherboard tray. This would then be at the highest point of the loop, allowing fresh air to get in and making it much easier to drain the top radiator and backside tube.

 

The good news, with the system up and running as it is right now, the gpu core and vrm run about 5°C cooler according to gpuz and even when overclocked the system passed a one hour stress test. No crashes, no bluescreens, just wonderful.

 

I will enclude overclocking and performance numbers at the end of the build log.

[skullbringer]

Since people usually include a lot of fancy concept drawings and 3d models of what they are planing to do with their build, I thought Id give this a shot as well.

 

 

Bascially I need to redo the cabling of the fans, lights and pump and tidy it up a bit. The plan is to create a molex male --> 2x molex female + 3pin fan splitter to distribute the power.

Fan splitter pcb and molex will use a female molex connection and the 3 pin fan header will split into three more 3 pin fan headers. These 3 will be used for connecting the LED flexlights. Then I will just need to recrimp those from molex to 3 pin connectors. That way I will save a lot of untidy molex connector space and make cable management easier.

[skullbringer]

Eventhough the psu of my xstar korean 1440p monitor broke today, I am still fully motivated because of the "motivation spheres" that were included with todays Caseking delivery. Going with them all the time as they are the only etailer in all of Germany that is selling Bitspower watercooling components.

So today I am planing to do the last drain and fill for quite some time, include the quick disconnect fittings into the loop and get two additional noiseblocker nb eloop fans mounted. Unfortunately I am still waiting for my mdpc-x order to arrive. But thats ok, I like Nils, hes a really cool dude!

 

[Square554]

cool stuff even though i dont understand 90% of the things your doing keep going!!