Project HydrOS (Waterworks 3.0) // Corsair 780T // UV Blue Water Tubing // Tube Reservoir // Titan X // 5820k // Quick Disconnects

[Syte]

Looks a lot like the NCIX PC in the recent Luke LTT video at PAX East right down to the quick disconnect fittings

Completed work:

A while ago I undertook an upgrade to X99 Haswell-E from X79 IvyBridge-E

My old build (Viewable Here) was a 4820k based system, originally with a GTX 780, but has been upgraded over the years as I'm in a position where putting the latest tech into my PC is a good idea.

Firstly I had to decide on the case; was I going to carry over my faithful Corsair Obsidian 750D?

It didn't have much in the way of flaws, but it was a little bit on the plain side and I was artistically drawing a blank when it came to putting a new system inside of it. So I went case shopping. Luckily I've already used almost every case on the market so I knew all the little secret ins and outs of every case and quickly built a short list. I don't much care for oversized cases such as the 900D or larger water cooling oriented cases because I enjoy the "Mid Tower" size range.

The contestants:

NZXT H440 Black/Blue

Corsair 760T

Corsair 780T

Corsair 540 Air (Sideways or upright configs)

Fractal Design R5

After a few days of webbing out the pros and cons of each, and eyeing up a few of my customer's systems virtually imagining my own water loop in them, I decided on the Corsair 760T White.

I normally am not the biggest fan of white cases, but this case was right for what I fan planned, I started putting the base components in and making measurements and calculations for heat and required cooling.

For the CPU I will be going with the 5820k, which was quite an easy choice. The 5930k doesn't have much to justify the extra $300 CAD and the 5690X is $1400 in Canada and not worth the extra 2 cores/40 lanes to me. For the motherboard I went with the X99-A as it fit the bill of required features while not having any useless garbage like Wi-Fi that I didn't ever plan on using, it also looks great. For the power supply I'm using my old-time favourite, the Corsair RM850, it's as close to perfect as you can get, despite the absolute CRAP LTEC capacitors, other than that it's perfect, seriously though screw LTEC.

After the measurements were all taken I drilled the holes and added minor supports for the XSPC 170ml tube reservoir and made a bigger hole in it for a slightly different shaded LED to fit inside the reservoir, very little clearance between top 360mm RAD and tube reservoir.

Now it was just a simple matter of plumbing everything together. For GPUs I am using two GTX 980 from EVGA running in SLI, for RAM I will be using Corsair Vengeance LPX and seeing what I can get out of the timings to best suit gaming/code work. Since I will be powering the ASUS ROG Swift with this build the dual 980s really shine here, despite certain games not having the best SLI profiles almost everything will be able to maintain 144Hz with the overclock I know I can get out of these cards. I don't generally like heavy overvolting on my own GPUs so I will be pushing them as far as I can get without touching core voltage, then possible adding a little if to stabilize a more aggressive overclock since I know heat certainly won't be an issue. I am using quick disconnect fittings for the GPU portion of the loop so I can swap out if a decently priced GM200/210 chip comes out, leaving my options open for the future. Cards are running in 16x/8x.

For the pump I am using a stock Swiftech D5, I've used a lot of these babies and they have never let me down, great flow rates, extremely reliable, and adjustable flow for near-silent operation is perfect. Speaking of silence; for case fans I will be using 3x NF-F12 fans from Noctua on the top 360MM rad, an NF-A14 Grey on the rear exhaust port, and the 2 stock LED fans with noctua low noise adapters running @800-100RPM each for perfect noise control. The choice behind the two Intel 730 SSDs (and 2 more 240GB HyperX Fury for games) is quite simple; both pair of 240GB drives will be running in RAID 0 and the 730s will have business files stored on them so they need to be reliable. I also like the spooky scary skellingtons on them so that helped with the choice.

Now it's just a matter of putting everything together, all of the planning has been done and the final pieces are falling into place, I'm excited to get to overclock another 5820k and luckily for me I'll be rewarded with an extremely lucky chip easily accepting 4.3GHz at very low voltage (1.165v). Also for tubing I'm using Primochill 1/2 ID 3/4 OD UV Blue reactive tubing, I use this a lot for my builds as with Cold Cathode lights cleverly tucked away they give the system a nice "glowing" aesthetic.

And after that the planned upgrade to the GM200 GPU was undertaken, unfortunately EK-WB delayed my Waterblock order sadly due to stock constraints so I ran the Titan without the cooler since I had a friend who desperately wanted my pre-binned 980s and didn't want to wait.

It looked--- Bad, to be honest, and I botched the half-assed cut so had to disable the rear Noctua 140mm so the quick-disconnect didn't clip into it constantly because I'm just so good at this.

The new Titan X, with awkward water cooling around it.

After finally getting the waterblock I put this baby to work, easily able to get 200+ MHz on the core with no extra voltage and +500 MHz on the memory with no hitching at all, the Titan X runs like a dream, everything I wanted from this purchase and more. It also feels good to be back with a full cover waterblock with full cover backplate. I'd personally recommend a backplate as the Titan has exposed VRAM and Core components on the back of the card which EK includes cooling thermal pads for, combine that with a decent Airflow fan hitting the backplate and you're looking at smooth sailing.

iPhone 4s pictures below!

CPU: Intel Core i7 5820k

Motherboard: Asus X99-A

RAM: 16GB 4x4 Corsair Vengeance LPX Black/Yellow 2400Mhz CAS14 (stock)

Graphics Card: (UPDATED) Nvidia Geforce Titan X

Pump: Swiftech MCP655

Reservoir: XSPC Photon 170ml tube reservoir

Radiator: 360mm XSPC Raystorm Radiator

Tubing: Primochill FLEX Blue UV 1/2ID 3/4OD

Fittings: Swiftech 1/2 G1/4 Silver Compression Fittings w/ 2x NO-SPILL black quick-disconnect fittings

Solid State Drives: 2x Intel 730 240GB SSDs in RAID 0, 2x Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB in RAID 0

Hard Disk Drives: 2x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM

Case: Corsair 760T White

Power Supply: Corsair RM850 80+ gold 850w PSU

[Decon]

-snip-

awesome sauce

[Swndlr]

so wait thats your pc at the intel booth? or am i stupid?

[Syte]

so wait thats your pc at the intel booth? or am i stupid?

No; I've worked at the NCIX PC building warehouse though before I started my own business. That's just an extremely strange coincidence that the NCIX Intel Booth had a PC that looks exactly like mine in almost every way. Which one do you like better?

[Swndlr]

No; I've worked at the NCIX PC building warehouse though before I started my own business. That's just an extremely strange coincidence that the NCIX Intel Booth had a PC that looks exactly like mine in almost every way. Which one do you like better?

id chuck mine out the window for either one of them any day

[Syte]

id chuck mine out the window for either one of them any day

Thanks for the complement!

You have a 4690k though; effectively runs the same as my CPU in any game that only uses 1-4 cores assuming it's clocked the same. Give that CPU some love as well as a nice cooler and it'll love you back!

[Swndlr]

Thanks for the complement!

You have a 4690k though; effectively runs the same as my CPU in any game that only uses 1-4 cores assuming it's clocked the same. Give that CPU some love as well as a nice cooler and it'll love you back!

ik c: ive still got some planned upgrades like RAM, cooler, and idk yet but maybe a 3xx card if theyre here soon enough

 

[-TesseracT-]

I love the look of the tubing.

[Syte]

is this your camera? 

 

Potato Camera.jpg

Yes.

 

I love the look of the tubing.

Thanks! The glow effect is hard to capture with a crummy iPhone 4S camera (purchased by my former employer for me) but it's UV reactive tubing with UV cold cathode lights to give them the "aura."

When you zoom the pictures all the way out it's not that bad.

[Syte]

Unfortunately it looks stupid right now as EK-WB delayed my EK-FC-Titan X block and backplate despite my order being one of the first. *Sigh* oh well.

 

Didn't want to show this, but popular demand and multiple messages made me. Absolutely amazing card though, also, those quick-disconnects have paid for themselves 5-fold by now.

 

[Syte]

Finally updated the main post with completed Titan X upgrade.

Horrible picture quality brought to you courtesy of the iPhone 4S

[Syte]

And I finally got my new phone and by extension a new camera. As an update the build runs great, as both the Titan and 5820k react extremely well to water and gain a heap of performance from it.