Build Log: The Grid

[Flynn]

"THE GRID"

"The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... I got in."

~ Kevin Flynn c. 1989

Preview of the heat shield I designed for the HD7970

The Build

Case: Fractal Design Define R4

CPU: Intel i7-3770k 3.5GHz (OC 4.8GHz)

Mobo: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H

RAM: 32Gb (4x8Gb) G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series DDR3 1600 (CL9)

GPU: XFX Double D HD7970

PSU: Corsair HX Series 750W Modular

OS Drive: Crucial M4 256Gb SSD

Data Drive: WD Black 1Tb HHD

Media Drives: 2x WD Red 2tb (Striped)

OS: Win8 Pro

Current Cooling

Intake Fans

2x Cougar Dual-X Hydraulic 140mm 1k rpm 146cfm 18dBA

1x Cougar Dual-X Hydraulic 120mm 1.2k rpm 64cfm 17dBa

Exhaust Fans

2x Stock Corsair H110 Rad Fans 94cfm total

1x Cougar Dual-x Hydraulic 140mm 1k rpm 73cfm 18dBa

CPU

Corsair H110 AIO WC

Current Mods

Sleeving

"Jedi" coloured 550 Paracord from ParacordPlanet for sleeving. I actually use this exact chord for my survival bracelets and misc use while camping. This is the real 7 strand paracord. I gut the strands, boil the paracord for about 30 seconds and toss it in the dryer to preshrink it to get that nice tight fit around the cabling. Most chord has white strands with a single dual twisted white/coloured strand, just so happens this chord has a white/blue strand in it, so I kept that to do the stitching to hold the cables together. Since I have several hundred feet of this paracord, and it matches the theme well (all black chord with a blue strand sparingly woven in), I figured there was no use trying to find "cable sleeves" when I have something that is perfect right here at home. Since my PSU was simi-modular (24pin main and 8pin 12v EPS are hardwired while all other connections are modular), I used 8in extensions for the Main and EPS so I wouldn't have to mess with sleeving down and inside the PSU, then fully sleeved the modular cables (except SATA connections since you can't see them anywhere other than the connection to the PSU anyway, but they are all black). I think the total when all was said and done came out to about 50ft of chord.

The highlight chords are from FrozenCPU, and are simply blue UV reactive chords. I didn't want a huge difference or highlight, so I used a single on each the Main, EPS, and GPU connections. This came out to about 8ft total.

All the fan chords are so easily hidden I didn't see any reason in sleeving them, they all have the stock black weave sleeves on them, I did however sleeve the connection to the rear rocker switch to turn the Cold Cathodes on and off. It started out as red/yellow wiring, so I actually took a couple feet of black wires off an old power supply and rewired them black with the Jedi paracord sleeved to get rid of those bright colours. All sleeving is terminated using the heat shrinkless method.

Lighting

I'm using 2 Logisys UV Cold Cathodes. I decided to go with the Cold Cathodes over LEDs simply because I wanted an even glow, plus I like the UV effects on sleeves and image on the side of the GPU. All the Cougar Fans have blue LEDs that help to provide some extra glow to the case that helps it look pretty nice.

Paint Jobs

PCI Slot Covers and Drive Sleds, I painted these with a non-UV paint, dark blue. The Define R4 black cases ship with white Drive Sleds, Fans, and Slot Covers. They look nice on thier own in my opinion, but after putting in lighting and sleeves, it just doesn't look right. While the movie makes great use of bright lights, I'm kind of imagining this as a night time scene, so the white is just too much contrast for my tastes. So I painted the PCI Slot Covers and Drive Sleds dark blue so as to keep them from standing out, but still be more than just back. I was going to use UV reactive paint, but decided I want to put the focus on the components as being part of the city, and the down play the case, which is why I went with the nice clean Define R4 over any other case. So they add a bit of colour when looking directly at them in the blue light, but almost understanded and unnoticable when not looking directly at them, so they don't take any attention away from what really makes the computer run, the components. Now, one thing about the Drive Sleds and Slot Covers is that they are powder coated. The proper way to do this would have been to get them repowder coated, but I honestly don't want to spend the money. Painting them doesn't make a difference on the Slot Covers, but the added mass surrounding the Drive Sleds (however minimal) is enough to make sliding the sleds in and out of the drive cage a pain in the ass, a couple of them are even sticking and wont come out without pushing them from the back. I suppose this is a trade I'm ok with considering it's not like I actually slide the drives in and out a lot, they go in fine, it's just coming out that can be a challenge.

I'm actually thinking about using a UV pen on a couple parts of the mobo just to give it that glow and feeling of highrises in Tron: Legacy. Think of the Capacitors as highrises, the edges of the heatsinks like tips of mountains, powercables like power lines, and SATA connectors like highways; all light up and glowing. I want to make the mobo kind of look like a technologically advanced city, just not sure how I'm going to impliment it yet. I'm taking an older black/blue mobo and tossing it in the case under the lights when the sleeved cables attached and am going to play with colouring it first to see what I like, and when I buy the UD5H next month and connect it in the case, I'll then decide if it even needs any glowing highlights or not.

I have a buddy that owns printing company and does vinyl wraps on vehicles. He was willing to take a design I did and apply it to the side plate of my HD7970. Nice thing is that since it was so small he did it for free and it's designed to handle weather and heat, so it shouldn't ever come off. So that "badge" I have on the graphics card came from that.

Resources I used

Supplies

http://www.newegg.com

http://us.ncix.com

http://www.frozencpu.com

http://www.paracordplanet.com

Tutorials and Information

Great Tutorials and information on overclocking: http://www.overclock.net

Heat-shrinkless cable sleeving: http://www.youtube.com/user/lutro0

Cable Sewing: http://www.youtube.com/user/FrankNSteinPC

Special Thanks to Suremark Signs for the GPU vinyl cover: http://www.suremarksigns.com

[Flynn]

FUTURE PLANS
Fully custom WC loop
Move the 2 WD Red's to a NAS and add another 6Tb to get me a 6Tb Raid5 NAS for all my media to stream to all the XBMCBuntu boxes in the house.
Add another 1Tb WD Black drive to mirror the current data drive.
Remove the top drive cage to make room for the pump for the Custom WC Loop, Cant wait for that T-Virus!!!!!
I have to decide if I'll still use the Define R4 for the full Loop, there might not be much room for what I want to do, so I may have to get the Define XL and then make a custom side window, which might be cooler anyway because then I can have more of the inside visible. With all the HDD room in the R4 I can use it as my network box and toss the current H110 into it and just have it be in my office looking nice.

Getting Started
Started the log today. This is actually something I've been working on for some time now. I've been planning parts and designing a home networking solution for the last year, just so happens that the last month has been a good month for me to get both time and the budget to work on a personal rig...finally.

I already have the PCI Slot Covers and Drive Sleds painted. I accidentally left the GPU side plate at home, but I have the design sent to my buddy and am running home to give him the plate so I can get the vinyl wrap completed. I'll post the image when I get home. I'm waiting on new pin extracting tools to get here from FrozenCPU since the tool I was using was crap and broke when I was trying to remove a particularly difficult pin from the female side of the EPS connector, stupid thing just snapped and nothing I have tried has gotten that pin out yet. The sleeving is going ok, something I noticed is that after I remove both sides of the pins and take the wire out of the connector, the easiest way to get the sleeve on is to bend down the tabs on the male side of the pin and slide it down, then use a dull knife to gently separate the tabs back out again. I'm loving the shrinkless method of doing these sleeves. 550 paracord is essentially 1/8in, and I'm using 1/4in shrink to melt the chord down which has been mostly working, although I'm starting to wonder if I should have gone ahead and used 1/8 shrink to melt down the wire, although I'm sure it wouldn't have come off nearly as easily.

The UV Cold Cathodes make the window on the Define R4 glow an even blue across the entire display, and evenly lights the case, so that's pretty good, the only thing I have to decide on now is decide if I want to sleeve the cable off the lights or just hide them, considering they are white. The stock switch has a short cord and doesn't reach all the way through the case the way I'm routing the cables behind the mobo, so I had to strip a couple black wires off an old PSU and rewire the switch to make it longer, then opted to get a switch from FrozenCPU and install it because it just looked so much cooler and then sleeved that cable as well.

I'll snap some pictures when the new tools get in of the sleeving project, and I'll also post the production mockup of the side plate posted, along with a picture of the plate itself as soon as the vinyl is done. One thing I did notice is that one of the feet on my R4 has the rubber missing, I just got the thing 2 weeks ago, but I went ahead and ordered some new feet from FrozenCPU because I didn't feel like messing with an RMA.

One thing I will give the boys over at Fractal Design is that when I got the case, one of the fans was rattling, I emailed them a copy of my receipt and they just sent me a new fan, took 2 days to get here and they didn't even ask for the old fan back. Pretty awesome customer service imo. I'm VERY happy with this case and Fractal Design's customer service.

Update - 20130321 - Sleeving, Soldering, and a few cuts to boot

Update - 20130324 - The plan for the WC Loop

Update - 20130414 - Cable Sewing and Organisation.

Update - 20130425 - Custom Vinyl Cover for the GPU

[Whaler_99]

Looking forward to the pics and nice point to add links to resources for others!

[Flynn]

Yeah, for some reason though when I went in to edit the post because the spacing was off, the links broke, then when I edited the links, the header got funky, edited to fix the header and the quote broke, fixed the quote and the links are messed up again lol

[Beausiph]

I love the theme for this build! Looking forward to seeing it. Subbed

[Flynn]

So here we go, sleeving. I went ahead and made a diagram that I kept with me for reference. Never be too proud to follow directions, saves a lot of time later lol, even if you write those directions for yourself just to keep it fresh. Like we say in the Army, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Tools of the trade:

Double check pins and diagram where they go

ATX Pin removal tool

Needle Nose Pliers

Wire Strippers

SHARP scissors

Electric Solder (I used 35W) with mats

Sleeve (I used Jedi black/blue 7 strand 550 paracord from paracordplanet.com)

Heatshrink (I used 1/4, most use 1/8, but I find 1/4 easier to remove after you melt down the chord)

Lighter

Lots and lost of Patience! (and maybe some caffeine and definitely good music)

Here you get a quick peak at what I'm working with and trying to achieve.

Most of the straight through wires are pretty simple. The process is simply to use your Pin Removal Tool to pinch the sides of the pin, then firmly pull the wire to extract the pin from the fitting. After that, if you refer to my first post, I used the shrinkless method of sleeving the cables. Basically, I bent down the retainer pins to make sleeving easier, then after the sleeve was on the wire, straitened the pins back out, positioned the sleeve, slightly melted the end of 1/4 inch heatshrink (leaving the end away from the pin unmelted so I can grab it with my pliers), then use the pliers to remove the heatshrink. Personally, since I made my diagram, I like to remove all the wires at once, straighten them out, sleeve them, then insert all the pins back in at once. However, there is one tricky pin, and that's where two of the ground wires reside on a single pin on the PSU side and go into two separate fittings on the PCI-E slot to the GPU.

The way this is typically done is ineffecent, and a royal pain in the butt when it comes to sleeving these cables as there is no way to sleeve the wire without heatschrink, and good luck getting it to fit back into the housing when you are done. So I cut one of the wires off the crimp and got started with making this a bit cleaner and easier to deal with.

At this point I strip about an inch long section of the wire still attached to the pins at both ends right around the middle of the wire (just make sure you get it at a point that will be behind the mobo), and then cut the other wire down to match the remaining length of the opposite pin.

Split the full wire so that you can thread the half wire through the middle of it, then twist the wires together.

Solder the wires together to make sure they stay put (excuse the sloppiness since it's being covered I'm not too worried about making it pretty).

Now sleeve the 3 cables from each end, event though we are doing shrinkless on the pins, here we will leave the heatshrink to keep everything place.

And there we go, the finished product. Even though the sleeving is done, I'm still going to stitch the wire with black (maybe blue, haven't decided yet, gotta look at it under UV to see what I like). Since the GPU has 1 8-pin and 1 6-pin, I'm going to stitch both cables together and run them at once. But that's a separate update.

[Flynn]

And don't let me forget to mention my badges of work completion.

Tell my mom I was wounded in a glorious battle.

[Flynn]

I think I have settled on what I'm doing with the water loop. I'm going to use a dual rad with a single up front. Since I want to maintain a clean case, I want positive pressure, and having two fans push air through a rad on the exhaust should help with that. This way I can also make sure all air entering the case is coming in through filtered ports. I'm going to get the 160 mm T-Virus Reservoir, which is about 90 bucks, the most expensive part of the water cooled phase is going to be the fittings and the two radiators, tallying up to a wopping 260 out of of the 550 bucks I'll be spending on the entire loop. The cheapest I've seemed to find for everything is on FrozenCPU, but I'm open to suggestions. Anyway, here is a basic diagram of what I'm going to do:

[Flynn]

I've been enjoying my new car so much lately I haven't done anything with the build, so I figured I'd show off what I did with the sleeving to keep everything neat and tidy. On to the stitching... Really all you need is the cables, a sewing needle, and whatever you want to use for stitching. In this case, I actually used the coloured strand from inside my parachord. Since it's 7 strand, I have more than enough to play with lol.

To start with, it's easiest to connect your cables so you can have an easy to manipulate the cables and everything.

The stitching is pretty simple, here is a couple shots as I go, if you really want to learn how to do this, I'd recommend Googling "cable sewing frank" (I want to keep him high on the rankings in google so people find him lol).

So now all I need to do is secure the knot to ensure it never comes undone, a littel $5 Gorilla Glue will do the trick ;)

The mobo I have has the connection going up and down rather than side to side. So instead of doing the cables the same way, I overlapped them to get a flatter thread through the back where the cables will be hidden away.

I didn't want them to be clear the way they are now, so I just did a quick paint job on the head because I didn't think about that until after I sewed everything, and rather than starting over so I could hook up a black connector, I decided to toss a spray of paint.

It looks really shiny, but under the lights of the case it's not. And here is the finished product:

Now I just have to decide what to do with the non-modular part of the power supply. right now there is WAY too much colour there. I might just do a couple inches long black sleeve around it to kind of hide it. I mean really, it's just about reggae style....

[unitus77]

Nice lightning cables look great. Not sure what to do about reggae style lol.

[Flynn]

FUTURE PLANS

Fully custom WC loop

Move the 2 WD Red's to a NAS and add another 6Tb to get me a 6Tb Raid5 NAS for all my media to stream to all the XBMCBuntu boxes in the house.

Add another 1Tb WD Black drive to mirror the current data drive.

Remove the top drive cage to make room for the pump for the Custom WC Loop, Cant wait for that T-Virus!!!!!

I have to decide if I'll still use the Define R4 for the full Loop, there might not be much room for what I want to do, so I may have to get the Define XL and then make a custom side window, which might be cooler anyway because then I can have more of the inside visible. With all the HDD room in the R4 I can use it as my network box and toss the current H110 into it and just have it be in my office looking nice.

Getting Started

Started the log today. This is actually something I've been working on for some time now. I've been planning parts and designing a home networking solution for the last year, just so happens that the last month has been a good month for me to get both time and the budget to work on a personal rig...finally.

I already have the PCI Slot Covers and Drive Sleds painted. I accidentally left the GPU side plate at home, but I have the design sent to my buddy and am running home to give him the plate so I can get the vinyl wrap completed. I'll post the image when I get home. I'm waiting on new pin extracting tools to get here from FrozenCPU since the tool I was using was crap and broke when I was trying to remove a particularly difficult pin from the female side of the EPS connector, stupid thing just snapped and nothing I have tried has gotten that pin out yet. The sleeving is going ok, something I noticed is that after I remove both sides of the pins and take the wire out of the connector, the easiest way to get the sleeve on is to bend down the tabs on the male side of the pin and slide it down, then use a dull knife to gently separate the tabs back out again. I'm loving the shrinkless method of doing these sleeves. 550 paracord is essentially 1/8in, and I'm using 1/4in shrink to melt the chord down which has been mostly working, although I'm starting to wonder if I should have gone ahead and used 1/8 shrink to melt down the wire, although I'm sure it wouldn't have come off nearly as easily.

The UV Cold Cathodes make the window on the Define R4 glow an even blue across the entire display, and evenly lights the case, so that's pretty good, the only thing I have to decide on now is decide if I want to sleeve the cable off the lights or just hide them, considering they are white. The stock switch has a short cord and doesn't reach all the way through the case the way I'm routing the cables behind the mobo, so I had to strip a couple black wires off an old PSU and rewire the switch to make it longer, then opted to get a switch from FrozenCPU and install it because it just looked so much cooler and then sleeved that cable as well.

I'll snap some pictures when the new tools get in of the sleeving project, and I'll also post the production mockup of the side plate posted, along with a picture of the plate itself as soon as the vinyl is done. One thing I did notice is that one of the feet on my R4 has the rubber missing, I just got the thing 2 weeks ago, but I went ahead and ordered some new feet from FrozenCPU because I didn't feel like messing with an RMA.

One thing I will give the boys over at Fractal Design is that when I got the case, one of the fans was rattling, I emailed them a copy of my receipt and they just sent me a new fan, took 2 days to get here and they didn't even ask for the old fan back. Pretty awesome customer service imo. I'm VERY happy with this case and Fractal Design's customer service.

Update - 20130321 - Sleeving, Soldering, and a few cuts to boot

Update - 20130324 - The plan for the WC Loop

Apparently i can't go back and edit this post. So I'll post update links in the comments.

Update - 20130414 - Cable Sewing and Organisation.

http://linustechtips.com/main/forum/the-workbench/build-logs/129629-build-log-the-grid?p=168994#post168994

[TicTac]

Looking awesome dude LOVE what you have done with the cables looks stunning!

[Flynn]

So my buddy just got done with the vinyl print on the graphics card side, now I have to drop the cat from my RX8 and figured I'd do an oil change while I'm at it, but as soon as I'm done I'm picking it up, I'm hoping this is going to look awesome.

[xXZeal123Xx]

Lookin good love the cables xD

[Nit3Rid3R]

Looks very interesting. Followed! 

[Anonymous]

Cool build. Very unique.

[TicTac]

Cool build. Very unique.

Nice name :P

[That Norwegian Guy]

I want positive pressure

 

I'm sorry, but you can't just add up raw spec data to find the total CFM. In your case there are varying layers of mesh, honeycomb and filters and the (lack of)  air pressure of each fan will decide your total CFM when you actually have to push through several layers like this. You probably still have positive air flow on account of the rad, but I'm just warning you not to think like this, intake fans are always more limited than outtakes are.

[Flynn]

I fully understand that, it's just an illustration, I was an engineer in the Navy at one point, I built gas turbine engines.  That was pretty much for illustration purposes, I actually did calculate fully all blockages, pressure, etc.  I will still have a positively pressured case.

[Rommer2258]

Really nice job, i really like the custom cables. 

[Flynn]

Here it is, the custom shield I designed for the graphics card.

 

 

Special Thanks to Suremark Signs for the GPU vinyl cover: http://www.suremarksigns.com

[TicTac]

Here it is, the custom shield I designed for the graphics card.

 

 

Special Thanks to Suremark Signs for the GPU vinyl cover: http://www.suremarksigns.com

that looks soooooooo good

[Flynn]

Thanks, I'm really happy with how it turned out.  It was a bit darker than I expected, but once I put it under the lights in the case I think it turned out amazing. Now I just have to find the other screw lol, the one on the right is missing, I have no idea what happened to it.

[Nicktrance]

Here it is, the custom shield I designed for the graphics card.

 

 

Special Thanks to Suremark Signs for the GPU vinyl cover: http://www.suremarksigns.com

 

Looks awesome, now it just needs a backplate xD.

[Flynn]

Looks awesome, now it just needs a backplate xD.

 

You know, I thought about it, but going back to the theme of Tron and the technological city, I want all the circuits and raw components, with the showing of the hardware rather than just making it pretty.  I want to make function part of the form, so I don't want to hide TOO much, but still make what is not hidden organised, the idea is to show off the hardware.  I love the idea of all the parts forming the city with the pathways as highways with programs and information speeding along all over the city.  What would be really cool is if I could figure out a way to make any component with electricity going through it glow white lol.