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20191202 Wall PC 1280x720.mp4

Finally I managed to take good photos of the finished build. Enjoy.

Sooooo, after a incredibly stupid amount of testing by myself, bribing a two man horde of drunk IT-friends and months of dispair incl. questioning my sanity it turned out to be a classic RTFM moment. yep Aaaaaanyway, PC runs as should, it is hanging on my wall and I finally installed and played Witcher III, game of the year 2017. (The game most appropriate for this build, which you realise when you scroll aaaaaaaall the way up and read the time stamp of the first entry of this topic) But does it keep its cool? The main question of this build though was always; will the cooling fins deliver enough cooling capacity to a system on fire? Gondor called for help, so I lit the combined beacon of Furmark and CPU Burner to see what happens. I ran both tests at the same time to simulate a heavy load which would never occure in a real world application. The GPU stayed surprisingly cool while the CPU was much hotter, but concerning the load not too much either. I wonder if anyone has an idea as to why the GPU is so much cooler. The temps rise faster at the beginning and as the pump starts to work more the curve flattens. It ramped up to 4700 RPM at the end. Unfortunately I did not record the RPM at each data point. The hotter the cooling fins get, the bigger the difference to ambient temperature (room at 21°C) and the better the cooling efficiency. Compared to an forced air cooled system, the mass of the cooling fins, pipes and about 3.5 liters of cooling liquid makes a big difference. This is why I think the system needed a full 1.5h to reach thermal max. as there was a lot of thermal mass to be "filled" first. I guess you could just hook up a water loop to a 200L rainbarrel and run your PC savely for at least 10 hours. Good idea for an episode of "bad cooling ideas", right @Linus? At around 1h 30mins it seemed to me that the CPU's temperature had reached a plateau. Within 20 minutes it only went up 1 °C. I turned the burners off to see how the system would cool down. (graph past 90 minutes) Thermal Imagery The surface temperature was monitored with a FLIR camera module for a smartphone. It is the cheapest way to get thermal imagery. Looking at the gray graph you see some irregularities, which I think are due to the "cheap" module. A curve is noticable, but there are some peaks like around 45mins, which seem out of place. To visualize I recorded the whole test in a thermal video timelapse. This shows the full 2 hours of the test. 20191010 Wall PC time lapse.MP4 You notice that some of the elements stay cold. This is because whereever there is an angle fitting, the brackets which transport the heat from the copper pipes to the cooling fins couldn't be installed. If you count the big squares as one full cooling element then there are a total of 19 elements. Of these, 4.5 are not used (marked blue), which is 23.7% of them. So there is almost a quarter of the potential wasted. But at least it looks sexy At the beginning I wanted to use solid copper blocks where the pipes would go into directly, eliminating the need for angle fittings and providing a much more direct and efficient heat transfer. But as mentioned earlier, that would have been 70kg more and something like 1000 bucks in copper alone. I am glad the cooling capacity is enough nevertheless, but it made me think how I could have activated the unused elements. The diagram only shows the copper loop, not the flex tube loop to the pump in the back. The pic below shows the two different mounting ways. I will come back with photos of the finished product. I'm still working out how to do the backlighting. Does anyone know a good LED strip system which I can hook up to the PC? I need about 5m of strip though. So all these solutions with 50cm long LED strips from PC tuners don't really do it or are too expensive.

In this thread a Vectorworks employee says the following: We don't (and likely wont) support the more advanced features in the RTX line before that card hits end of life anyway, .. https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/61654-graphics-card-gtx-1070-ti-or-rtx-2060/

So I tried my GTX 1080 in a friends PC and there it does 125fps. This means the GPU runs good. But the same card in my wall PC, with the ordinary corsair 650W PSU only delivers 4fps. This indicates a problem not related to my dual 250W Mini-PSU setup... no? Just doesn't make sense to me..

I did the whole thing DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) every time, and installed: EVGA Driver: - newest - version that worked two years ago - oldest version nVidia Driver: - newest - version that worked two years ago - oldest version FPS / WATTS In all versions the fps never went past 6 in the stresstest with the GTX 1080. I tried my friend's GTX970 again and got 22fps out of it. It drew 278 Watts. My GTX 1080 got 6 fps and drew 156 Watts. I find this very interesting. As if it is somehow throttled. For this whole setup I used a brand new never used 650W corsair PSU. So there is no way my dual Mini-PSU has anything to do with it. (they were entirely disconnected) HWmonitor received all sensor data with any driver version and the cards was never too hot. The device manager showed all versions as installed without any problems. What else can I do? GTX970 results GTX1080 results

sounds intreguing. We didn't install experience though.

So I ran into really big problems with this build. In this topic I am asking people for help: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1046103-gpu-or-psu-causes-crash-wall-pc/ I separated it from here so this stays a buildlog only.

For two years I have been building a wall PC. But now I have problems with the hardware and I am seeking your help since I seem to have tried everything and I have no solution. The buildlog of the PC is here so you know how complex it is. You really should take a look there first: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/744224-wall-pc-build-log/ What’s the problem: - The computer boots normally and works fine without the GPU driver installed. - As soon as the GPU driver (EVGA GTX1080) is installed, the computer crashes either during startup or shortly after login, no error-code or bluescreen. Just black. - PC runs stable in safe-mode (where presumably the GPU driver is not active) What I (and friends) have tried: - Replaced GPU driver with newest driver. Tried Nvidia as well as EVGA driver. - Replaced Win7 with Win10 (works until Win10 is online and updates drivers) - Updated Bios - Tried different monitor - Tried different monitor cables - Tried HDMI / DVI - Disabled on-board intel graphics - Tried RAM in a different PC to check if they are good, they are. - Tried different SSDs - Disconnected all non vital SSDs - Prime95 stress-tested CPU, all good - Tried all PCI-e Raiser cables by themselves and in combination, all good - Completely disconnected the two HD-Plex 250W PSUs and ran entire PC through a regular PSU (see pic), no change. - Borrowed a working GTX970 from Friend, setup with dual PSUs, still crashes. - Put GTX970 in PCI-e Slots directly, still crashes - GTX970 with regular PSU works (even with PCI-e Raiser cables) So the only stable configuration that works is when both the PSUs and the GPU are replaced. But all this at least eliminates the following error-sources: - Mainboard - CPU - RAM - SSD - Raiser-Cables What really haunts me, is that initially in 2017 the computer worked in the same configuration before the frame was completed. (see table test pic) I used furmark to stress the GPU and Prime95 to stress the CPU and proofed that it works under simultaneous load. At that time I didn’t have the cooling rig, so I used 3 fans on a radiator. Those fans are not used now which results in less power usage. This eliminates the following error-source: - Not enough power from the dual PSU setup. The power draw graph of the GTX1080 suggests that power could be an issue. (pic 2) (eventhough already proven that it isn’t two years ago) So I hooked up the regular power supply to the GPU alone and ran the PC through the other PSUs. - PC doesn’t crash, but GPU performs only 4fps in furmark. You likely want to point out the special setup with the two micro PSU connected through the add2psu adapter. But remember the PC still crashes when those are taken out of the equation entirely. And initially the setup worked flawlessly with those two PSUs two years ago. A test done by eteknix.com with same Mobo, CPU and a GTX980Ti (same power draw) shows 368 Watts power draw under full combined load. (pic) List of Hardware: (and which PSU it is hooked up to, see attached assembly diagram.) - PSU : 2x HDplex 250 Hi-Fi DC-ATX 250W, max. peak is 300W (www.hdplex.com) - PSU connector: add2psu (http://www.add2psu.com/) This connector does not share the power!! - Power : 2x Dell PA-9E AC-Adapter 240W (recommended by HDplex) Master PSU - Mainboard: AsRock Z170 Extreme7+ (LGA 1151, ATX) - CPU: Intel Core i7 6700K Box (LGA 1151, 4Ghz, unlocked) 100W - Storage: Intel SSD - RAM: Hyper X Fury (2x 16GB, DDR4-2133, Dimm 288) Slave PSU (201W total components, max. peak 296W) - GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FE (8GB) (178W, max. peak 273W) - Pump: EKWB - EK-DBAY D5 PWM (23W) PC assembly diagram Original test setup with dual stresstest (both GPU / CPU) successful for 4 hours: Stresstest at the time: GTX1080 power consumption When I used a regular PSU (didn't help) Mainboard diagram

thanks guys. @cluelessgenius for now it works and if I need to replace I will look into it. Thanks. @lenien77 actually two years now... it's not so much fun anymore. because right now I am dealing with lots of stupid problems -> next post

Insert locking There’s light glooming at the horizon, dear friends of the computer crafts! Both cooling rig and the hardware insert are finished. Now they need to marry. The rig has been sitting on my CNC for ever, the CNC projects are piling up. So a first test showed that the pump somehow doesn’t want to fit. The opening in the glass had to be widened. With this thin mill it worked pretty well. Once it fit, we attached two clear block which turn to hold the insert in place. The aluminium plates are always in place and prevent the insert from falling out the other direction. So to be able to work on it, we propped it up Oh and yeah, tadaaa: But will it blen.. I mean, boot?

Water test First I had to switch the pump’s in and out, since the CPU-block cares about the direction of flow, gosh, so needy. RTFM, right? Time to test whether I tightened all connections correctly everywhere. With all these fittings I have about 30 of them, and some 30 more in the cooling rig. If you do this, run the pump with a jumper adapter. In the picture it is the 24pin molex with the red cable. 5$ or so. Really handy. (just to the right of the dry coupling) This way your hardware has no power and if there is a leak, no harm will be done. It ran for about 36 hours successfully. Pic shows process of first fill. Oh and look, a folded PCI raiser cable and a big moist turd of foreshadowing. ? Used this bucket so any air in the piping can escape here. Front view with the CPU GPU piping. Definitely looks cleaner now that it is filled. Had to find out that coloured fluid apparently settles pretty fast. Here after 2 days or so. But it mixes up again within seconds. Is this normal?

Cable management Here’s my excuse for a cable management. It sure cleaned things up but there’s just too much and it’ll be hidden behind it all anyways. The only thing that bothers me a bit is that they will be visible from the front when they cross over from behind one tray to the next. (look at the renderings and you’ll know what I mean) I might try to put them all close toghether later on to create a similar appearance as the copper piping. Have you ever had access to a labeling machine ? People, don’t do it. It’s addictive. I have many random things in my appartment now that are labeled. Like « chair », « bowl », or « cat ». Keep your hands off it, or use only under supervision. Yeah, take this, 3feet-raisercable ! So ghetto,.. any ideas how to make it keep that folded? Yes it really needs to be that way around. No, there’s no performance drop with one or more raiser cables, did my research. Also, flex tubing is in. Quick and dirty. Don’t judge me. The dry couplings will allow me to take this insert out of the main cooling rig. They are by alphaUNcool. What a shitty product, couldn’t find anything else tho. The sealing came off on two of them after just a few uses. 2x30$ gone. But once you started such a project you just keep throwing money at it here and there and apathetically stop to count. Here’s the raiser cable on the other side. Took me half a day to find a good looking black one. After all this is the prominent side. Plugged into a close PCI slot, apparently they are all 16x, props to my adopted IT-Guy for clarification.

Power supply What a mess in the back. Before I clean that up, the two laptop poweradapters need to go in. After Ill see how much space I have left to do the «cable management». The quotation marks let you know that I’ll be streching that term. A while ago I discovered one can buy velcro in bulk, on a roll. Guys, and ladies, this will change you Life forever. It ties just about anything and is really easily detached and attached and detached and attached and detached and attached and detached and attached and detachted.…reusable you might say. In the end there will be a cable bundle exiting below of the PC. But I want as few as possible. I guess I’ll even overcome my disgust for wireless periphery. Two power cables are too much, and the cord from the power adapter is too long too. Power adapter cable, soldered and double shrink tubed. What's the thin green one for? I made the classic power cords into a Y, one end for the wall plug and two ends for the two poweradapters. I am not putting the pictures of that modification here, they are NSFW.

I will add it to the list Thanks Mr. Steal.

GPU tray So the GPU was one of the hardest to install. There is only one hole I can use to fasten a screw. I made use of the cooling blocks spacers. The weight of the card sits on that, rubber strips prevent it from sliding around, and one screw at the top secures it from falling out. Life on the edge ! The one screw to rule them all & make shift console. It is a U-shaped aluminium profile with notches for the cooling block spacers. All the hardware sits in what I call trays. Because they all have a frame to create a boxed look. I attached the profiles with these sticky things, each is rated with 2 kg, so no worries. And here the GPU was in the tray the first time. Looks good. Next was the pump. It was hard to fix it to the frame without a normal case. So I banged together these brackets from spare aluminium profiles. I screamed so many times trying to fit those cables in. Ahhh. This is the middle tray with the MOBO and the two PSUs. Progress… needed a solution to have access to both front and back at the same time. So often I had to fish cables through holes.. at first I put it on some accoustic padding. No good. make shift scrap wood stand Finally the insert with the three trays starts to look like something.

Insert glass and trays The glass is the detachable part with three hardware trays mounted on it. This is after they were black anodized. Retro radio in the back! Second picture shows the GPU tray, fitting of PCI raiser. (later made black with a permanent marker) and a very thin HDMI Cable. It’s like 7mm wide and about 0.25mm thick. Crazy. And since it's on a small piece of PCB board, it is almost invisible from the front. Really flat. Started to do put in some wires, see whether it would fit all of them. And oh surprise I had to add a hole somewhere. Here I tried the SSDs, aaaalmost didn’t fit. I definitely will never take them out.

Cooling fins Yay cooling fins are back from black anodizing. It is a electrochemical process where the part is submerged in a tank. Electrical current is then put through the part which causes the desired effect. simplified. Where they were held the treatment had no effect, so I used a permanent marker to hide that. So everything was going very well, when suddenly I realised that the copper pipes are just a bit above the sytrofoam blocks and metal sheets. To acheive the boxed and flat look, it was important that each cooling fin panel was absolutely straight relatively to the glass. Since there is a glass panel behind it, and the styrofoam is always the same thickness, this would go very smoothly. But now with this pipe too high.. damn. You almost can’t see it in the picture, and I don’t know why this didn’t happen in my tests. A good but labour intensive solution was to mill out a concave groove on the back side. bye bye anodization. But you won't notice it from the front. I tried it with one part and it worked. Then, and we are a few days later now as this took some time, all the fins were to go in. I was using hard wood laths as spacers. It was hard to feed the screws in from below the glass, and lower the fins exactly so they would match the holes in the block. Otherwise I would've gotten thermal paste into the thread. Here you can also see the frame for the first time. Each side has a small groove where the glass fits in tightly. The corners are held together with screws, it can't fall away. The frame just magically appeard out of nowhere, that's why there are no photos of its creation. doubt.jeg Another leak test? Another leak test! Fittings to the soft tubing were temporary. Needed new holes I didn’t think of before. The glass is fractured around the cut because I had to do it with a power drill. CNC cuts are much better. After the leak test, those flexible tubes were all milky.. does anyone know why? I used some chemically filtered water.. really pure. Maybe it attacked the tubes… I later bought some made-for-this-application-water.

So guys it seems I mixed up some photos and the resurrection post showed stuff way ahead. Just found some more pix on an old phone. So here are the prequel-posts to the resurrection. After all, who wants a story told straight forward, right? Cooling rig I put the rig together before, but that was only a try to see whether it all fit. I did that, because after that, the parts had to go together with thermal transfer paste. And one does not simply take that apart so easily, Boromir. Also I made costum spacers for the corner elements, because there I can’t use the styrofoam base. Downside is, there is no cooling. Then the parts had to be cleaned and marked. I have access to an industrial cleaner solution. Fingerprints speed up patina and look bad, that's why the gloves. Towel on a string to clean inside. The pump wouldn’t like those burrs. At the beginning I planned solid copper block for each cooling element. But as mentioned before, it’s too expensive and heavy. The downside of this stock part from hydronic floor heating is that it doesn’t exactly fit standard copper pipes. So I made these copper parts that help bridge the gap, since I though that filling it all with paste would not be good. May cause dripping. Eww. The pipes were clean and I needed to find out if the circulation would not leak. So I set up the pump with the HD-Plex PSU and the jumper to make it run. Had that running for a day, only one fitting was leaking. With the blocks and the circulation in place, it was time to put them toghether, all the while be careful not to deform the circulation too much. I did another leak test afterwards.

"But OP", you say, "hasn't it been over a year since your last post? Isn't your hardware old and suffering from dementia?" Well, I am glad you asked Forum. Only a few pros in this forum have reached the enlightenment that the performance of a PC is actually determined by its looks, not its specs. Therefore I am quite confident my computer, even though older, will always outperform your state-of-the-art-2080x-hyper-ultra-3000-blinky-tera-peta-exa-in-a-80$-stockcase-build. Linus, our lord and saviour, even made a video about it, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ Now that that's settled, here's what happened next: Piping Originally, when you look at my first renders, I intended to have two massive copper blocks on both CPU and GPU. But the connection between the stock cooling block and those was very tricky. So I opted for rigid plexi piping. I got one of those bending kits and a hot air blower with a silicone tube for inside to prevent kinking. Below shows the ultrasonic bath to clean the pipes afterwards. This is an industry grade machine. But you can get them starting from 30$ to clean glasses. And really, it comes in handy anytime you want to clean something. Right at the first second there forms a dirt-cloud around the part. Crazy effective. EDIT: You trying to convince your SO that you need this?: This thing cleans jewelery and makes them all new and shiney. I don't have any involvement with the ultra-sonic industry, but siriously, if you have a ring with a nice stone in it, it will look like day one again. The effect is astonishing. The lower pipe has two 90° turns close together but in different directions. That was really hard to do as novice to pipe bending, as you want to soften one turn, but not mess up the neighbouring one in the process. There are some small bending tears on the pipe by the CPU IN-Port outer radius. I probably will use white cooling fluid to hide that. Other than that I am quite happy with it. Also I started to have sense of just wanting to finish this already and I have become less picky. somewhat. Man the last 5% of a project are always the hardest.

someone else said RGB too, I find it to be a bit flashy. Not my taste. But maybe I should do it anyways for some pix and just have it on white later. The portability is done through the detachable hardware part, called the insert. Look at the post from February 26. There you see a backplate in the backplate. This one has the whole hardware attached. The tubing will be disconnected with drycouplings. The "insert" then goes into a housing where the fan array is attached. Reconnect the tubing and fans and go.

With the glass finished I made a first try to mount the aluminium fins to the glass. First I layed out the fins.. copper tubing.. snapping the gap filler plates into the heat dispersion blocks. (to much space between tubing and heat dispersion blocks for heat paste) proping up the glass with the whole construction. It seems sturdy enough, not all that heavy. I'm glad. I calculated the weight before, but it's great when it works out as planned. Frontal view of the section with the biggest fin plates. you can see how they are not alligned. Eventhough the tolerance is minimal, it was really hard and I gave up quickly. I think I will use spacers, or buy a cheap plywood and cnc wholes for the fin plates, put it over to align and then fasten the screws. That should work. next step are the water blocks for the GPU and CPU, or the connection between the two. Also a graficscard mount.. hmm.. After these parts are done I can send all the aluminium off for black anodisation.

I like the name "Wallther". But more names are welcome. Alu fins Finally the holes and the screw thred for mounting the alu fins to the glass panel were made. The pockets you see are for the fittings which are a bit too thick and would not fit otherwise. Cut viewer Next up is the cutting of the glass panel. To make sure it will cut the way I want it the program Cut Viewer simulates the cut. CNC Controll The program Mach3 controlls the movement of the cnc according to the g-code from the cam program. Forgot to make a pic of that one. May add it later. You see x y and z coordinates and on the right of it the paths its running. Cutting finished product elapsed time

btw, I am still looking for an adequate project name for this pc. Any suggestions welcome.

Vectorworks for the modeling Cinema4D for rendering