fabafaba

Most boards won't post without graphics, and the 3600 doesn't have internal graphics. Throw the card in there and see if you get a boot.

During the Jayztwocents vs Gamers Nexus OC battle, I was confused as to why the contestants used submerged radiators rather than actual liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers. So I thought I'd get one and try it.
 

 
This is a plate heat exchanger I got as a refurbished spare for a domestic hot water heater for £10 (GBP). It's rated heat transfer is 2.5k when being used to heat water in that application, so I needed to test whether it would work well enough given the much smaller temperature delta between ice water and a PC water cooling loop. If I was patient enough to do this properly I would have tapped G1/4 threads into the ports, but couldn't get access to a pillar drill to do it and fluffed it up a little trying to do it manually. So those barbs are just super-glued into place.
 

 
With some cheap-ass chinese watercooling parts and semi-decent fittings to build my test unit with, this is the result just before I fired it up. The hot and cold loops counter-flow in opposite directions through the heat exchanger for optimum efficiency, that blue thing you can see in the background is a coolbox full of ice water - as I had that available, I also tested a Cooler Master Seidon v3 240mm AIO I had laying around to see how it compared. The AIO was deployed as-is, with all the dust cleaned out of it, the radiator submerged and finally with an additional pump (borrowed from the heat exchanger) to circulate the water around the coolbox. The CPU block attached to the heat exchanger hot loop is also a cheap chinese thing, it does have some 1mm channels cut into the cold plate running between the two ports, but it's still primitive AF.
 

 
The test bench has a delidded, LM'd, Devil's Canyon i5-4690K running at 1.35v and 4.5GHz, 1.85v Vrin. Moderate LLC settings have been applied. The test load is Prime95 v29.8b6 Small FFTs FMA3, measurements are CPU Package temperature measures from HWiNFO64. Reported CPU Package Power consumption during the tests is ~180W.
 

 
AIO - Dusty: 36C Idle, 98C Load
AIO - Clean: 35C Idle, 94C Load
AIO - Ice, static: 15C Idle, 75C Load
AIO - Ice, flow: 12C Idle, 65C Load
Heat Exchanger: 10C Idle, 57C Load
 
So yeah, worked pretty well. Concept proved (like it needed it.) Would be interested to see how it stacks up against larger radiators but I don't have any lying around I can use. Never mind.
It needs some improvements. The heat exchanger itself has some kind of residue inside it that seems to be burnt into place, I've tried to clean it out chemically to no avail and a fair amount of flakey bits broke off into both loops during these tests. The connection to the heat exchanger itself leaks in a few places and the water block was crap, but my main idea is to add some temperature sensors to the two loops, along with atmospheric temperature and humidity sensors, allowing a controller to calculate the dew point and adjust the flow rate through the cold loop to maintain the hot-side of the loop condensation-free as a safety feature, not to mention self-detecting fire-and-forget smart ice-bucket cooling that runs just above the dew point sounds like a cool idea.
 

 
Condensation built up on cold loop, the heat exchanger and the hot loop reservoir very quickly, but not so quickly on the hot loop tubing and the water block - lots of wiping it off though, had to remove the fan I placed on the RAM (blood was indeed shed to bring you these results.)
 

 
Soggy CPU socket, but it survived a few hours of HWBOT runs after these tests no problem - can't waste 6Kg of ice now, can I?
 

 
Pay no attention to the thermal paste spread, thermals were fairly even across the cores in use, the lop-sided remnants here are from where I had to man-handle the block to get the suction to release. Also please ignore the rough edges, I had to dremel the AMD bits of the bracket off to get it to fit. But do pay attention to the condensation that built up on the underside of the block.
 
So yeah, hopefully you actually get to see the images here, as opposed to when I tried to post this on Reddit and it's .jpg processing immediately broke. Suck it, /r/overclocking! Hey Alex and Linux, next crazy cooling experiment, perhaps?

I'd go for hard in the front, soft in the back. While PVC-softtubing doesn't hold up as long as acrylic hardtubing and needs to be changed more often, it's easier and cheaper to swap out. It also makes work on other parts of the cooling loop easier.

Well I'll run SLI, so... ?
With two GPUs and triple slot spacing there's just barely enough room for a 30mm radiator in the bottom. With two slot spacing and a motherboard that has a pcie slot at the absolute top I could have fit the 60mm in the bottom, but the only X470/X570 board with that slot arrangement is the MSI MEG X570 Godlike and that one was too expensive.

Alrighty, today I built the CPU loop as I'm still waiting for the second 1080Ti to arrive. Let's start of with all the hardare and what's new:

CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X (new, superceeds an i7 6850K) MoBo: AsRoch X470 Taichi (new superceeds a MSI X99A SLI Plus) RAM: 4x8GB HyperX Fury (old) GPU: 2x GTX 1080Ti (one old, one new) PSU: Corsair RM100x (new, superceeds a Seasonic M12II 850W) Drives: Samsung 970 Evo M.2, Crucial MX300, Kingston A400, 4x2TB SSeagate IronWolf (all old) The watercooling is mostly stuff I already had, except for a second pump-res-combo, a second GPU block and a monoblock for the Taichi.
And oh boy do these chips look sexy

Time for a quick test, and everything seems to work just fine:

After confirming that everything works I started by tidying up my fan wireing and mounted the components in the case.
To mount the two reservoirs in the front, I 3d printed a new frontplate that's mounted to the case with the same mounting points as the glass one, as well as some duble sided tape to take out the sag caused by the Heatkillers heavy glass tubes. I also printed some plates to cover up the radiator mount on the side and some brackets to mount up to 8 2.5" drives in the back of the case.

The CPU loop uses the top mounted 360x60mm radiator and the front reservoir and is connected by tubes with two bends each and a short straight tube, making for a clean loop. The coolant is just over 1L of EKs CryoFuel Solid in Cloud White. 


With the CPU and RAM at stock and about 30°C for the water the 3900X reached a maximum of 77°C in a CinebenchR20 run and absolutely smoked my 6850K with 6888 vs 2888 points. Once I've installed the second GPU and did some overclocking I'll post again, see you next time!
 

So here's the good pictures, little PC for the little brother, bigger PC for me . My favourite thing about the two is how close the cases match in color and the fans are identical, making kind of a theme for systems in our house.
 





 
And here's a little peak at what's about to become my server. Right now it's just a Define R5 with casters instead of the regular feet, four hard drives and a CPU cooler, but it will get my current CPU and motherboard once I upgrade them later this or early next year. It will become a NAS, a Jupyter Notebook host and maybe a game and TeamSpeak or Mattermost server.
 

Let's get to replacing the DDC pump with a D5 in my rig. Quick spoiler in the beginning: my flowrate is even worse than what it was before, I guess dual loops exist for a reason. And that will be the next big thing to do next year. On the plus side, the D5 is quieter at 4500rpm than the DDC was at 3000, and the reservoir looks a whole lot better.
 
So let's start by draining the loop, trying to remember in which order I mounted everything around the pump so as to not wreck the seals in the fittings while removing it again.

 
And.... success, the pump is out without any problems. Also, the Watercool Heatkiller Tube has to be the pinnacle of German engineering and machining, this thing wheighs a ton, is built like a tank, all tolerances are neither tot loose nor too tight and everything fits perfectly. The surface finish is a dream, the threads are cut just right, I could go on and on about it. Just look at it! The pump in there is an Alphacool VPP755 Rev. 3.

 
After doing some testfitting and planning the tubeing runs, I realized that what I had in mind would be a giant paint in the ass to bend, especially with the 24, 8 and 6 pin cables being quite close to the res. Putting the tubes in would also be nearly impossible, so I decided to keep it close to my original layout.
The stack of fittings the between the pump and the lower radiator didn't quite fit and tended to leak when it was off by just a fraction of a millimeter and was replaced by a simple offset bend tube.

 
Some more preassure testing, in the mean time I made a quick Molex Cable for the pump, having ATX-connectors and crimps is always great if you need a specific cable. After a final preassure test while I was at university, I started filling the loop and was basically done.

 
Because I have reached the 20MB max and I still have to cover water cooling my brothers PC, this post ends here.

This is less of a buildlog and more like an upgrade-log, covering upgrades to my own PC, my brothers PC and a build of a homeserver. I'm making this as one buildlog because all three systems will be related to each other with parts moving from one to another.
 
Step number the first: Planning an upgrade to my water loop.
 
The story so far, about as short as possible: Built a PC with an EK Fluid Gaming loop, upgraded to EK copper and then to even more copper. You can check it out here.
I am however not too happy with my DDC pump, as it doesn't move a whole lot of water. I have two water temperature sensors in my loop, one on the inlet of the radiator right behind the blocks and one one the outlet of the rad before the blocks, allowing me to measure the water temperature difference over the blocks/rads. While gaming on a 1080Ti and a i7 6850K I was seeing a rise in temperature of 5-6°C. At first I thought that was normal, but after hearing and reading that loop order supposedly doesn't matter, I started to wonder. If I'm looking at a 6°C delta, loop order really should matter, with a rad between the CPU and GPU allowing for a couple degree lower temps on the second component in the loop. So I reactivated my physics skills from school, fired up hwinfo64, prime95 and Furmark to load my system up and check the powerdraw of my CPU and GPU in order to calculate the flowrate. 300W GPU and 130W CPU with a 6.5°C delta.
In case you have a similar setup and would like to know your flowrate without a dedicated sensor, here's the math and science behind it:
I came to a flowrate of approximately 57.6l/h with the pump running at full oomph, the consensus online for a good flowrate seems to be 100-150l/h. Well, crap.
My first thought was to throw another DDC somewhere in the loop and started to do some work in CAD to figure out a fit. The only space I had to put it was within the footprint occupied by my current reservoir, and I came up with a quite half-assed solution. Stacking two DDC pumps, just putting them right above each other. It looked pretty interesting, but would be hard, if not impossible, to properly mount to the case, the fans or the radiators with commonly available mounting hardware.
 

 
But D5 pumps exist for a reason, so D5 it will be. Finding a D5 pump-reservoir combo that fits just perfectly without too much free room above and below that also isn't as horribly wide as the Eisbecher (80mm squared for the pump top with a 60mm tube, really not looking that nice)  was harder than I expected, but the Watecool Heatkiller Tube 150 D5 should fit just right. So, back into CAD, modelling up a new case model, with more accurate measurements this time, and voilá, looking much better. I'm digging the look of the cross-over on the in- and outlets of the pumptop with the 90° fittings.
 

 
All that's left to do now is figuring out a place for a fill port where it actually fits, I'm thinking about the back port of the top radiator, which would be the highest point in the loop when I turn the case on its front. I'm not sure however how well the air will bleed out of the reservoir. Maybe I'll dive a little into fluid dynamics simulations to see if I can find out what would happen.
 

 
For now all I can do is decide on some parts, order them and wait for them to arrive, but once they do, I'll update this buildlog. After that, there will be the watercooling of my brothers PC. Now that he left his XBox alone, it's time to get him into the expensive hobby of water cooling .

Well, I kinda ran out of space for my second 60mm radiator, so I had to mount it externally under my desk. The sode mount still has space for a 45, but since I don't already have one, i just covered the hole with the printed plates. And a quick update on the OC'ing: Holy friggin' crap! On X99 the fastest I got out of my HyperX Fury (2133 stock, the cheapest 32GB kit at the time) was 2800 at 1.2V and nothing more, not even hat higher volateges. On X470 I pushed that kit to 3200-16-18-18-35 at 1.35. My new TimeSpy score is 11190, an almost 1300 point difference. 

Quick update: I'm either too stupid to read measurements of calipers or do simple maths, or some of the dimesnions/CAD models I found online were incorrect because the Heatkiller 150 is just a few mm too tall. So I had to return it and now I'm waiting for the Heatkiller 100. I'm also kind of a cheapass, I simplified the mess of 90° fittings and will replace them with more bends to save some money and to reduce the flow restrictions by making the turns a little smoother.

Thanks! Yeah, I learned that too when I asked about an off the shelf solution for what I tried with this. When I started work on a way to run the pumps in parallel in this stacked configuration, I found out that the in- and outlets for the pumptops I had in mind were to close together and I couldn't make it work in a simple way without the parts interfering, so I scrapped that idea. I still have the model from that try, so I just made a quick render of that.

I might have been able to make this work with 12mm tubing and fittings between the pumps for a parallel multi-GPU look, but finding 90° and T-fittings that share the same dimensions and also match the EKWB nickel-finish must be a nightmare.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The most enjoyable videos are the ones that don't (seem to) follow a script, like x somethings one CPU, the stuff that went into the server room, the construction videos about Linus' carcharger or the wireing of the LAN center, etc.

The VRMs are the voltage regulation modules on the mainboard, the electrical components that step down the 12V the board gets from the power supply to around 1V for the CPU. These VRMs can only handle a certain load before they overheat or outright fail, and a 3800X will get them close to their limits

In your case it won't. If you don't want to replace your mainboard, it makes more sense to go for aircooling with a ton of airflow over the board.

What mainboard and CPU are you looking at? There's some incompability with the 3xx chipsets.

>putting a heatsink on a heatsink

 

Wow, that's looking great! I can't really tell from the angles of your renders, but you might want to check clearance for the tubing and fittings going from the CPU block to the bottom of the case. I can imagine it interfering with VRM heatsinks on some mainboards. Another thing I can't see is a god way to route the EPS cable, it looks like it'll be hard to not have it get into the fans when they're mounted on the inside.

I present to you: The Hyperloop! It sounds cool and futuristic, screams power and innovation, but in reality it's just a big money burnig party.
The first part is more like a build log, the second part is just a lot of sexy shots of my machine.
 
PC:
MSI X99A SLI Plus Intel Core i7 6850K at 4.3GHz Inno3D GTX 1080Ti X2 at 2100MHz Core/5400MHz Memory Kingston HyperX Fury 32GB quad-channel at 2666MHz Samsung 970Evo 250GB 2x Kingston A400 120GB Crucial MX300 525GB 4x Seagate Ironwolf 2TB in RAID 5 Seasonic M12II Evo 850W with DIY cables made with MDPC-X sleeving and an EKWB Vardar fan for quieter operation Lian-Li PC-O11 Dynamic Black Cooling:
Aqua Computer Aquaero 5LT EKWB EK-Supremacy Evo X99 Nickel-Plexi EKWB EK-FC GeForce GTX FE Nickel-Plexi 2x Phobya G-Changer V2 360mm XSPC Slim G2 360mm Alpahcool DDC310 Alphacool Eisbecher 150 Corsair ML120 EKWB EK-HDC 16mm Nickel Fittings Alphacool Eisrohr 16/13mm Acrylic Tubing Mayhems X1 Oil Black Coolant I initially built this PC in mid 2017, cooled with an EKWB Fluid Gaming Loop with a 360mm and a 240mm radiator. But with my 1080TI overclocked to the powerlimit and 6850K pushed to 4.4GHz @ 1.45V and a system powerdraw of 500W, it was quickly overwhelmed and ran uncomfortably loud and hot. When the pump top started to leak because I screwed a fitting in to hard and caused a crack (Whoever invented the GPU backplate is my hero), I decided that I wanted to go for a copper loop with way too many radiators for the maximum overkill-factor.
 
Aftermath of the leak, viewer discretion is advised:
This was shortly after the O11 Dynamic was released. I really liked the looks of the case, the two chamber design and the radiator capacity. So I put my aircoolers back on, fired up Fusion360, modelled the case based of pictures and measurements taken off my display with a ruler, downloaded a whole bunch of PC component models from grabCAD and started planning my loop. Because I didn't have a collection of fittings to tinker around and only wanted to order exactly what I needed, I had to get my dimensions right and actually managed to get everything close enough to actually fit.
 
Renders:
I built the loop exactly like I planned, using the black coolant as seen in one of the renders.
 
Pics of the first loop:
But there was one thing that didn't quite fit. I couldn't model the exact position and dimensions of the fan mounting holes on the side where I wanted to mount the pump-res-combo. The mounting holes were interfering with the pump top, resulting in a slightly crooked mount because I had to jam it in there. Fast forward 6 months, and I notice 5mm air in the top of the reservoir tube and some coolant on the pump top. Fortunately it was only leaking at something like a drop every few hours, so most of the coolant dried up before it could drip anywhere and there was no hardware below the pump. Turned out my reservoir tube was stressed too much and developed a lot of small cracks and a larger one whre the stress was the highest.
 
Pic:
So, back to the drawing board. I had to find a better way to mount the reservoir. I made a testfit with some fans on the inside and a slim aluminum radiator on the outside, and it was close to perfect, I could almost make it fit without any new fittings and I just needed a 8mm M-F extension as well as a new 90° rotary and two hardline fittings for a third radiator. At first I planned the connections to the side radiator with nothing but fittings, but that would have required like 80€ worth of fittings. Instead I just used the fittings I mentioned and some of my tubing I still had around.
 
Doing some testfitting:
I then decided to delay my plans for a FreeNAS or unRAID server and tried to cram my four 3.5" HDDs in the O-11s back. Fully kitted out, it can fit three 3.5" drives, two in cages and one mounted to a cable-hiding-plate. I placed my new radiator on the inside of the case, put the fans on the outside and left the lower fan out to make space for a fourth HDD, placeed in some packing foam to dampen vibrations.
In order to fit the HDD cages, I had to move my PSU from the top mounting slot to the lower one, which required new cables. A few days and a MDPC-X shipment later I rebuilt my cables from the ground up with a white-grey (XXX White, Titanium Grey and Shade-19) color scheme instead of the Carbon-BTI I had before. I also used this opportunity to rectify a mistake I made when I built my cables for the first time. Then I used solid core 15AWG wire, which turned out way to stiff for proper cable management and went with regular stranded wires.
 
Cable-Stuff:
While I already had my PC disassembled, I also put in some LED strips and also modded the terminal cover of the GPU waterblock to stick some LEDs in there too.
 
A few dissasembled and completed shots:
And now, all the sexy glamour shots in Cyberpunk 2077-hype-pink
 








As for my future plans for this system: I'm again thinking about building a NAS and putting my HDDs in there. Depending on X570 motherboard pricing, I might switch over to AMD and use my current motherboard and CPU in my old Define R5 as a NAS. I've already started working out a custom SATA backplane and some 3D printed or lasercut brackets to fit 8 or maybe even more 2.5" SSDs in the 2x 3.5" bay in the back of the O11 to run them off a RAID controller or just in a Windows storage pool with a regular SATA or SAS HBA card.