[FINISHED] Project Dragon Khan - K'nex Rollercoaster PC build

[tomaatvk]

Hey everyone. I've already been running a K'nex PC case for a little while now but it doesn't feel special anymore to me. Because of this I decided it is time to take it a little bit further by completely overhauling the case itself and throwing an actual, functioning K'nex rollercoaster into the mix. Yes, you read that correctly, a rollercoaster. When I was little (when I was 10 and I'm 18 now) I built a K'nex rollercoaster almost every month (including some 2-5 meter high ones) so I have plenty experience building them. Now it's finally time to combine my current passion of PCs with my old passion of K'nex rollercoaters. Project Dragon Khan is born. The reason I named it Dragon Khan is because that is the first rollercoaster I can remember and my PC will have a red, blue and white (+a lot of black and gray) theme just like the real life version.

 

Let me start off with the original specs.

The specs are:

- CPU: i7 3770k (delidded and running at 4,8GHz)

- Mobo: Asrock Z77 Extreme 4

- GPU: GTX 780 (reference card from Gainward)

- RAM: 2*8GB Crucial 1600MHz value DDR3

- PSU: Corsair RM750i

- HDD: 1TB WD Black

- Sata SSD: 120GB Samsung 840 Evo

- PCI-e SSD: 480GB Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe

- Optical drive: Samsung SH-224BB

- Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster Z (OEM version)

- CPU cooler: DeepCool Gamer Storm Lucifer

 

I do plan to do some upgrades because I am redesigning my case.

The specs I have planned are:

- CPU: i7 5820k ready

- Mobo: Asus X99-Deluxe/U3.1 MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon ready

- GPU: Palit GTX 1070 Super Jetstream ready

- RAM: 4*8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport @2400MHz CL 16 ready

- PSU: Corsair RM750i ready

- HDD: 1TB WD Black ready

- Sata SSD: 120GB Samsung 840 Evo ready

- PCI-e SSD: 480GB Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe ready

- Optical drive: Samsung SH-224BB ready

- Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster Z (OEM version) ready

- CPU cooler: Cryorig R1 Ultimate ready

 

As for the case disign, I have yet to begin building it but I just finished my quick sketch in photoshop.

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In the sketch the random black bars are outlines of the K'nex stuctures, the gray part behind the mobo is the steel motherboard plate (salvaged from a 2003 computer case) and the rollercoaster part has yet to be designed. I will do that when I finished the rest of the case as I need to see what spaces I can work with exactly.

 

I will also be doing some mods to parts here and there.
This is what I am planning on doing:

- Go to town on the motherboard tray with my Dremel cutting off all the excess metal and smoothing out some of the scratches it has.

- Instead of connecting the CPU fans directly to the motherboard I will throw my custom made 100%/50%/0% fan switch inbetween there with the switch being mounted on the steel motherboard tray. This will enable me to run the fans at even lower speeds or even run it passive (my 3770k can already run passive after being 'downclocked' to 4GHz).

- I will create a custom BIOS for the GPU so it can run even higher than normal overclocks but it will also get a fanless mode. If this isn't possible on the 1070 cards I will get a used 980 ti instead and mod the hell out of it.

- I am going to mod the K'nex motor for the rollercoaster so it won't run on 2 AA batteries but on the 5V lane from the PSU. I have tested it and although 2 AA batteries only give off ~3V, it can handle 5V just fine. I will also add a power switch to the K'nex motor so the rollercoaster can be turned off.

 

I do not yet plan on painting parts or the motherboard tray but I am concidering it.

 

Here is a quick picture I took of my old K'nex PC (no rollercoaster though):

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Thank you for your time spent reading and sorry if my pictures won't be up to standard but I will try my best. I will probably start cutting the motherboard plate today and maybe start construction on the K'nex part of the case afterwards or I will save that untill tomorrow.

 

Update #1 Part pictures and small delay

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It hasn't even been a day and this project is already not going exactly as planned. I was taking my old machine apart (to work on the motherboard tray I need to take it out of my current machine ofcourse) but it took quite a bit longer than expected. Because of this there will be no cutting and polishing today as it is already later on the day and I prefer not to make a lot of noise at these time. I did manage to get some nice pictures of the parts that I already have and will make it to the final version of this project: the storage, sound card and the PSU (I also have the optical drive already but it's just an optical drive), I will add the pictures in the spoiler to not make it too image heavy.

 

480GB Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe

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120GB Samsung 840 Evo

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1TB WD Black

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Corsair RM750i

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Creative Sound Blaster Z (OEM version)

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Because I wasn't able to start working on the motherboard tray today I will start the base of the case construction later on tonight and do the motherboard tray tomorrow.

 

Update #2 Case framework

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Today I've been working on the framework of the actual PC case part all evening (4-5 hours in total for the framework). The framework I'm talking about is the frame that the motherboard tray is going to rest upon. The frame will also house all the components that aren't directly on the motherboard like the PSU, the SATA storage devices and even my sound card through a PCI-e 1x ribbon cable. After the actual PC part of this build is complete (or complete enough) the frame will also offer sufficient mounting points for the rollercoaster to be attached to the PC.

 

Upon building this framework I ran into 3 issues:

Eventhough there is sufficient space above the PSU for the HDD and SSD to fit according to the original plan, it was going to lose a lot of its stability causing it to wobble like crazy. To solve this I decided to stick both the SSD and the HDD in the little space there is above the optical drive and still below the motherboard tray. It didn't fit at first because I didn't have enough space to propperly secure their position, but in the end I managed to get it working through some experimenting. I was even able to add some isolation foam tubes cut in half to lower the ammount of noise created by the HDD.

After putting some pressure on the 'finished' structure I noticed that it was bending a little if you put a lot of pressure from the rear top to the bottom front and this is exactly how the motherboard tray would exert its pressure. I managed to solve this by adding some longer feet on the front.

While building this I managed to run out of certain kinds of K'nex parts. I didn't feel comfortable going into the low numbers before even starting on the rollercoaster mod. The only way to solve this was to throw in a lot of longer red rods instead of more than double the blue, medium length ones. Red may not seem to fit the coloursceme ATM, but once I add the LEDs it will fit with the build and if I were to put the motherboard tray on, it would cover almost all of them. I'm still low on some parts but I have a backup box filled with the K'nex parts that I'm slowly running out of already.

I will include the pictures I took of the current state of the build in the spoiler. They will include the framework with the SATA devices, the PSU and the sound card already mounted in there.

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Tomorrow I'm going to have my way with the motherboard tray if I get the time (I probably will but I'm not 100% sure).

 

Update #3 Starting the metalwork and temporary assembly

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When I finally had the time at the end of the morning I started by just looking at the motherboard tray I was planning to cut and sand. I knew my first step was to rip out all the LEDs and switches hotsnotted/clamped on there. This went without a problem like you would expect. After that I started to think what exactly I wanted to do with the plate.

 

At first I was thinking of cutting off all the excess pieces of metal (like the metal around the expansion slot backets and IO shield backet) and polishing the whole thing. However, after thinking a bit longer (because it is always a good idea to think twice before you make irreversible changes) I realised that having those excess pieces of metal on there could possibly prove to be usefull in future projects and they aren't really in the way of something. I also realised that polishing that whole think ment sanding and working on a really big surface and by doing so I would go through my Dremel bits quite quickly but I still wanted to get rid of the few scratches in the metal caused by previous drilling.

Eventually I decided to just sand and polish the part of the tray where those scratches were untill I would hit a place where I could stop. This caused me to have a nice and shiny strip of metal where the switches/LEDs are going to go. Maybe I will do another polishing run once the rest of all this is done. For before/after pictures of the motherboard tray, see the spoiler below.

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Before:

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After:

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After finishing my work on the motherboard tray I decided it was time to put everything I have already together for the first time to check if everything is still functioning propperly and to form a better idea of how it looks.

 

I started by mounting the motherboard on the tray to give the whole thing some weight. Because I added some weight to the motherboard tray assembly I was able to rest it firmly on the case framework allowing me to take my time with running the 4 pieces of metal wire through holes in the side of the tray and the K'nex framework. After that I made sure the wires were propperly tightened by just grabbing them with pliers and rotating the wires to the point that the motherboard tray and the K'nex structure couldn't move appart at all (unless you cut the wires). Within the spoiler below you can see pictures of the framework+motherboard tray with all the parts that were already mounted.

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After this I just threw my GPU, PCI-e SSD and some other stuff in and eventually hooking up all the cables (which wasn't as much of a nightmare as on my previous K'nex case but still not as easy as I hoped) and throwing it under my desk, hook it up and do a test to check if everything still works. IT DOES!

Within the spoiler below I will include some pictures of my old build compared to the new one and if you are wondering what that expansion card is that isn't a GPU/SSD, it's a wifi card and I also took off the metal cap at the end of the GPU to give the memory/VRM heatsink a little more open air exposure. I have no idea if that extra air cools them better but I already like the idea.

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Old build:

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New build:

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Right now all that is left is to:

Replace some of the hardware once I bought and recieved it.

Start with the whole rollercoaster part of the build.

Disassemble my old LED/fan switches and reassemble them as LED/fan/rollercoaster switches.

Add all the switches/LEDs to the build again.

Maybe polish the motherboard tray another time.

Maybe do some painting or other mods if I think they would be worth it.

Do cablemanagement because I really, really need to do that.

 

I can't wait to be able to purchase the other parts and continue this mod. I will probably start designing the electrical circuit for the switches tonight/tomorrow and start soldering everything together tomorrow or in the weekend.

 

Update #4 Cablemanagement, LED testing and wiring diagrams

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As I (as expected) didn't have anything to do this evening I continued on with working on this project and for me it finally started getting interesting.

 

I started off by just doing some cablemanagement to make room for the rollercoaster that also has to be inside the case and to just make it look better. Because there was a lot of space left in my case because of the cablemanagement and as I didn't yet want to start on building the rollercoaster I decided to throw in some of my LED strips to see what would look best. After throwing my LED strips in the case in several different positions I think I struck gold. Within the spoiler below the first picture will be of the cablemanagement (the LEDs are being testfitted in that picture so a few cables are out of place but most are in the right place) and the 2nd and 3rd picture will be of the case with the LED strips turned on and the lights in my room off. I will try to get some better pictures tomorrow but this is all I could do for now with an almost dying camera battery. Also, please don't pay attention to the awful cablemanagement behind the PC because I had to undo some of it to extend the reach of some of the cables.

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I also tried some stuff with the blue LED strip I have but it just didn't fit with the current version of the PC, maybe it will be different when I throw the rollercoaster in there.

 

After being pleased with the current status of the build I decided to move on to the next part: the wiring of the case.

My goal: have 2 3-position toggle switches (on (wire 1)/off/on (wire 2)) and have them controll my LEDs and my fans. I want my LEDs to be able to be turned off, to just have the pwr and HDD activity LED on and to have all of them on. I want my fans to be able to be turned off, to have them running on the PWM signal with reduced voltage from a 3-pin fan plug (that will increase voltage as CPU temperature rises) and to have it run on PWM with 12v straight from the PSU. I also want the k'nex motor for the rollercoaster to be powered from the PSU's 5v lane.

 

From my old case I still have 2 of those switches, a cut up molex Y-splitter, 2 relays, a handfull of diodes, a lot of cable and the knowledge aquired in building the previous version of this switching system on that case.

 

After spending about an hour puzzling for the easiest version, I came up with the circuit I'll include in the spoiler. Just some extra explanation about it: the yellow, black and red bar are supposed to be a molex connector with yellow being 12v, black being ground and red being 5v. The voltage on the hd+ and the pwr+ connection is ~1,8v. The way the hdLED turns on and off is by raising the resistance of the hd- connection (at least on my motherboard).

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I plan on maybe soldering this tomorrow or the day after that. It sort of depends as I will also need to mod the knex motor before I can hook that up to the circuitry.

 

If anyone were to have some comments on the circuit, or on anything else in this build for that matter, they are more than welcome.

 

Update #5 Modding K'nex, soldering, circuitry testing and new discoveries

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Today I thought it was time to give this case some functionality other than just holding components (it still doesn't have a power switch or anything). This update is going to be a lengthy one but that is because it's finally getting interesting.

 

I wanted to throw the circuitry from my previous update together, but I didn't even have the K'nex motor modded so I could hook it up with the circuitry so I had to start with that.

 

So at first, lets take a look at what we have.

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It also uses 2 AA batteries but I don't want my computer to run on batteries so it needs to use the 5v leads (already tested this through some weird way and it works).

 

Time to open it up and take a look at the insides. Not counting the screw that holds the battery lid, it only had 5 screws so that was pretty easy but there was also a big K'nex sticker over top of the seam of the 2 plastic parts. Now lets carefully cut that sticker in 2 and open it up.

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The cut up sticker doesn't even look that bad (it could be worse).

 

After that it was time to gut the thing but sadly, one of the metal battery contact pieces was stuck so I had to leave the parts that I wanted to mod in the plastic container.

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So lets evaluate the situation we have now: 2 cables have to be soldered to 2 small metal plates in a small plastic housing. Sounds like something that can only turn out in the most perfect way possible!

 

Ofcourse it didn't turn out perfect. The solder didn't adhere to the metal plates propperly at first so I had to retry it several times only heating the metal plates more and more, with the plates still being stuck in the small plastic housing. By the time I finally got the cables soldered to the plates they became so hot that the plastic got soft and started bending.

As the plastic was still soft I saw my chance to put the metal plate that I did manage to take out back into the plastic before I wouldn't be able to anymore. At first I burnt my hand on the metal plate as it was still hot AF but eventually I did manage to get the plate back in there by hitting it with a hammer. Sadly the cable came loose because of the hamering. After another 5 awful minutes I managed to get the wire to stick to the metal plate again and finally, it was finished.

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I guess that it is time to assemble the thing back to the way it was and eventhough the sticker has been cut and I can't put the battery lid back on it again leaving a hole, it turned out damn fine.

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The K'nex motor drama is finally over (tested it by putting the leads against the ground and 5v plugs of a molex connector and it worked).

 

 

Now it is the perfect time for the next bit of drama to start, the circuitry for the switches.

 

I had to start with untangling the switch setup I had before there and to my amazement, I only had to remake ~50% of it for this new case. After several hours of trying to make sense of everything I had lying before me, soldering everything I could find together (eventually I discovered that I soldered too much resulting in there being an extra ground cable), looking at it again and comparing it to my plan I finished this heap of switches, wires, connectors and so on. I even managed to get the K'nex motor attached to it with little trouble. Also, yes, I covered the exposed wire with normal tape because the highest voltage that will be on them is 12v and that isn't enough to cause any trouble for the tape.

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By now it is time to just test this to check if I screwed up along the way.

 

I screwed the switches into the motherboard tray, fed some of the cables through the case, hooked everything up (not caring about managing the cables of these switches), making sure the switches are in the correct position (so I wouldn't boot my 4.8GHz 3770k with the CPU fan stuck at 0RPM) and turn the machine on with the hope that everything would work propperly.

 

The outcome, it worked, sort of. I had the HD activity LED wired the wrong way around causing it not to work but that was an easy fix. After that, it worked like a charm. In the spoiler I have some nice, slightly out of focus pictures of the state that it's currently in with the cables all over the place. This time it even has the blue power LED and the red HD activity LED in there (although the HD activity LED isn't on on the picutures).

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After making sure the switch system functioned propperly I started experimenting and measuring a bit. First, a bit of context for the next bit of text, my current motherboard has a 4 and a 3 pin CPU fan header with the 3 pin fan header being able to change the fan voltage. I hooked my multimeter up to the power pin of the 3 pin fan header and discovered that it was 6v (and it could ofcourse go up to 12v).

Those 6v could turn the CPU fan at ~700RPM (the maximum is 1600RPM) and when hooked up to the 4 pin connector with 12v it runs at ~750RPM at the lowest setting. I had the idea that it could maybe work if I hooked both the variable voltage power pin AND the PWM pin to the fan and well, the result is amazing. The fan can now run at anywhere from 350RPM up to the full 1600RPM. At 350RPM you can't even hear the fan when practicly pushing your ear into it, you just hear a little bit of airflow when you have your ear that close and at 1600RPM it can still cool propperly at full load.

Because of the fact that this still works and because the Cryorig R1 Ultimate (it's probably going to take till tuesday for me to get it) has 2 PWM fans, I made my own splitters for it and now I can probably run those fans at anywhere from almost 0RPM up to the maximum RPM they can handle.

 

I also added a 0RPM mode with the switches but my CPU heats up too quickly at 4.8GHz if it is cooled passive.

 

Tonight I may do some more cablemanagement but probably nothing besides that.

 

Tomorrow I might do a little bit more cablemanagement, glue the buttons to the motherboard plate or start my work on the rollercoaster (these last 2 require me to cablemanage first).

 

Update #6 More cablemanagement and rollercoaster preparations

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This is going to be a short update as almost all that I did was cablemanagement to make sure that no cable would get in the way of the way of the rollercoaster.

 

The only thing that had been added since the last time I did some cablemanagement was the thing with all the switches and my LEDs so that was basicly all I had to cablemanage for now. In the end I just threw most of my cables between the motherboard tray and the K'nex framework in an 'orderly' fashion (so it's 50% chaos, 50% neatly managed). I also stuck my front LEDs through my motherboard tray and I was planning on hotsnotting them but as the hole was the exact size of the LEDs they just stick in there perfectly (combined with the old hot snot safely sealing the LED contacts away). I took some more pictures of the cablemanagement and also of the motherboard tray switch+LED thingy. This time with the HDD activity LED on because of a crystaldiskmark benchmark of my HDD that I just so happen to have running in the background.

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Now I just have to glue the power and reset switch in there and the motherboard tray should be completely finished. I am still in debate with myself over the idea of painting the whole plate.

 

I also thought it was time to dig my old K'nex rollercoaster parts up as after I have those switches glued into the motherboard tray it would be most logical step in this project.

 

I have ~2 meters of short orange track pieces that I won't be using and ~5 meters of longer blue track pieces that I will be using for this build as that will make the project name make more sense as the Dragon Khan is also partially blue (although they are just pastel blue supports on the real one). I also have 3 carts, 2 orange and 1 purple. I should also have some things lying around to bind the seperate carts into one train but I think I will keep the carts seperate.

 

Here is a quick pic I snapped of the carts+track parts.

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So after hotsnotting the power and reset switches to the motherboard tray tomorrow I will finally start construction on this build's main attraction (pun intended). I already have something in mind but what exactly I'm planning for the rollercoaster is going to be a surprise but I can tell you that it isn't going to be your standard old rollercoaster design.

 

This build is getting more and more fun IMO and I hope the readers (if any) think so too.

 

Update #7 'Completing' the case and rollercoaster construction

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Today it was finally time to slowly start moving to the second (or third if you count building the case and wiring it up as 2 seperate things) fase of this project. I was almost done with the case in the previous part and almost ready to start construction on the rollercoaster. Almost as in, I just needed to glue the power and reset button to the case and it would be finished.

 

So that is what I started off with today.

At first I took my motherboard (including everything directly mounted on the motherboard) off of the motherboard tray and I searched for my power and reset button that I had lying around somewhere in this mess that came into existance these past few days.

 

After that I flipped my PC motherboard tray down (with the expansion slots hanging off the table and a small wooden block under the other side of the plate so the switches wouldn't break), I grabbed the gluegun, put the buttons through the holes they were supposed to go through and just started pouring glue on it untill they didn't move anymore.

 

With the buttons glued in place I started putting everything back together, cablemanaged the 2 cables and the case is now (finally) fully wired up. I will include a few pictures of the buttons glued in there in the spoiler but nothing special besides the pure craftsmanship that it took to glue them like that (but seriously, if you don't want your eyes to bleed, don't look at the second picture).

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At this point the case is fully wired up and ready for the next part of this project: the rollercoaster.

 

Lets start by grabbing all the K'nex I can find within a reasonable ammount of time, one box with normal K'nex, one with mini K'nex (which will be used to connect the rollercoaster to the normal K'nex) and one with stuff like gears.

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The next step would be to start putting everything together, so that's exactly what I started doing.

I usually build my K'nex rollercoasters according to a specific order:

1. Start by figuring out where you want the chain for getting the carts higher up to run.
2. Actually build the final part of the rollercoaster as a run up to the chain part.
3. Build the bottom of the chain part including the gears in the lower part that are supposed to keep the chain running.
4. Leave the rest of the chain part and build roughly the last half of the rollercoaster.
5. After this, finish the rest of the chain part, throw the motor in there and check if everything is working propperly.
6. Figure out a way to get from the top of the chain part to there you stopped at step 4.
7. Start reinforcing the structure and make sure that the whole system works by testing it with a cart.
8. Start colour correction (as you can see, K'nex is very colourful but I don't want something I build like that so I try to get everything in as few colours as possible).
9. Do some finishing touches and you're finished.

 

Once I had figured out where I wanted the chain I built the last corner and I'll include a picture of that so you could get an idea of how this works in case you aren't really familiar with K'nex rollercoasters (big chance that's the case).

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For the rest I just executed the steps I named above and I'm currently halfway through step number 7: I've strengthened the structure to the point that everything works but it's still a bit wobbly for my taste so I will improve that. I also still need to do the colour corrections and finishing touches.

 

During construction I noticed a few things:

• While building a K'nex rollercoaster it's always smart to do a lot of testing during construction, however, to supply power to the motor my PC needed to be on and the air surrounding my PC gets hot to the point that it's still barable but quite uncomfortable too after spending prolonged times in it.
• Building a rollercoaster (or anything for that matter) around an object that you can alter but has to remain the same shape and structure isn't the easiest thing, by far not.
• Building a rollercoaster around a PC means that it will get bigger, by a lot, by now this PC measures in at 50cm deep, 55 cm wide and 50cm tall. You can also add the hight of the cart to those dimensions because it will need some extra space on every side to not run into anything.
• After spending several hours in the weirdest positions trying to get the rollercoastertracks to snap into the pieces that are supposed to hold them, taking a break and just sitting down is the best feeling ever.

 

Because the rollercoaster isn't technically finished (still need to finish step 7,8 and 9) I don't want to spoil everything yet but I do have 2 pictures that I feel like sharing already.

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I must also say that I have tried running 3 carts on this rollercoaster track already but I ran into 2 problems:

1. To not make this rollercoaster another 5-10cm bigger I took some sort of a shortcut at a certain place. Because of this shortcut it is now technically possible for 2 carts to hit eachother. The chance is small but with 3 carts running round it happends every once in a while and I have to push them to the chain manually (which I don't want to do that often).
2. The 3 carts that I have have different ammounts of friction working on the wheels. The difference is so big that 1 of them completes the track all the time, 1 stops at a certain point ~50% of the time and the third stops at that same point for roughly 10% of the time.

Because of this I have given up on running 3 but I don't want to give up on running 2. The one that completes it without a problem is already sitting on the track and I threw some oil on the one that didn't complete it for ~10% of the time hoping that will lower it to 0%.

 

I probably won't get a lot of time to work on this in the upcoming period but I will try to free some time every day to continue this project.

 

EDIT: I just nocticed that wide pictures are being squeezed together so if you want so see a picture without the squeezing problem, open the picture on a new tab.

 

Update #8 Rollercoaster improvements and new parts

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As I said in my previous update, I didn't get much time to do anything.

 

I did, however, manage to find some time to colourcorrect the rollercoaster. I'm almost finished with that, but sadly I don't have all the parts needed for finishing this at hand so I need to wait untill I have access to more K'nex (which should be this weekend).

Eventhough I couldn't continue my work on the colourcorrection, I did pretty much finish reinforcing the thing and I already made most of the finishing touches. I even managed to find the small rubber pieces needed to connect multiple carts together and I now, instead of having 1 cart, have a 3 cart train driving over the track.

 

Another note concerning the rollercoaster: K'nex motors have always been loud in my opinion but having it wired up to 5 instead of 3v makes this another dimension of loud. When comparing it with the reference cooler of a GTX 780 at full speed (4200RPM), the reference cooler is suddenly really quiet. May I also remind you of the fact that my case has no noise dampning for the GPU so it is the full noise created by a full speed reference cooler. Fun little fact: I already modded this reference 780 to have a fanless mode so after running it at full speed to compare the noise it went fanless for several minutes before slowly creeping back to ~800RPM.

 

The second part of this update, today I also recieved a package. My Cryorig R1 Ultimate+20 grams of MX-4+1 gram of Coolaboratory Liquid Ultra finally got delivered. I did not get any time to open them, take pictures and install everything but I did take a picture of the packaging (because yes, packaging is interesting).

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Tomorrow, after work, I will probably have enough time to actually open the boxes and maybe even install it, lets hope so. In case I don't have the time it probably means that I had to work overtime and that only means more money for new parts. Tomorrow is going to be a good day

 

Update #9 Cooler upgrade and strange CPU stuff

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So today I decided it was time to throw my new CPU cooler in my rig, the Cryorig R1 Ultimate, to replace my Deepcool Gamer Storm Lucifer. I also wanted to replace the MX-4 inside my delidded CPU with Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra.

 

Lets start off by unpacking the Cryorig. Good looking cooler IMO.

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Here are also some shots of the CPU cooler it will replace mounted on my Asrock Z77 extreme 4.

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So now lets get that old piece of metal out of here and start working on the CPU. Just a matter of cleaning the MX-4 off and throwing some Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra inbetween the die and IHS. Sounds simple and it actually was.

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Is it just me or is there quite some beauty to a 'naked' CPU. The reflecting die, the traces on the PCB, somehow I think it's beautiful.

 

So what is next, throwing it in there and putting the cooler on?

Well... Small problem. When I was getting ready to put the CPU back into the motherboard I noticed something strange. The CPU socket pins didn't look perfect, 1 looked slightly different than the rest. As you can imagine, my first reaction when I saw this contained words that could get me banned from here so lets not type them.

 

After looking at it for several minutes it seemed like it wasn't close to contacting any other pins and it looked like it might even be able to make contact with the CPU without me having to fix it.

 

Having enough faith in it and not wanting to look at it anymore I just carefully put my CPU in and mounted the Cryorig cooler on it (the edges of the CPU are filed down because they were a bit rough because of the delidding that I did several months ago).

Spoiler

 

Now I just have to put the motherboard back into the system and see if it still functions propperly.

 

I screwed it in there, hooked the cables up and pressed the power button.

 

Windows crashed upon boot and didn't want to work anymore. As you can imagine, I was losing my sh*t, untill, 3 minutes later, I discovered I forgot the sata power cable for my PCI-e SSD. I plugged it in, it worked and I was like (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

 

Time to get to work and get some baseline results. At 4.8GHz my CPU used to get ~90°C (depending on the room temperature which changes a lot). Now it gets to 70 with the same overclock!

 

I quickly stopped the test, increased the voltages and started testing 5GHz (though be it at ~1.5V) and it was only getting around 85°C, but then...

 

It crashed. I couldn't get it stable anymore at the same voltages I used to run it at. I decided to just dail it back to 4.5GHz at more than enough voltage (+0,050v while -0,010 used to be enough for 4.5GHz) and just ran a stresstest for an hour. It passed. At the moment I am trying a stresstest at 4.8GHz again with +0,200v instead of the +0,180v I used to run. Lets just hope that this overclock survives or else I may have indeed bent a pin. Maybe a power delivery pin that only kicks in under certain conditions but maybe worse.

 

I'm going to run a stresstest over the night and will report back tomorrow evening.

 

EDIT: FML, it crashed several minutes ago, a pin must be a problem then. That means I'll have to take my motherboard out again tomorrow. Wish me luck.

 

Update #10 Motherboard pins repair

Spoiler

This is going to be a short update, just saying.

 

Yesterday it became apearant to me that my CPU wasn't functioning propperly and narrowing down all the problems it was probably because of that CPU socket pin.

 

I started tearing my CPU cooler off again which I put on just yesterday and I took the CPU out and there it was, a slightly bent pin. I tried to take a picture of it but it's extremely hard to see.

Spoiler

As you can see, that pin is off by a little bit.

 

I made sure that it was lit enough by pointing all the lights I had available at it, then grabbed a set of needles and started poking around carefully. I moved the pin a little, threw everything back together and hoped that it would work.

 

I booted the computer and well... It didn't work, because this time I forgot the PCI-e power cables for my GPU.

After sticking those in I started running stresstests and it didn't crash on stock. After that I started overclocking and it worked just fine, I'm currently running my 3770k at 'just' 4,8GHz as 4,9 takes a little but too high of a voltage IMO (1,45v). I will probably do a nightly stresstest but I think it will be fine this time around.

 

Sorry for not being able to do anything but weekend is approaching and eventhough I won't be able to work on it during the weekend (as I will be away), I will be able to get the final K'nex parts needed for the rollercoaster so I can finally finish that.

 

Update #11 Rollercoaster reveal and future plans

Spoiler

After I fixed the CPU stability problems (running 4,8GHz stable on my 3770k again but at lower temperatures than before) it was finally time to start throwing all the K'nex pieces that I managed to get last weekend into the case. This went with no troubles at all but then I started doing some structural reworking as I had to take some parts out before to make room for the rollercoaster tracks. This did go together with a few problems as when I wanted to add a part here it meant that I needed to change something in another place and so on. Eventually I did manage to get everything working and I now have a fully functional, propperly looking K'nex rollercoaster PC case.

 

I did not yet get the chance to take pictures with a better background (better as in, no ton of cables, no beer crate, no single-use barbeques and no desk in the picture) but I will wait with that untill the complete project is finished (or as good as finished) but I did take enough pictures of it to get the idea of how it looks and works. I also plan on shooting a video of the rollercoaster but that has to wait for now.

 

Lets start with 3 pictures to share the general idea

Spoiler

 

As you are able to see, it has no looping in it. I did try it but because of how K'nex rollercoaster rails and carts work you need to sacrifice ~0,5m of altitude for a single looping and I just didn't have that much to spare. I could turn this computer into some sort of huge ass tower with loopings and everything (I might actually do that at some point) but if I do it won't fit under my desk anymore which it needs to for the time being.

 

Below there will be 3 spoilers, the first one containing general overview pictures of the build, the second one containing pictures zoomed in on a specific part of the build and the third one showing off the PC in the dark.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

I hope you guys aren't too bothered with the picture quality.

 

But now that we got that out of the way, I'll give a text discription of the rollercoaster:

Looking at the case from the front it starts in the rear left part of the case and goes straight up through a chain. Once it has arrived at the top it will go down a little bit, let go of the chain, make a 90° turn around its own axle and make a big 180° turn overtop the CPU cooler, GPU and motherboard. With the track hanging that whole part so it gives way a little bit but not enough to have it touch any parts. After that 180° turn it will do another tighter 90° turn to end up behind the motherboard tray in the top right. This will be the first time that the rollercoaster goes through the case. The rail is also on its side at this point. It will exit the case at the rear and continue to travel from the rear right to the rear left. Back again at the rear left (behind the part of rails with the chain) it will make a tight 180° turn around the chain part of the rollercoaster and entering the middle of the case from the left. When traveling inside the case from left to right it will make a ~145° turn around its own axle and exit the case on the right side. It will make a tight 90° turn to the lower front of the case where it will make another tight 90° turn to have it travel from right to left. Arrived at the left it will make another tight 90° turn back to the start of the rollercoaster but before arriving there it will turn 90° around its own axle.

 

 

For now I'm done with the rollercoaster part of this build and it's time to talk about how I will continue this build.

I have 1 more plan for the rollercoaster, I'm planning on spray painting the carts to make them black and red matching the theme a little better. I don't know when I will do this but it probably won't be really soon.

Roughly half an hour ago I bought a used 5820k. It should be a good overclocking chip but we'll see how it will handle my cooling methods. It should arrive early next week.

As you can probably imagine right now, I also need to get an X99 motherboard and DDR4 for that CPU. For the RAM I was thinking of ordering a kit of 32GB Kingston HyperX DDR4. That specific kit has 4 8GB sticks running at 3200MHz with a CL of 16 and it's one of the cheapest on the market ATM (I don't understand why though). For the motherboard I am still slightly unsure but I think I will go for a used Gigabyte GA X99 Gaming 7 WIFI but I want to know a little bit more about the power delivery system before I buy it.

I am also thinking about throwing a new GPU into my PC. This will probably be something like a GTX 1070, a GTX 980 Ti or maybe a non-reference PCB 8GB RX 480 untill something new hits the market.

After finishing all of that stuff it is time to start working on my setup around the computer again. I will need to buy a few more cables like a longer DisplayPort cable for my 1440p ultrawide and as you should be able to see in the pictures it is time for me to redo my cable management AGAIN, urgh... Just to give you an idea, last time I did cablemanagement I weighed some of the cables (roughly 80% of them) and that heap of cables was 7,5kg. 7,5kg of cables! Between that last time I did cablemanagement and now I added several more cables and I still have more to add. Having to do this type of cablemanagement is something you wouldn't wish even upon your worst enemy. One may ask, why do I need that many cables. Well, it's because I have my PC hooked up to 3 monitors (1440p 21:9, 1080p 16:9 and 768 4:3) and another HDMI cable to hook my TV up too but it doesn't stop there. There are 2 speaker sets in my setup, one dolby 5.1 and one stereo with 2 speakers per channel and with 2 subwoofers, a VCR, a blu-ray player (integrated into the 5.1 speaker set but it needs a cable to one of the monitors), an HD TV tuner/recorder, a printer, periferals, a light and as you can imagine by now, 4 power bars to provide a power plug for everything. There are also switches everywhere, a ton of remotes and 2 jurassic park movies that I want to watch again. I also have extra cables everywhere so I can hook up my gamecube or something like that up to the stereo speaker set and the tv. There are also cables to hook my laptop and phone up to everything that it can be connected to. I know this is kind of BS but why not.

 

Lets see if I can come up with anything else to do, if you have an idea for something to add, please let me know.

 

EDIT: the RAM had false product details on the site I used to find them, it's only 16GB, time to search for something else

 

Update #12 Moving to a new platform (part 1)

Spoiler

As you should be able to see in the first post in this thread I recieved my new CPU, a 5820k (used) and my new RAM, 4*8GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport.

As of yet I only had LGA 1155 CPUs for myself (i5 3570 and i7 3770k) and I worked with an i5 4670k. This means I got used to a specific size for a CPU. Now that I recieved my 5820k I think that's going to change. The first indicator for that was my first reaction: "Damn, that thing is huge" (although it was in dutch and not in english and yes I know, that's what she said). Those LGA 2011 v3 chips also have quite some weight behind them (compared to the size) because of the bigger IHS and without further ado, here are some quick pics I snapped.

Spoiler

 

The previous owner also told me that he was able to get the chip up to 4.8GHz without any trouble on a quad radiator setup with 2 290x cards included in the same loop so it should probably do at least 4.5GHz on my Cryorig R1 Ultimate (in an open air case setup).

 

I also said that I got some new RAM, a 32GB kit of decent DDR4. On my current platform I have 16GB value RAM and while it technically does work it isn't the best looking or the fastest stuff around. With those 32GB I should finally be able to run a RAM disk of more than 4GB (because I do sometimes reach 15GB usage with a 4GB RAM disk so 32GB was really welcome). Now time for some pictures of the Crucial Ballistix:

Spoiler

 

Because I currently only have my Z77 motherboard I can't put all of this in my system yet but it won't have to sit on a shelve for very long.

 

Tomorrow I should get some more packages containing an X99 motherboard (used) and some more K'nex rollercoaster parts (including more carts for a longer train). I should be able to get some nice shots of the motherboard online tomorrow together with some shots of the motherboard with the CPU and RAM installed. I probably won't get the chance to install everything into my PC tomorrow but I'll be free thursday as well so that means that by thursday my PC will be moved from ivy bridge to haswell-e.

 

My backups are also almost finished already, only some more documentation and I should be ready to reinstall windows in case my current install doesn't work on the new platform.

 

Update #13 Moving to a new platform (part 2) A nightmare

Spoiler

Yesterday I recieved my motherboard, the ASUS X99 Deluxe/U3.1 and it's a real beauty, I'll include some pictures in the spoiler below

Spoiler

 

As I did not feel like waiting with installing the motherboard, CPU and RAM, I directly mounted my CPU and RAM on the motherboard to put it directly into my machine. Here are some pictures with the RAM and CPU mounted.

Spoiler

 

I was able to take my Z77 platform out of my case in no time. Quickly transfered the Cryorig R1 Ultimate, gathered some extra screws to mount this motherboard to the rest of the machine and put it in. After spending half an hour getting all the cables to the right place (not paying attention to cablemanagement at all) it was time to turn it on.

 

Boot errorcode 00, turning itself off, rebooting several seconds later and repeating.

 

Turned the machine off manually, checked if all the cables were connected and everything was mounted, it was...

 

Retried to boot, same problem.

Starting to get worried now because this RAM, CPU and motherboard combo set me back roughly 3,5 weeks of full time working (gotta love the fact that the minimum wage for 18 year olds is only ~€4 in the Netherlands).

 

After reassembling and checking everything 5 times I started to accept that it may be broken so it was time to move on to diagnostics of what might be broken. As it was error code 00 it was probably a CPU issue. I wasn't able to spot any problems with the CPU by just looking at the front and the back so I decided to start feeling if the CPU actually got hot at all. I whiped off the thermal paste, put the CPU back in and turned my PSU on again. I was putting my hand on the CPU to feel if it got hot at all, but before I turned the machine on at all, my hand got zapped. Yes, you read that right, the IHS of my CPU was under load with my PC turned off. It wasn't warm, it just had a bit of electricity going through it.

 

I grabbed my Multimeter, hooked it up to a random piece of metal and the IHS and you'd never guess, 50V. Yes that's right, my PC's ground was 50V AC above any from of actual ground. This means that when I connected the wires to the motherboard with the PSU turned off I actually zapped it with 50V AC resulting in the probable death of the CPU.

 

I mounted everything back to the way it was before and I'm currently trying to get all the documentation ready to ask for money from insurrance or even a replacement from warranty.

 

The conclusion: my house has bad wiring, my CPU got fried (probably and there is a small chance my motherboard got taken down with it), back to my old configuration of a 3770k, currently preparing to get some money back or a replacement.

 

EDIT: the conclusion was incorrect, there was probably a problem with the motherboard itself as it as slightly bent.

 

Update #14 Light at the end of the tunnel

Spoiler

At first a quick summary of what happened in the past months and why this project ginded to a temporary halt:

My Asus X99 Deluxe/U3.1+5820k+32GB DDR4 wouldn't boot so I went though the following steps:

1. RMA'd the motherboard. When I got it back, it still didn't work.

2. RMA'd the CPU. When I got it back, it still didn't work.

3. RMA'd the motherboard again. When I got it back, it still didn't work.

4. Noticed the motherboard was bent and RMA'd it again.

5. Got tired of waiting and decided to order an MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon. It works. (this was past tuesday if I recall correctly)

Still don't have my Asus X99 Deluxe/U3.1 back from the 2nd RMA...

 

So now I have a working X99 set in my computer, just as planned.

Within the spoiler below I'll drop a ton of images of the motherboard and the board installed in the system (warning, I did not yet do any cablemanagement as I didn't have that much time to do that yet and I had to take all the pictures with my phone so the quality isn't that amazing, nexus 5x for those interested).

 

Spoiler

The board outside of the system (these pictures are especially bad)

Spoiler

The board installed in the system

Spoiler

 

 

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thinks that this is a sexy as hell motherboard. I just don't know what colour sceme I prefer, I really like the blue one but the green one is sick as well, the red one is pretty damn badass and the mixed one is also amazing...

 

As you might be able to see, some things concidering the case make no sense at all, well, I have to change those. For example, the box on the side where my sound card was, that is now in the 2nd PCI-e slot and the box can be removed.

 

The next step in this project is the GPU, I'm doubting wether I should just get a 1080 or go with a 1070 (it needs to drive a 1440p ultrawide). I did already decide that it's going to be a Palit Super Jetstream or Zotac Amp Extreme card (with a custom backplate on the zotac card).

 

I'll do my best to update the first post in this topic as well. I also still need to make a video of the rollercoaster but I'll wait with that untill I have my GPU.

 

FYI, I got my 5820k overclocked to 4.3GHz with 75°C on the hottest core under prime 95 full load with full fan speed and it can run at a light load while staying under 65°C, WHILE BEING FANLESS!!! Once it shoots above 20+% load or stays pegged at 15+% for a longer time the fans do kick in very slightly and it quickly cools down to ~50°C where it'll go fanless again and slowly warm up.

 

Update #15 Final hardware upgrade

Spoiler

Today my GPU got delivered and we all know what that means, time for some pictures and installing the card.

 

Lets start off with some pictures of the GPU by itself (the Palit GTX 1070 Super Jetstream):

Spoiler

 

The card does look a little bit shiny but IMO that fits perfectly with the RGB LEDs on the motherboard.

 

Installing the card was a little bit hard because it's really bulky but this means that it took me 2 minutes instead of 1 to install the card (my case makes it really easy ).

 

After installing the card it was time to boot and unlike the Asus motherboard, this one did work first try (still pissed about the Asus board).

 

After changing some settings I got the card to work at 2150+MHz on the core and ~9GHz on the memory clock.

All this while maintaining a maximum temperature of only 41°C on the core at full load (and with this I mean furmark full load) while running at max fan speeds (2500RPM) or 65°C on 35% fan speed (870RPM) which is still unaudible compared to my WD black which has noise and vibration dampning all around it. I am only able to notice that my GPU is running at full load because the air around my pc heats up a bit.

 

Now time for some pictures of the build in its current state (which is almost completed):

 

Spoiler

Looking pretty damn amazing if you ask me.

 

Sadly, we have now arrived at the point where I have to start wrapping this build log up. Which I'll do in the next update.

 

I'll have to do some final touches to the cablemanagement, take some good pictures of the build (I should have a decent pocket camera available to take pictures starting saturday morning) and make a little movie of the rollercoaster (which I still have to start shooting).

 

I hope so far everyone enjoyed this build log. If anyone still has any opinions or ideas about this build, I'd be glad to hear.

 

Update #16 Final update

Spoiler

I just finished uploading the youtube video, here it is. I hope you'll enjoy it or at least get a decent idea of what it became. Sorry for the bad picture quallity at some spots in the video.

 

The build log is now finished and I will edit the title to match that.

 

I might take a few extra pictures if people want some more as I already did provide some in earlier posts and in the video.

 

I do already have plans to make several changes in the future. For example, I want to take the PCI-e SSD out and exchange it for a Samsung 960 PRO 1TB m.2 SSD. But that won't be included directly in this build log.

 

Please tell me your opinions about what you thought of this build log and what I could impruve for future ones.

 

Thanks for reading.

[ImBleu]

Interesting, Followed.

[tomaatvk]

9 hours ago, ThatCoolBlueKidd said:

Interesting, Followed.

Thanks, I hope you will enjoy it.

 

UPDATE #1

It hasn't even been a day and this project is already not going exactly as planned. I was taking my old machine apart (to work on the motherboard tray I need to take it out of my current machine ofcourse) but it took quite a bit longer than expected. Because of this there will be no cutting and polishing today as it is already later on the day and I prefer not to make a lot of noise at these time. I did manage to get some nice pictures of the parts that I already have and will make it to the final version of this project: the storage, sound card and the PSU (I also have the optical drive already but it's just an optical drive), I will add the pictures in the spoiler to not make it too image heavy.

 

480GB Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe

Spoiler

 

120GB Samsung 840 Evo

Spoiler

 

1TB WD Black

Spoiler

 

Corsair RM750i

Spoiler

 

Creative Sound Blaster Z (OEM version)

Spoiler

 

 

Because I wasn't able to start working on the motherboard tray today I will start the base of the case construction later on tonight and do the motherboard tray tomorrow.

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #2

Today I've been working on the framework of the actual PC case part all evening (4-5 hours in total for the framework). The framework I'm talking about is the frame that the motherboard tray is going to rest upon. The frame will also house all the components that aren't directly on the motherboard like the PSU, the SATA storage devices and even my sound card through a PCI-e 1x ribbon cable. After the actual PC part of this build is complete (or complete enough) the frame will also offer sufficient mounting points for the rollercoaster to be attached to the PC.

 

Upon building this framework I ran into 3 issues:

1. Eventhough there is sufficient space above the PSU for the HDD and SSD to fit according to the original plan, it was going to lose a lot of its stability causing it to wobble like crazy. To solve this I decided to stick both the SSD and the HDD in the little space there is above the optical drive and still below the motherboard tray. It didn't fit at first because I didn't have enough space to propperly secure their position, but in the end I managed to get it working through some experimenting. I was even able to add some isolation foam tubes cut in half to lower the ammount of noise created by the HDD.
2. After putting some pressure on the 'finished' structure I noticed that it was bending a little if you put a lot of pressure from the rear top to the bottom front and this is exactly how the motherboard tray would exert its pressure. I managed to solve this by adding some longer feet on the front.
3. While building this I managed to run out of certain kinds of K'nex parts. I didn't feel comfortable going into the low numbers before even starting on the rollercoaster mod. The only way to solve this was to throw in a lot of longer red rods instead of more than double the blue, medium length ones. Red may not seem to fit the coloursceme ATM, but once I add the LEDs it will fit with the build and if I were to put the motherboard tray on, it would cover almost all of them. I'm still low on some parts but I have a backup box filled with the K'nex parts that I'm slowly running out of already.

I will include the pictures I took of the current state of the build in the spoiler. They will include the framework with the SATA devices, the PSU and the sound card already mounted in there.

Spoiler

 

 

Tomorrow I'm going to have my way with the motherboard tray if I get the time (I probably will but I'm not 100% sure).

[tomaatvk]

Another day another update.

UPDATE #3 Starting the metalwork and temporary assembly

When I finally had the time at the end of the morning I started by just looking at the motherboard tray I was planning to cut and sand. I knew my first step was to rip out all the LEDs and switches hotsnotted/clamped on there. This went without a problem like you would expect. After that I started to think what exactly I wanted to do with the plate.

 

At first I was thinking of cutting off all the excess pieces of metal (like the metal around the expansion slot backets and IO shield backet) and polishing the whole thing. However, after thinking a bit longer (because it is always a good idea to think twice before you make irreversible changes) I realised that having those excess pieces of metal on there could possibly prove to be usefull in future projects and they aren't really in the way of something. I also realised that polishing that whole think ment sanding and working on a really big surface and by doing so I would go through my Dremel bits quite quickly but I still wanted to get rid of the few scratches in the metal caused by previous drilling.

Eventually I decided to just sand and polish the part of the tray where those scratches were untill I would hit a place where I could stop. This caused me to have a nice and shiny strip of metal where the switches/LEDs are going to go. Maybe I will do another polishing run once the rest of all this is done. For before/after pictures of the motherboard tray, see the spoiler below.

Spoiler

Before:

Spoiler

 

After:

Spoiler

 

 

After finishing my work on the motherboard tray I decided it was time to put everything I have already together for the first time to check if everything is still functioning propperly and to form a better idea of how it looks.

 

I started by mounting the motherboard on the tray to give the whole thing some weight. Because I added some weight to the motherboard tray assembly I was able to rest it firmly on the case framework allowing me to take my time with running the 4 pieces of metal wire through holes in the side of the tray and the K'nex framework. After that I made sure the wires were propperly tightened by just grabbing them with pliers and rotating the wires to the point that the motherboard tray and the K'nex structure couldn't move appart at all (unless you cut the wires). Within the spoiler below you can see pictures of the framework+motherboard tray with all the parts that were already mounted.

Spoiler

 

After this I just threw my GPU, PCI-e SSD and some other stuff in and eventually hooking up all the cables (which wasn't as much of a nightmare as on my previous K'nex case but still not as easy as I hoped) and throwing it under my desk, hook it up and do a test to check if everything still works. IT DOES!

Within the spoiler below I will include some pictures of my old build compared to the new one and if you are wondering what that expansion card is that isn't a GPU/SSD, it's a wifi card and I also took off the metal cap at the end of the GPU to give the memory/VRM heatsink a little more open air exposure. I have no idea if that extra air cools them better but I already like the idea.

Spoiler

Old build:

Spoiler

 

New build:

Spoiler

 

Right now all that is left is to:

1. Replace some of the hardware once I bought and recieved it.
2. Start with the whole rollercoaster part of the build.
3. Disassemble my old LED/fan switches and reassemble them as LED/fan/rollercoaster switches.
4. Add all the switches/LEDs to the build again.
5. Maybe polish the motherboard tray another time.
6. Maybe do some painting or other mods if I think they would be worth it.
7. Do cablemanagement because I really, really need to do that.

 

I can't wait to be able to purchase the other parts and continue this mod. I will probably start designing the electrical circuit for the switches tonight/tomorrow and start soldering everything together tomorrow or in the weekend.

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #4 Cablemanagement, LED testing and wiring diagrams

As I (as expected) didn't have anything to do this evening I continued on with working on this project and for me it finally started getting interesting.

 

I started off by just doing some cablemanagement to make room for the rollercoaster that also has to be inside the case and to just make it look better. Because there was a lot of space left in my case because of the cablemanagement and as I didn't yet want to start on building the rollercoaster I decided to throw in some of my LED strips to see what would look best. After throwing my LED strips in the case in several different positions I think I struck gold. Within the spoiler below the first picture will be of the cablemanagement (the LEDs are being testfitted in that picture so a few cables are out of place but most are in the right place) and the 2nd and 3rd picture will be of the case with the LED strips turned on and the lights in my room off. I will try to get some better pictures tomorrow but this is all I could do for now with an almost dying camera battery. Also, please don't pay attention to the awful cablemanagement behind the PC because I had to undo some of it to extend the reach of some of the cables.

Spoiler

I also tried some stuff with the blue LED strip I have but it just didn't fit with the current version of the PC, maybe it will be different when I throw the rollercoaster in there.

 

After being pleased with the current status of the build I decided to move on to the next part: the wiring of the case.

My goal: have 2 3-position toggle switches (on (wire 1)/off/on (wire 2)) and have them controll my LEDs and my fans. I want my LEDs to be able to be turned off, to just have the pwr and HDD activity LED on and to have all of them on. I want my fans to be able to be turned off, to have them running on the PWM signal with reduced voltage from a 3-pin fan plug (that will increase voltage as CPU temperature rises) and to have it run on PWM with 12v straight from the PSU. I also want the k'nex motor for the rollercoaster to be powered from the PSU's 5v lane.

 

From my old case I still have 2 of those switches, a cut up molex Y-splitter, 2 relays, a handfull of diodes, a lot of cable and the knowledge aquired in building the previous version of this switching system on that case.

 

After spending about an hour puzzling for the easiest version, I came up with the circuit I'll include in the spoiler. Just some extra explanation about it: the yellow, black and red bar are supposed to be a molex connector with yellow being 12v, black being ground and red being 5v. The voltage on the hd+ and the pwr+ connection is ~1,8v. The way the hdLED turns on and off is by raising the resistance of the hd- connection (at least on my motherboard).

Spoiler

 

I plan on maybe soldering this tomorrow or the day after that. It sort of depends as I will also need to mod the knex motor before I can hook that up to the circuitry.

 

If anyone were to have some comments on the circuit, or on anything else in this build for that matter, they are more than welcome.

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #5 Modding K'nex, soldering, circuitry testing and new discoveries

Today I thought it was time to give this case some functionality other than just holding components (it still doesn't have a power switch or anything). This update is going to be a lengthy one but that is because it's finally getting interesting.

 

I wanted to throw the circuitry from my previous update together, but I didn't even have the K'nex motor modded so I could hook it up with the circuitry so I had to start with that.

 

So at first, lets take a look at what we have.

Spoiler

It also uses 2 AA batteries but I don't want my computer to run on batteries so it needs to use the 5v leads (already tested this through some weird way and it works).

 

Time to open it up and take a look at the insides. Not counting the screw that holds the battery lid, it only had 5 screws so that was pretty easy but there was also a big K'nex sticker over top of the seam of the 2 plastic parts. Now lets carefully cut that sticker in 2 and open it up.

Spoiler

The cut up sticker doesn't even look that bad (it could be worse).

 

After that it was time to gut the thing but sadly, one of the metal battery contact pieces was stuck so I had to leave the parts that I wanted to mod in the plastic container.

Spoiler

So lets evaluate the situation we have now: 2 cables have to be soldered to 2 small metal plates in a small plastic housing. Sounds like something that can only turn out in the most perfect way possible!

 

Ofcourse it didn't turn out perfect. The solder didn't adhere to the metal plates propperly at first so I had to retry it several times only heating the metal plates more and more, with the plates still being stuck in the small plastic housing. By the time I finally got the cables soldered to the plates they became so hot that the plastic got soft and started bending.

As the plastic was still soft I saw my chance to put the metal plate that I did manage to take out back into the plastic before I wouldn't be able to anymore. At first I burnt my hand on the metal plate as it was still hot AF but eventually I did manage to get the plate back in there by hitting it with a hammer. Sadly the cable came loose because of the hamering. After another 5 awful minutes I managed to get the wire to stick to the metal plate again and finally, it was finished.

Spoiler

 

I guess that it is time to assemble the thing back to the way it was and eventhough the sticker has been cut and I can't put the battery lid back on it again leaving a hole, it turned out damn fine.

Spoiler

The K'nex motor drama is finally over (tested it by putting the leads against the ground and 5v plugs of a molex connector and it worked).

 

 

Now it is the perfect time for the next bit of drama to start, the circuitry for the switches.

 

I had to start with untangling the switch setup I had before there and to my amazement, I only had to remake ~50% of it for this new case. After several hours of trying to make sense of everything I had lying before me, soldering everything I could find together (eventually I discovered that I soldered too much resulting in there being an extra ground cable), looking at it again and comparing it to my plan I finished this heap of switches, wires, connectors and so on. I even managed to get the K'nex motor attached to it with little trouble. Also, yes, I covered the exposed wire with normal tape because the highest voltage that will be on them is 12v and that isn't enough to cause any trouble for the tape.

Spoiler

 

By now it is time to just test this to check if I screwed up along the way.

 

I screwed the switches into the motherboard tray, fed some of the cables through the case, hooked everything up (not caring about managing the cables of these switches), making sure the switches are in the correct position (so I wouldn't boot my 4.8GHz 3770k with the CPU fan stuck at 0RPM) and turn the machine on with the hope that everything would work propperly.

 

The outcome, it worked, sort of. I had the HD activity LED wired the wrong way around causing it not to work but that was an easy fix. After that, it worked like a charm. In the spoiler I have some nice, slightly out of focus pictures of the state that it's currently in with the cables all over the place. This time it even has the blue power LED and the red HD activity LED in there (although the HD activity LED isn't on on the picutures).

Spoiler

 

After making sure the switch system functioned propperly I started experimenting and measuring a bit. First, a bit of context for the next bit of text, my current motherboard has a 4 and a 3 pin CPU fan header with the 3 pin fan header being able to change the fan voltage. I hooked my multimeter up to the power pin of the 3 pin fan header and discovered that it was 6v (and it could ofcourse go up to 12v).

Those 6v could turn the CPU fan at ~700RPM (the maximum is 1600RPM) and when hooked up to the 4 pin connector with 12v it runs at ~750RPM at the lowest setting. I had the idea that it could maybe work if I hooked both the variable voltage power pin AND the PWM pin to the fan and well, the result is amazing. The fan can now run at anywhere from 350RPM up to the full 1600RPM. At 350RPM you can't even hear the fan when practicly pushing your ear into it, you just hear a little bit of airflow when you have your ear that close and at 1600RPM it can still cool propperly at full load.

Because of the fact that this still works and because the Cryorig R1 Ultimate (it's probably going to take till tuesday for me to get it) has 2 PWM fans, I made my own splitters for it and now I can probably run those fans at anywhere from almost 0RPM up to the maximum RPM they can handle.

 

I also added a 0RPM mode with the switches but my CPU heats up too quickly at 4.8GHz if it is cooled passive.

 

Tonight I may do some more cablemanagement but probably nothing besides that.

 

Tomorrow I might do a little bit more cablemanagement, glue the buttons to the motherboard plate or start my work on the rollercoaster (these last 2 require me to cablemanage first).

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #6 More cablemanagement and rollercoaster preparations

This is going to be a short update as almost all that I did was cablemanagement to make sure that no cable would get in the way of the way of the rollercoaster.

 

The only thing that had been added since the last time I did some cablemanagement was the thing with all the switches and my LEDs so that was basicly all I had to cablemanage for now. In the end I just threw most of my cables between the motherboard tray and the K'nex framework in an 'orderly' fashion (so it's 50% chaos, 50% neatly managed). I also stuck my front LEDs through my motherboard tray and I was planning on hotsnotting them but as the hole was the exact size of the LEDs they just stick in there perfectly (combined with the old hot snot safely sealing the LED contacts away). I took some more pictures of the cablemanagement and also of the motherboard tray switch+LED thingy. This time with the HDD activity LED on because of a crystaldiskmark benchmark of my HDD that I just so happen to have running in the background.

Spoiler

 

Now I just have to glue the power and reset switch in there and the motherboard tray should be completely finished. I am still in debate with myself over the idea of painting the whole plate.

 

I also thought it was time to dig my old K'nex rollercoaster parts up as after I have those switches glued into the motherboard tray it would be most logical step in this project.

 

I have ~2 meters of short orange track pieces that I won't be using and ~5 meters of longer blue track pieces that I will be using for this build as that will make the project name make more sense as the Dragon Khan is also partially blue (although they are just pastel blue supports on the real one). I also have 3 carts, 2 orange and 1 purple. I should also have some things lying around to bind the seperate carts into one train but I think I will keep the carts seperate.

 

Here is a quick pic I snapped of the carts+track parts.

Spoiler

 

So after hotsnotting the power and reset switches to the motherboard tray tomorrow I will finally start construction on this build's main attraction (pun intended). I already have something in mind but what exactly I'm planning for the rollercoaster is going to be a surprise but I can tell you that it isn't going to be your standard old rollercoaster design.

 

This build is getting more and more fun IMO and I hope the readers (if any) think so too.

[TheRandomness]

This is getting rather interesting. c:

[tomaatvk]

7 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

This is getting rather interesting. c:

Now it's just a matter of hoping that I don't manage to fry my whole computer because I connect a wire the wrong way :v

[theninja35]

So let me get this straight...you're building a "case" out of Knex...and then you're going to put Knex coaster track around it?

[tomaatvk]

36 minutes ago, theninja35 said:

So let me get this straight...you're building a "case" out of Knex...and then you're going to put Knex coaster track around it?

Well, the case will be made out of Knex and some motherboard tray from an 2003 computer and the rollercoaster won't just be around it.

On top of that I set up 2 switches to set the LEDs and fans to different modes (on/off/somewhere in between) and the case isn't really the standard design so if any it will still be special in terms of design.

I also do have one or 2 things on top of that but I'm not yet sure if I should.

[theninja35]

1 hour ago, tomaatvk said:

Well, the case will be made out of Knex and some motherboard tray from an 2003 computer and the rollercoaster won't just be around it.

On top of that I set up 2 switches to set the LEDs and fans to different modes (on/off/somewhere in between) and the case isn't really the standard design so if any it will still be special in terms of design.

I also do have one or 2 things on top of that but I'm not yet sure if I should.

Well, it sounds pretty fun and looks pretty cool. I've followed so I can see how the rest goes.

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #7 'Completing' the case and rollercoaster construction

Today it was finally time to slowly start moving to the second (or third if you count building the case and wiring it up as 2 seperate things) fase of this project. I was almost done with the case in the previous part and almost ready to start construction on the rollercoaster. Almost as in, I just needed to glue the power and reset button to the case and it would be finished.

 

So that is what I started off with today.

At first I took my motherboard (including everything directly mounted on the motherboard) off of the motherboard tray and I searched for my power and reset button that I had lying around somewhere in this mess that came into existance these past few days.

 

After that I flipped my PC motherboard tray down (with the expansion slots hanging off the table and a small wooden block under the other side of the plate so the switches wouldn't break), I grabbed the gluegun, put the buttons through the holes they were supposed to go through and just started pouring glue on it untill they didn't move anymore.

 

With the buttons glued in place I started putting everything back together, cablemanaged the 2 cables and the case is now (finally) fully wired up. I will include a few pictures of the buttons glued in there in the spoiler but nothing special besides the pure craftsmanship that it took to glue them like that (but seriously, if you don't want your eyes to bleed, don't look at the second picture).

Spoiler

 

At this point the case is fully wired up and ready for the next part of this project: the rollercoaster.

 

Lets start by grabbing all the K'nex I can find within a reasonable ammount of time, one box with normal K'nex, one with mini K'nex (which will be used to connect the rollercoaster to the normal K'nex) and one with stuff like gears.

Spoiler

 

The next step would be to start putting everything together, so that's exactly what I started doing.

I usually build my K'nex rollercoasters according to a specific order:

1. Start by figuring out where you want the chain for getting the carts higher up to run.
2. Actually build the final part of the rollercoaster as a run up to the chain part.
3. Build the bottom of the chain part including the gears in the lower part that are supposed to keep the chain running.
4. Leave the rest of the chain part and build roughly the last half of the rollercoaster.
5. After this, finish the rest of the chain part, throw the motor in there and check if everything is working propperly.
6. Figure out a way to get from the top of the chain part to there you stopped at step 4.
7. Start reinforcing the structure and make sure that the whole system works by testing it with a cart.
8. Start colour correction (as you can see, K'nex is very colourful but I don't want something I build like that so I try to get everything in as few colours as possible).
9. Do some finishing touches and you're finished.

 

Once I had figured out where I wanted the chain I built the last corner and I'll include a picture of that so you could get an idea of how this works in case you aren't really familiar with K'nex rollercoasters (big chance that's the case).

Spoiler

 

For the rest I just executed the steps I named above and I'm currently halfway through step number 7: I've strengthened the structure to the point that everything works but it's still a bit wobbly for my taste so I will improve that. I also still need to do the colour corrections and finishing touches.

 

During construction I noticed a few things:

• While building a K'nex rollercoaster it's always smart to do a lot of testing during construction, however, to supply power to the motor my PC needed to be on and the air surrounding my PC gets hot to the point that it's still barable but quite uncomfortable too after spending prolonged times in it.
• Building a rollercoaster (or anything for that matter) around an object that you can alter but has to remain the same shape and structure isn't the easiest thing, by far not.
• Building a rollercoaster around a PC means that it will get bigger, by a lot, by now this PC measures in at 50cm deep, 55 cm wide and 50cm tall. You can also add the hight of the cart to those dimensions because it will need some extra space on every side to not run into anything.
• After spending several hours in the weirdest positions trying to get the rollercoastertracks to snap into the pieces that are supposed to hold them, taking a break and just sitting down is the best feeling ever.

 

Because the rollercoaster isn't technically finished (still need to finish step 7,8 and 9) I don't want to spoil everything yet but I do have 2 pictures that I feel like sharing already.

Spoiler

 

I must also say that I have tried running 3 carts on this rollercoaster track already but I ran into 2 problems:

1. To not make this rollercoaster another 5-10cm bigger I took some sort of a shortcut at a certain place. Because of this shortcut it is now technically possible for 2 carts to hit eachother. The chance is small but with 3 carts running round it happends every once in a while and I have to push them to the chain manually (which I don't want to do that often).
2. The 3 carts that I have have different ammounts of friction working on the wheels. The difference is so big that 1 of them completes the track all the time, 1 stops at a certain point ~50% of the time and the third stops at that same point for roughly 10% of the time.

Because of this I have given up on running 3 but I don't want to give up on running 2. The one that completes it without a problem is already sitting on the track and I threw some oil on the one that didn't complete it for ~10% of the time hoping that will lower it to 0%.

 

I probably won't get a lot of time to work on this in the upcoming period but I will try to free some time every day to continue this project.

 

EDIT: I just nocticed that wide pictures are being squeezed together so if you want so see a picture without the squeezing problem, open the picture on a new tab.

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #8 Rollercoaster improvements and new parts

As I said in my previous update, I didn't get much time to do anything.

 

I did, however, manage to find some time to colourcorrect the rollercoaster. I'm almost finished with that, but sadly I don't have all the parts needed for finishing this at hand so I need to wait untill I have access to more K'nex (which should be this weekend).

Eventhough I couldn't continue my work on the colourcorrection, I did pretty much finish reinforcing the thing and I already made most of the finishing touches. I even managed to find the small rubber pieces needed to connect multiple carts together and I now, instead of having 1 cart, have a 3 cart train driving over the track.

 

Another note concerning the rollercoaster: K'nex motors have always been loud in my opinion but having it wired up to 5 instead of 3v makes this another dimension of loud. When comparing it with the reference cooler of a GTX 780 at full speed (4200RPM), the reference cooler is suddenly really quiet. May I also remind you of the fact that my case has no noise dampning for the GPU so it is the full noise created by a full speed reference cooler. Fun little fact: I already modded this reference 780 to have a fanless mode so after running it at full speed to compare the noise it went fanless for several minutes before slowly creeping back to ~800RPM.

 

The second part of this update, today I also recieved a package. My Cryorig R1 Ultimate+20 grams of MX-4+1 gram of Coolaboratory Liquid Ultra finally got delivered. I did not get any time to open them, take pictures and install everything but I did take a picture of the packaging (because yes, packaging is interesting).

Spoiler

 

Tomorrow, after work, I will probably have enough time to actually open the boxes and maybe even install it, lets hope so. In case I don't have the time it probably means that I had to work overtime and that only means more money for new parts. Tomorrow is going to be a good day

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #9 Cooler upgrade and strange CPU stuff

So today I decided it was time to throw my new CPU cooler in my rig, the Cryorig R1 Ultimate, to replace my Deepcool Gamer Storm Lucifer. I also wanted to replace the MX-4 inside my delidded CPU with Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra.

 

Lets start off by unpacking the Cryorig. Good looking cooler IMO.

Spoiler

Here are also some shots of the CPU cooler it will replace mounted on my Asrock Z77 extreme 4.

Spoiler

 

So now lets get that old piece of metal out of here and start working on the CPU. Just a matter of cleaning the MX-4 off and throwing some Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra inbetween the die and IHS. Sounds simple and it actually was.

Spoiler

 

Is it just me or is there quite some beauty to a 'naked' CPU. The reflecting die, the traces on the PCB, somehow I think it's beautiful.

 

So what is next, throwing it in there and putting the cooler on?

Well... Small problem. When I was getting ready to put the CPU back into the motherboard I noticed something strange. The CPU socket pins didn't look perfect, 1 looked slightly different than the rest. As you can imagine, my first reaction when I saw this contained words that could get me banned from here so lets not type them.

 

After looking at it for several minutes it seemed like it wasn't close to contacting any other pins and it looked like it might even be able to make contact with the CPU without me having to fix it.

 

Having enough faith in it and not wanting to look at it anymore I just carefully put my CPU in and mounted the Cryorig cooler on it (the edges of the CPU are filed down because they were a bit rough because of the delidding that I did several months ago).

Spoiler

 

Now I just have to put the motherboard back into the system and see if it still functions propperly.

 

I screwed it in there, hooked the cables up and pressed the power button.

 

Windows crashed upon boot and didn't want to work anymore. As you can imagine, I was losing my sh*t, untill, 3 minutes later, I discovered I forgot the sata power cable for my PCI-e SSD. I plugged it in, it worked and I was like (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

 

Time to get to work and get some baseline results. At 4.8GHz my CPU used to get ~90°C (depending on the room temperature which changes a lot). Now it gets to 70 with the same overclock!

 

I quickly stopped the test, increased the voltages and started testing 5GHz (though be it at ~1.5V) and it was only getting around 85°C, but then...

 

It crashed. I couldn't get it stable anymore at the same voltages I used to run it at. I decided to just dail it back to 4.5GHz at more than enough voltage (+0,050v while -0,010 used to be enough for 4.5GHz) and just ran a stresstest for an hour. It passed. At the moment I am trying a stresstest at 4.8GHz again with +0,200v instead of the +0,180v I used to run. Lets just hope that this overclock survives or else I may have indeed bent a pin. Maybe a power delivery pin that only kicks in under certain conditions but maybe worse.

 

I'm going to run a stresstest over the night and will report back tomorrow evening.

 

EDIT: FML, it crashed several minutes ago, a pin must be a problem then. That means I'll have to take my motherboard out again tomorrow. Wish me luck.

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #10 Motherboard pins repair

This is going to be a short update, just saying.

 

Yesterday it became apearant to me that my CPU wasn't functioning propperly and narrowing down all the problems it was probably because of that CPU socket pin.

 

I started tearing my CPU cooler off again which I put on just yesterday and I took the CPU out and there it was, a slightly bent pin. I tried to take a picture of it but it's extremely hard to see.

Spoiler

As you can see, that pin is off by a little bit.

 

I made sure that it was lit enough by pointing all the lights I had available at it, then grabbed a set of needles and started poking around carefully. I moved the pin a little, threw everything back together and hoped that it would work.

 

I booted the computer and well... It didn't work, because this time I forgot the PCI-e power cables for my GPU.

After sticking those in I started running stresstests and it didn't crash on stock. After that I started overclocking and it worked just fine, I'm currently running my 3770k at 'just' 4,8GHz as 4,9 takes a little but too high of a voltage IMO (1,45v). I will probably do a nightly stresstest but I think it will be fine this time around.

 

Sorry for not being able to do anything but weekend is approaching and eventhough I won't be able to work on it during the weekend (as I will be away), I will be able to get the final K'nex parts needed for the rollercoaster so I can finally finish that.

[Rodinski]

This is looking sweet!  Followed!

 

How do you find the Cool Factory stuff?

[tomaatvk]

1 minute ago, Rodinski said:

This is looking sweet!  Followed!

 

How do you find the Cool Factory stuff?

I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the project too.

 

With "the Cool Facotry stuff" I presume you mean the Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra because I don't know of any Cool Factory stuff.

 

I only applied it to my CPU die and that went without a problem. It also works as I expected, which is pretty good. One thing about it though, it's expencive AF for the ammount you get. Purchased it for ~€8 on an online store and it was only 1 gram. That is about 1/4th of the gold price. Overpriced AF if you ask me.

 

Small update on the overclocking, I ran a succesfull 12+ hour 4,5GHz stresstest and it didn't have any problems, right now I jumped to 4,8GHz and I'm testing that.

[tomaatvk]

Another small update, during the weekend I managed to gather all the pieces of K'nex that I needed to correct all the colours.

 

After taking the rollercoaster apart more than I would've liked I managed to replace all the incorrectly coloured parts with the right ones. Here is a quick shot of the parts that I had to tear out.

Spoiler

 

Sadly, because I had to take some parts of the framework out of the build to make the rollercoaster fit it lost some structural strength. I will try to fix this problem within the upcoming few days and after that I will be sure to upload a few pictures of how the build looks at the moment.

 

I will probably do all of this and just make a big update of everything that happened after update #10. It should be up by next sunday at the very least but I expect it to be up around thursday. It will also sort of depend on the weather, because if it is as rainy and hot as it has been these past few days, working on the PC will be hell as it will be way to hot in the case to work with it and I also won't be able to put the case outside to take some good pictures of it (there has been extreme rainfall in my area and it has also been slightly hot so working in a hot environment is even worse as usual).

[tomaatvk]

Started taking some pictures today, time for a little teaser

Spoiler

 

[tomaatvk]

UPDATE #11 Rollercoaster reveal and future plans

After I fixed the CPU stability problems (running 4,8GHz stable on my 3770k again but at lower temperatures than before) it was finally time to start throwing all the K'nex pieces that I managed to get last weekend into the case. This went with no troubles at all but then I started doing some structural reworking as I had to take some parts out before to make room for the rollercoaster tracks. This did go together with a few problems as when I wanted to add a part here it meant that I needed to change something in another place and so on. Eventually I did manage to get everything working and I now have a fully functional, propperly looking K'nex rollercoaster PC case.

 

I did not yet get the chance to take pictures with a better background (better as in, no ton of cables, no beer crate, no single-use barbeques and no desk in the picture) but I will wait with that untill the complete project is finished (or as good as finished) but I did take enough pictures of it to get the idea of how it looks and works. I also plan on shooting a video of the rollercoaster but that has to wait for now.

 

Lets start with 3 pictures to share the general idea

Spoiler

 

As you are able to see, it has no looping in it. I did try it but because of how K'nex rollercoaster rails and carts work you need to sacrifice ~0,5m of altitude for a single looping and I just didn't have that much to spare. I could turn this computer into some sort of huge ass tower with loopings and everything (I might actually do that at some point) but if I do it won't fit under my desk anymore which it needs to for the time being.

 

Below there will be 3 spoilers, the first one containing general overview pictures of the build, the second one containing pictures zoomed in on a specific part of the build and the third one showing off the PC in the dark.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

I hope you guys aren't too bothered with the picture quality.

 

But now that we got that out of the way, I'll give a text discription of the rollercoaster:

Looking at the case from the front it starts in the rear left part of the case and goes straight up through a chain. Once it has arrived at the top it will go down a little bit, let go of the chain, make a 90° turn around its own axle and make a big 180° turn overtop the CPU cooler, GPU and motherboard. With the track hanging that whole part so it gives way a little bit but not enough to have it touch any parts. After that 180° turn it will do another tighter 90° turn to end up behind the motherboard tray in the top right. This will be the first time that the rollercoaster goes through the case. The rail is also on its side at this point. It will exit the case at the rear and continue to travel from the rear right to the rear left. Back again at the rear left (behind the part of rails with the chain) it will make a tight 180° turn around the chain part of the rollercoaster and entering the middle of the case from the left. When traveling inside the case from left to right it will make a ~145° turn around its own axle and exit the case on the right side. It will make a tight 90° turn to the lower front of the case where it will make another tight 90° turn to have it travel from right to left. Arrived at the left it will make another tight 90° turn back to the start of the rollercoaster but before arriving there it will turn 90° around its own axle.

 

 

For now I'm done with the rollercoaster part of this build and it's time to talk about how I will continue this build.

• I have 1 more plan for the rollercoaster, I'm planning on spray painting the carts to make them black and red matching the theme a little better. I don't know when I will do this but it probably won't be really soon.
• Roughly half an hour ago I bought a used 5820k. It should be a good overclocking chip but we'll see how it will handle my cooling methods. It should arrive early next week.
• As you can probably imagine right now, I also need to get an X99 motherboard and DDR4 for that CPU. For the RAM I was thinking of ordering a kit of 32GB Kingston HyperX DDR4. That specific kit has 4 8GB sticks running at 3200MHz with a CL of 16 and it's one of the cheapest on the market ATM (I don't understand why though). For the motherboard I am still slightly unsure but I think I will go for a used Gigabyte GA X99 Gaming 7 WIFI but I want to know a little bit more about the power delivery system before I buy it.
• I am also thinking about throwing a new GPU into my PC. This will probably be something like a GTX 1070, a GTX 980 Ti or maybe a non-reference PCB 8GB RX 480 untill something new hits the market.

After finishing all of that stuff it is time to start working on my setup around the computer again. I will need to buy a few more cables like a longer DisplayPort cable for my 1440p ultrawide and as you should be able to see in the pictures it is time for me to redo my cable management AGAIN, urgh... Just to give you an idea, last time I did cablemanagement I weighed some of the cables (roughly 80% of them) and that heap of cables was 7,5kg. 7,5kg of cables! Between that last time I did cablemanagement and now I added several more cables and I still have more to add. Having to do this type of cablemanagement is something you wouldn't wish even upon your worst enemy. One may ask, why do I need that many cables. Well, it's because I have my PC hooked up to 3 monitors (1440p 21:9, 1080p 16:9 and 768 4:3) and another HDMI cable to hook my TV up too but it doesn't stop there. There are 2 speaker sets in my setup, one dolby 5.1 and one stereo with 2 speakers per channel and with 2 subwoofers, a VCR, a blu-ray player (integrated into the 5.1 speaker set but it needs a cable to one of the monitors), an HD TV tuner/recorder, a printer, periferals, a light and as you can imagine by now, 4 power bars to provide a power plug for everything. There are also switches everywhere, a ton of remotes and 2 jurassic park movies that I want to watch again. I also have extra cables everywhere so I can hook up my gamecube or something like that up to the stereo speaker set and the tv. There are also cables to hook my laptop and phone up to everything that it can be connected to. I know this is kind of BS but why not.

 

Lets see if I can come up with anything else to do, if you have an idea for something to add, please let me know.

 

EDIT: the RAM had false product details on the site I used to find them, it's only 16GB, time to search for something else 

[samcool55]

Just wondering but is it actually strong enough that you can pick it up and move it around?

I also built a K'nex pc about 8 years ago and i still have it, but it took years of tweaking and rebuilding before it was a solid structure.

Also if it's solid how much do the metal panels contribute to its overall strength?

[brwainer]

I've been waiting to say this but now that you've posted pictures of the coaster I can wait no longer: your images get distorted a lot on mobile. It's like they have a fixed height, but are taking on the width of the display, meaning the are tall and skinny. From what I can see, this looks really cool though!

[tomaatvk]

2 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Just wondering but is it actually strong enough that you can pick it up and move it around?

I also built a K'nex pc about 8 years ago and i still have it, but it took years of tweaking and rebuilding before it was a solid structure.

Also if it's solid how much do the metal panels contribute to its overall strength?

The strength of the construction has always been at the top of my mind ever since my first K'nex computer case (built 0,5-1 year ago). The first one was so strong that I could put an easy 90-100kg on top of the K'nex and it wouldn't move (I didn't dare to put more on top of it). This one however isn't that strong as the construction is much more open (so weaker). However, it is still built with a lot of triangles (strongest shape as they say) and you can still push down on the case as much as you want, it won't move. After adding the metal plate to the case it just had an extra part to distribute any forces applied to the case. It doesn't add that much strength to the case but it just offers a bit of protection, that's all.

As for picking it up, that was one of the things that was easy to do at first but after adding the rollercoast became harder. I eventually had to rework the back a little bit but now you can pick the top of the case up with 1 hand and just move it around like that. It's strong AF.

 

Also, could I as for a picture of your K'nex case as I am kind of curious how others make them?

 

In the mean time I also discovered that that 32GB set of RAM was only 16GB of RAM, the site I used to find it had incorrect information, sigh. I'm looking at other sets of RAM and it's most likely going to be a kit of 2 16GB  HyperX Fury black sticks @2133MHz with CL of 14 for €10 more, I knew the 32GB of 3200MHz CL 16 was too good to be true.

 

3 minutes ago, brwainer said:

I've been waiting to say this but now that you've posted pictures of the coaster I can wait no longer: your images get distorted a lot on mobile. It's like they have a fixed height, but are taking on the width of the display, meaning the are tall and skinny. From what I can see, this looks really cool though!

I've also noticed that on desktop, what helps is opening the pictures in a new tab and they should look fine in the new tab.