Project: Node way will it fit! - A hardline watercooled Node202

[SonoDanshi]

 

Since roughly the start of 2016 I've been contemplating a new watercooling project, but wasn't sure what to do as I was happy with my main rig already. Then my thoughts turned to upgrading my HTPC so it could play games as well as serve media (with the aim to dust off my racing seat/wheel and play on the htpc. I spent some time thinking about how to approach this and then @red773 made a thread about how he'd watercooled a node202 which really kicked off my interest in making this a reality - although I wanted to go hardline and also wanted it to look completely stock from the outside (so no chopping the top of the case up to let tubes fit etc...).

 

Fast forward a few weeks and I had pretty much everything I needed apart from the pump/res (more on that in a later post) and the final list of fittings.

 

For anyone who wants a complete parts list you can see the pcpp link in the spoiler..

Spoiler

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor  (Purchased For $238.99) 
Motherboard: Asus Z170I PRO GAMING Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard  (Purchased For $164.99) 
Memory: G.Skill TridentZ Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  (Purchased For $209.99) 
Storage: Samsung 950 PRO 256GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  (Purchased For $181.99) 
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon R9 Nano 4GB Video Card  (Purchased For $484.98) 
Case: Fractal Design Node 202 HTPC Case  (Purchased For $87.98) 
Power Supply: Silverstone Strider Gold 450W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular SFX Power Supply  (Purchased For $88.99) 
Other: EK-CoolStream SE 240 (Slim Dual) (Purchased For $54.99)
Other: EK-Supremacy EVO CPU Water Block - Nickel/Plexi (Purchased For $77.95)
Other: 2x Bitspower None Chamfer PETG 12mm OD Tube Length 1000mm (Purchased For $9.98)
Other: Mayhems Dye - 15ml Orange (Purchased For $8.95)
Other: EK-FC R9 Nano - Nickel (Purchased For $122.99)
Other: EK-FC R9 Nano Backplate - Black (Purchased For $32.99)
Other: EK-FC Terminal Angled (Purchased For $17.99)
Other: 3x Bitspower G1/4" Black Sparkle Enhance Multi-Link For Acrylic Tube OD 12MM (Purchased For $17.85)
Other: 5x Bitspower Black Sparkle Enhance Rotary 90-Degree Multi-Link Adapter (Purchased For $69.75)
Other: Bitspower Black Sparkle T-Block With Triple IG1/4" (Purchased For $7.99)
Other: 2x Bitspower Black Sparkle 90-Degree With Dual Rotary Inner G1/4" Extender (Purchased For $29.90)
Other: 2x Bitspower Black Sparkle 90-Degree With Dual Rotary G1/4" Extender (Purchased For $27.90)
Other: Bitspower G 1/4" Black Sparkle Rotary 45 Degree IG 1/4" Adapter (Purchased For $9.95)
Other: 2x Bitspower G 1/4" Black Sparkle Rotary 90 Degree IG 1/4" Adapter (Purchased For $21.90)
Other: Bitspower G 1/4" Black Sparkle 90 Degree IG 1/4" Adapter (Purchased For $6.99)
Other: Bitspower BP-BSWP-C60 G1/4" Black Sparkle IG1/4" Extender - 15mm (Purchased For $4.99)
Other: Bitspower BP-MVV-BK Mini-Valve - Black Sparkle (Purchased For $21.99)
Other: Bitspower G1/4" Black Sparkle Stop Fitting (Purchased For $4.99)
Other: XSPC G1/4" Male to Male Rotary Fitting - Black Chrome Finish (Purchased For $3.99)
Other: Koolance PMP-420 Pump G1/4 BSP (Purchased For $69.99)
Other: USB 3.0 20-Pin Internal Header Adapter Cable (Low Profile Connector) (Purchased For $14.99)
Other: 2x Scythe Slip Stream Slim 120mm Case Fan (SY1212SL12L) (Purchased For $30.00)
Total: $2126.92
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-30 16:30 EDT-0400

 

Before I even consider putting any of the watercooling parts together, I had to fix a huge issue..... The motherboard and RAM are red and black - which I absolutely detest (sorry to the millions out there who love it). I stripped off everything with red paint on it and already thought the bare components looked a lot better...

 

For the heatsinks, I simply masked off all the black areas leaving the red paint exposed before giving it a light sand. The RAM accents were just sanded and the chipset heatsink had a combination of masking and being attacked with a sharp blade to remove the plastic covering it came with to expose the red paint.

 

As I live in a high rise apartment, I don't have access to large areas to put together a spray booth so I had to go ghetto on it in my living room!

 

A few coats later and it looked a bit like this

 

 

That's it for now but plenty of updates and pics to follow (I'll add spoilers to the first post for late comers).

 

UPDATE 1:

Spoiler

On 5/31/2016 at 6:25 PM, SonoDanshi said:

Another day, another update then....

 

Now that I have the painting out of the way, my attention turned to the complete lack of space for a custom loop as well as all of the cables being the wrong length.

 

I figured that one of the largest problems was going to be fitting a pump/res inside the case as well as traversing between the 2 "zones" Fractal have created. They do provide a small cut out for cables but this was going to be nowhere near big enough for what I needed. Time to mask up, mark up and chop up!

 

 

After a bit of effort I had a nice big gap that would help me with the res/pump as well as easily pass the cables and tubing between zones....

 

With that out of the way I wanted to find a way of mounting the radiator that would still let me cleanly(ish) route the tubing around the system so I mocked up a rough template with the mounting points marked out.

 

A little bit of drilling later and it fits like a glove!

 

 

One of the downsides of it fitting like a glove is that the handy power plug at the back of the case no longer fits, so I had to throw that away. And as the cable running to the PSU was attached to this and is specially designed to fit in the tight confines of the case when plugged into the PSU, I had to keep the cable and splice a longer plug onto the other end so it would function as a normal cable and also allow room for the radiator to fit. I also had to cut up a small piece of metal plate to act as a patch panel for the hole left by removing the original plug (apologies for how rough it is, but it is almost completely hidden by the outer shell of the case once reassembled.

 

 

With all the metal chopping out of the way, it's time for a bit more soldering. For some reason, the front USB3 header cable is long enough to keep owners of even the largest cases happy and in a case as tight on space as this one is, that simply won't do. Let the madness commence!

 

 

And here it is all tucked away and the right length.

 

That's it for now. Stay tuned for more cables and the weird little reservoir in the next update!

 

UPDATE 2:

Spoiler

Time to pretend I'm Microsoft and force another update on you all

 

As you may have already noticed, but this thing is going to have a small touch of orange in it, and I decided that the stock cables that come with the PSU were ugly, too long, and not orange enough for my liking. Cue a nice delivery of goodies.

 

This was my very first attempt at making my own cables let along going with the "heatshrink-less" method and I had some successes, some failures, but mostly I melted the skin off the end of my fingers....  Both the EPS and PCI-E cables went smoothly as there aren't many of them and they are long enough to forgive any minor mistakes.

 

 

You can see attempt 2 of the 24 pin on the floor in the picture above, and this is what remained of attempt 3 as I just couldn't get the cables seated properly and behaving as I wanted...

 

I finally got the hang of it though and finished with something I was happy with.

 

I also sleeved the 3 cables going to the fan headers (2 rad fans and the pump) and pretty happy with the way the 2 rad fans worked out.

 

With the cables out of the way, I could finally get to something watercooling related - and that was the reservoir. I searched absolutely everywhere for a small reservoir that would actually fit into the tiny gap I had left in the case, but the smallest one I could find was about 3 times too big. After briefly contemplating the logistics of a hardline loop with no res (call it a temporary moment of insanity) I decided the only thing I could do was buy some acrylic and make my own tiny little res. I mocked it up with a piece of paper to see how stupid it was going to be, and after a few tears I moved onto getting it done.

 

Hmmm that USB cable I went to the trouble of shortening sure looks like it's going to be a problem......

 

The first piece of acrylic cut, drilled, tapped and tested with a Bitspower fitting.

 

Ready to glue. Acrylic cement sure takes skill to work with...

 

Guess I should probably check to see if it can actually hold water without leaking. Sorry about the joins being pretty crappy. It is definitely water tight and I'm going to blame the fact that I broke my wrist halfway through this project which made doing things ..... troublesome.

 

And here's the little she-devil wedged in her new home. And as you can see, that USB3 cable had to go as it was completely blocking where the inlet to the res is. I managed to find an ultra low profile extension that I could run behind the pump and back into the other zone of the case to hook up to the main USB3 cable.

 

That's it for today. Sorry for all the boring stuff, but we should get some eye candy tomorrow. As always I appreciate any feedback (positive or otherwise).

 

UPDATE 3:

Spoiler

This should be the penultimate update for Phase 1 of this project, so lets get straight to it.

 

I pretty much had 1 choice of graphics card for this build, as I wanted something as powerful as possible that I could watercool, was short in length 
(so it didn't block both rad fans) and also only took up a single expansion slot otherwise it would interfere with the radiator. So the R9 Nano it is then!

 

Here it is with the waterblock fitted along with the inlet/outlet block..... Wow that thing is big and I don't think it's going to give me enough room to actually route the pipes inside the case...

 

Luckily EK also offer angled terminals which give me the room I need.

 

So along with the challenges of squeezing all the watercooling gear in here, because it is a hardline loop, I need to think about draining it. This weird little group of fittings - whilst not very pretty, should get the job done.

 

With it in place (temporarily) this is how it should look - and yes I can open and shut the valve without interfering with the fan blades:

 

Hooking up the radiator and the pump was always going to be tricky as this is one of the points where I have to jump between the 2 case "zones" and to make matters worse the clearance of everything was extremely tight.

 

I tried to do this with petg but there simply wasn't enough space and distance to get a clean bend without forcing the pump out of position and meaning the res and other connections would never clear other hardware.

 

I ended up spending a small fortune on 5 interconnecting fittings to get a very sharp turn completed.

 

The next problem area was always going to be connecting the CPU block and the res because it has to squeeze between the RAM, GPU riser and the return feed from the GPU.

 

I really don't know what I was worried about - there's LOADS of room....

 

And believe it or not that is the loop fully connected up to everything. My final update tomorrow will show the loop filled and leak tested with everything finally crammed into place.

 

UPDATE 4:

Spoiler

Final update time!

 

So carrying on from the last update, as I had everything connected I figured it was time to leak test. Time for lots of paper towels and a light color tint to the water to highlight any problems.

 

As the res was so small and the connection to the pump is right near the top, I had to add a temporary tube to the fill port that would give me enough liquid to cycle the pump on and off without it running dry for too long.  The tube also helped with the bleeding as it allowed air top bubble up and escape wit the water level higher than the res.

 

To my complete and utter surprise absolutely nothing leaked at all and after adding a bit more dye to the loop it looked like this:

 

 

 

 

Here's a better look at the res when fully topped up.

 

 

And finally... here she is with everything in place and ready to roll.

 

 

I haven't done a great deal of benching and haven't done any overclocking yet, but the CPU idles at 24c and peaked out at 67c on the highest core when benchmarking. I definitely plan to push things beyond stock but with such small thermal capacity I imagine things will spike very quickly beyond a certain point. I also have plans to cut the top of the Node202 out and replace it with some beveled tempered glass so I can actually see all the hard work that has gone into it.

 

[TheRandomness]

omg yes Trident Z <3

Looks very interesting, following c:

[TheDev]

this looks like its going to be one hell of a build...it already does

[Bananasplit_00]

looks like it could be a cool build, followed 

[Bananasplit_00]

also did you do anything with the heatsinks because that board and RAM looks like stock... 

[SonoDanshi]

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

also did you do anything with the heatsinks because that board and RAM looks like stock... 

Yes I did, but I used my phone to take the after pic and it is over-exposed and looks a lot darker that it really is. If you look at the banner image at the very top you can see the true orange color.

[Bananasplit_00]

9 minutes ago, SonoDanshi said:

Yes I did, but I used my phone to take the after pic and it is over-exposed and looks a lot darker that it really is. If you look at the banner image at the very top you can see the true orange color.

oh ok yah that looks sweet  

[SidewinderB4]

Suppose I best give you a follow then and see how you got on through this process.. 

 

Looks fairly interesting I suppose

 

Edit: On a serious note, really looking forward to the updates and progress on this build. I can't imagine how much stress doing something so big in something so small must have caused.

[SonoDanshi]

Out of interest, has anyone else seen a fully watercooled Node 202 before? I searched high and low and apart from red773's close attempt, and Kyle (Awesomesauce Network) smashing in an AIO for his "go-anywhere" editing rig, I haven't been able to find a single example of this being done...

[SidewinderB4]

Can't say I have! Plenty of posts asking about it or as you say doing AIO but not a full system.

 

I'd imagine with the time and effort it must take to do it, someone would have posted about it somewhere on the interwebs.

 

Or at least Fractal Design would have posted about it somewhere as I'm sure they'd love to see it..

[SonoDanshi]

Another day, another update then....

 

Now that I have the painting out of the way, my attention turned to the complete lack of space for a custom loop as well as all of the cables being the wrong length.

 

I figured that one of the largest problems was going to be fitting a pump/res inside the case as well as traversing between the 2 "zones" Fractal have created. They do provide a small cut out for cables but this was going to be nowhere near big enough for what I needed. Time to mask up, mark up and chop up!

 

 

After a bit of effort I had a nice big gap that would help me with the res/pump as well as easily pass the cables and tubing between zones....

 

With that out of the way I wanted to find a way of mounting the radiator that would still let me cleanly(ish) route the tubing around the system so I mocked up a rough template with the mounting points marked out.

 

A little bit of drilling later and it fits like a glove!

 

 

One of the downsides of it fitting like a glove is that the handy power plug at the back of the case no longer fits, so I had to throw that away. And as the cable running to the PSU was attached to this and is specially designed to fit in the tight confines of the case when plugged into the PSU, I had to keep the cable and splice a longer plug onto the other end so it would function as a normal cable and also allow room for the radiator to fit. I also had to cut up a small piece of metal plate to act as a patch panel for the hole left by removing the original plug (apologies for how rough it is, but it is almost completely hidden by the outer shell of the case once reassembled.

 

 

With all the metal chopping out of the way, it's time for a bit more soldering. For some reason, the front USB3 header cable is long enough to keep owners of even the largest cases happy and in a case as tight on space as this one is, that simply won't do. Let the madness commence!

 

 

And here it is all tucked away and the right length.

 

That's it for now. Stay tuned for more cables and the weird little reservoir in the next update!

[SidewinderB4]

Awesome job so far. Can't wait to see the finished product, you're certainly more hands on with this than anything I've ever done. Kudos!

 

I'm also loving the rubber lining around the chopped area, most would just leave that how it was, nice touch!

[RustyHamrLickr]

Ambitious project that's for sure. I like your approach so far, and you're doing things right I think.

I was always bothered by the excessive length of cables from the PSU and for the USB headers in the 202, I think it's kust making things harder for cable management and simply gets in the way.

Where will you put the GPU? If it's in the usual place, will you have to use only one fan for the rad?

[SonoDanshi]

3 minutes ago, RustyHamrLickr said:

Ambitious project that's for sure. I like your approach so far, and you're doing things right I think.

I was always bothered by the excessive length of cables from the PSU and for the USB headers in the 202, I think it's kust making things harder for cable management and simply gets in the way.

Where will you put the GPU? If it's in the usual place, will you have to use only one fan for the rad?

Yes the GPU is going to use the standard location and with the EK rad (26mm thick) and some thin profile fans, I can have 2x120mm fans on the rad with a littel bit of space between the fan and the water block. It's certainly going to impact airflow, but it will definitely be better than nothing at all.

[OPSJono]

Holy S*#!,

 

I have a pretty standard Node 202 build. (See Sig).

 

I did think of water cooling, but I didn't think that it would be even possible to get a rad + fans + GPU in there.

 

Good luck to you! Followed.

[SonoDanshi]

Time to pretend I'm Microsoft and force another update on you all

 

As you may have already noticed, but this thing is going to have a small touch of orange in it, and I decided that the stock cables that come with the PSU were ugly, too long, and not orange enough for my liking. Cue a nice delivery of goodies.

 

This was my very first attempt at making my own cables let along going with the "heatshrink-less" method and I had some successes, some failures, but mostly I melted the skin off the end of my fingers....  Both the EPS and PCI-E cables went smoothly as there aren't many of them and they are long enough to forgive any minor mistakes.

 

 

You can see attempt 2 of the 24 pin on the floor in the picture above, and this is what remained of attempt 3 as I just couldn't get the cables seated properly and behaving as I wanted...

 

I finally got the hang of it though and finished with something I was happy with.

 

I also sleeved the 3 cables going to the fan headers (2 rad fans and the pump) and pretty happy with the way the 2 rad fans worked out.

 

With the cables out of the way, I could finally get to something watercooling related - and that was the reservoir. I searched absolutely everywhere for a small reservoir that would actually fit into the tiny gap I had left in the case, but the smallest one I could find was about 3 times too big. After briefly contemplating the logistics of a hardline loop with no res (call it a temporary moment of insanity) I decided the only thing I could do was buy some acrylic and make my own tiny little res. I mocked it up with a piece of paper to see how stupid it was going to be, and after a few tears I moved onto getting it done.

 

Hmmm that USB cable I went to the trouble of shortening sure looks like it's going to be a problem......

 

The first piece of acrylic cut, drilled, tapped and tested with a Bitspower fitting.

 

Ready to glue. Acrylic cement sure takes skill to work with...

 

Guess I should probably check to see if it can actually hold water without leaking. Sorry about the joins being pretty crappy. It is definitely water tight and I'm going to blame the fact that I broke my wrist halfway through this project which made doing things ..... troublesome.

 

And here's the little she-devil wedged in her new home. And as you can see, that USB3 cable had to go as it was completely blocking where the inlet to the res is. I managed to find an ultra low profile extension that I could run behind the pump and back into the other zone of the case to hook up to the main USB3 cable.

 

That's it for today. Sorry for all the boring stuff, but we should get some eye candy tomorrow. As always I appreciate any feedback (positive or otherwise).

[Dackzy]

very nice build.

[Heesleemer]

WAMMY 

[SidewinderB4]

Looking good! Loving the sleeving and choice of colours. 

 

Could do with something like that in my rig. Roughly how long did it take you to make each cable? Seems to me you did a very good job for a first time attempt, especially with a broken wrist! 

 

Looking forward to the next uodate tonight. 

[SonoDanshi]

50 minutes ago, Heesleemer said:

WAMMY 

KAPOW!

41 minutes ago, SidewinderB4 said:

Looking good! Loving the sleeving and choice of colours. 

 

Could do with something like that in my rig. Roughly how long did it take you to make each cable? Seems to me you did a very good job for a first time attempt, especially with a broken wrist! 

 

Looking forward to the next uodate tonight. 

Well the broken wrist hindered me a bit so I had to use my teeth and my good hand. That took a looong time. Towards the end though as my fingers started working again, it literally becomes maybe 3-4 minutes per wire once you get into a groove for the actual making part (and assuming you have the right tools), but measuring up the wires and getting it combed and plugged in all takes time as well. 

[SonoDanshi]

This should be the penultimate update for Phase 1 of this project, so lets get straight to it.

 

I pretty much had 1 choice of graphics card for this build, as I wanted something as powerful as possible that I could watercool, was short in length 
(so it didn't block both rad fans) and also only took up a single expansion slot otherwise it would interfere with the radiator. So the R9 Nano it is then!

 

Here it is with the waterblock fitted along with the inlet/outlet block..... Wow that thing is big and I don't think it's going to give me enough room to actually route the pipes inside the case...

 

Luckily EK also offer angled terminals which give me the room I need.

 

So along with the challenges of squeezing all the watercooling gear in here, because it is a hardline loop, I need to think about draining it. This weird little group of fittings - whilst not very pretty, should get the job done.

 

With it in place (temporarily) this is how it should look - and yes I can open and shut the valve without interfering with the fan blades:

 

Hooking up the radiator and the pump was always going to be tricky as this is one of the points where I have to jump between the 2 case "zones" and to make matters worse the clearance of everything was extremely tight.

 

I tried to do this with petg but there simply wasn't enough space and distance to get a clean bend without forcing the pump out of position and meaning the res and other connections would never clear other hardware.

 

I ended up spending a small fortune on 5 interconnecting fittings to get a very sharp turn completed.

 

The next problem area was always going to be connecting the CPU block and the res because it has to squeeze between the RAM, GPU riser and the return feed from the GPU.

 

I really don't know what I was worried about - there's LOADS of room....

 

And believe it or not that is the loop fully connected up to everything. My final update tomorrow will show the loop filled and leak tested with everything finally crammed into place.

Edited June 2, 2016 by SonoDanshi

[SonoDanshi]

Sorry about the mess up there, I clicked post instead of insert image  so had to edit quickly.

[SidewinderB4]

Yikes.

 

Very very tight fitting in there. I can see why people didn't want to take up the challenge. haha.

 

That last shot really puts it in to perspective of how small the Res is! What's the capacity of that thing? Surely it can't be more than 30-40ml?

[SonoDanshi]

14 minutes ago, SidewinderB4 said:

Yikes.

 

Very very tight fitting in there. I can see why people didn't want to take up the challenge. haha.

 

That last shot really puts it in to perspective of how small the Res is! What's the capacity of that thing? Surely it can't be more than 30-40ml?

I never measured when I was filling but you're not far off - I was thinking 25-30ml

[SonoDanshi]

Final update time!

 

So carrying on from the last update, as I had everything connected I figured it was time to leak test. Time for lots of paper towels and a light color tint to the water to highlight any problems.

 

As the res was so small and the connection to the pump is right near the top, I had to add a temporary tube to the fill port that would give me enough liquid to cycle the pump on and off without it running dry for too long.  The tube also helped with the bleeding as it allowed air top bubble up and escape wit the water level higher than the res.

 

To my complete and utter surprise absolutely nothing leaked at all and after adding a bit more dye to the loop it looked like this:

 

 

 

 

Here's a better look at the res when fully topped up.

 

 

And finally... here she is with everything in place and ready to roll.

 

 

I haven't done a great deal of benching and haven't done any overclocking yet, but the CPU idles at 24c and peaked out at 67c on the highest core when benchmarking. I definitely plan to push things beyond stock but with such small thermal capacity I imagine things will spike very quickly beyond a certain point. I also have plans to cut the top of the Node202 out and replace it with some beveled tempered glass so I can actually see all the hard work that has gone into it.