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Project Dianoga

AlienALX

Some one gave it to me at the beginning. That and the front rad.

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On 10/23/2016 at 7:54 AM, AlienALX said:

Some one gave it to me at the beginning. That and the front rad.

I was just wondering because I had bid on a dual DDC Res on eBay and didn't win it, so I wondered if you had gotten it.

 

BTW even if it had been you that got it, I would've been fine with it because I came up with a better solution for the project I was working on.

 

Can't wait to see the final thing!

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Thanks dude. I've had it about six weeks or so. Plus I live in the UK haha, so that would have been a bit expensive on the shipping :D

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6 hours ago, AlienALX said:

Plus I live in the UK haha, so that would have been a bit expensive on the shipping :D

Yeah, no kidding! The shipping on it was already absurd in the US.

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5 hours ago, Alec M said:

Yeah, no kidding! The shipping on it was already absurd in the US.

I tell you what though dude the pump is really strong. I was getting worried that I may have asked a little too much of it but I can see now why the pumps are so expensive. When I first got the res my first thought was "Oh, it takes two pumps, I will add another". My second thought was "God damn maybe I won't add another pump". I was amazed how quickly it filled the loop and returned the liquid back to the res tbh.

 

Oh yeah a short update. The rig is now about 90% complete. All I need to do is -

 

1. Make two LED (single) boards for the side panels. Oh yeah and a fan for the side panel (EVGA spare one)

2. Fit the side panels.

3. Wait for the sun to come out so I can take the final pics.

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Cool! can't wait to see the final pics!

 

I've heard that the DDC pumps are noisy, is this true?

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47 minutes ago, Alec M said:

Cool! can't wait to see the final pics!

 

I've heard that the DDC pumps are noisy, is this true?

 

No. Well, at least not to me. All I get from the rig is a very faint whirr and it's not the pump. I mean you can watch the video with headphones on and it's inaudible tbh.

 

I was poking around in it yesterday and stopped the ram fan and the whirr immediately stopped. I'm faced with two choices, leave it as it is or disconnect it. It is already running at 7v and won't even spin up at 5v. Mind you when I say faint I mean very, very faint. One thing Dianoga does do is put all of my other rigs to shame for noise. I've never had a rig so quiet tbh. I thought my triad rig was quiet when I basically removed all of the GPU fans and ran it on AIO but damn, it's actually really noisy compared to this rig.

 

I'm really looking forward to getting it all wired in. I need to find my USB switch box so I can run both my gaming rig (Triad) and Linux rig from the same peripherals but I have one of those somewhere. Works good too, but I might have robbed the USB A-B cables from it... I've even got a headphone amp and set of headphones going spare, so I don't need to connect it to any speakers.

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Oh. I knew someone that said their DDC pump whined a lot, although their pump block could've had manufacturing problems.

it should be easy enough to get a quieter fan of that size, I've seen plenty.

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A summary of how I am thinking. It begins with C and rhymes with stunt, blunt, and runt.

 

IMG_20161026_232701_zpslu24uyja.jpg

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The block is awesome. Look at the top fitting in it though, it's leaking from the rotary part :(

 

That means a complete tear down.

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Well actually that wasn't so bad. I timed myself and it took about five minutes.

 

rfG3OF9.jpg?1

 

I suppose it gave me a chance to test out my drain idea. As you can see I designed it so that the GPU was on rotaries at both ends, meaning it just simply swings out. You then undo the 90' farthest right and when that has drained you open the ball valve, dry off the 90' which is now empty and then blow :D

 

I gotta admit I actually quite enjoyed that rofl.

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Yay :)

 

I was poking around on OCUK earlier looking for rotary fittings and I found these on clearance.

 

hrFSzMB.jpg

 

In a four pack for £7.99 :D

 

JC3bv4j.jpg

 

So now I can replace both of the odd coloured ones with green ones and make up two new 45 deg rotary fittings with these, which I have ordered two of.

 

DgXtHlO.jpg

 

So hopefully early next week (well, or the weekend, free second class) I can get it put back together again :D

Huge thanks to OCUK (they're in my thanks list any way) but I've bought quite a few fittings cheap now from them. Been a life saver three times !

 

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Wow. So last night I decided to strip out the bottom 45' fitting to the 120 rad. When I got it out it too had a couple of beads of green coolant around the seal. Good thing I ripped it out really. Any way, I have the replacements coming tomorrow (XSPC) but I noticed these on OCUK today for £1.99 each.

 

E7ULCiy.jpg

 

They were showing four in stock so I ordered all four. My reasoning was they are obviously better than £4 full priced XSPC fittings, and because my block is copper they would look OK. However, I then got an email from OCUK saying they only had three in stock (which was fine, I only need two) so they are replacing the 4th with a black one.

So hopefully they will be here soon. I will probably use those tbh, it's a pretty critical connection is the CPU block.

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sG6BybZ.jpg?1

 

Just Dr Dropping it now. It seems fine though. I wasn't going to use the XSPC fittings but when they arrived they were considerably more chunky than they looked. They're also stiff, so my hands are now like super buggered.

 

If it holds pressure for another 30 mins I will start filling it again :) I mean in theory it never leaked from anywhere else so if it does now it's highly likely to be from the new fittings and stuff, but they feel super firm.

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Take two lol. It can only leak from the new fittings and I've left plenty of air pressure in them (and wiggled them etc, they're rock solid) so I deemed it safe to be filled. This time though I will leave it for a day or so before igniting the hardware again (he said, not being quite sure...).

 

 

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Update. This will be quite long due to me philosophising over water cooling and whether it was worth it or not. Not just worth it financially (note before I even begin, it wasn't worth it financially. It's cost me a small fortune even with half of it being free !) and as to whether the final result was worth it. I would say on that I am completely happy, thrilled even.

 

I've not been putting up rig pics for a while as I had to take it all apart again after the leak but I now have the face plate mounted up properly and bolted on (something I thought I was not going to be able to do due to a mistake I made :D ) but any way, just leak testing it now with paper towels etc so it looks stupid any way.

OK, so here is the total cost of Dianoga. And when I say total cost I mean, total cost. Even though I probably have £30 kicking around in spare fittings and £10 worth of bolts I did not use or only used half of etc. I have, however, left out any tools whatsoever because I do not count those into the costs of builds. They will all be reused at some point any way no doubt and well yeah, they're tools.

 

Total cost of Dianoga



PC itself - free

 

CPU block - £10.53
GPU block - £16.09
M3 black bolts - £4.78 (not used)
Molex - 6 fan distro - £4.70
NIC card for killer - £4.39
8 x LED strip - £4.44
Alien head metal badges £3.08 (not used.. Yet...)
20 Green pre wired 12v single LED - £2.99
UNC bolts short (for fans) - £1.99
UNC bolts long (for fans) - £5.89
Steel mesh - £3.19
50mm fan for memory cooler - £0.99
Green dust caps - £2.99
Memory cooler - £13.99
Lime A4 vinyl X2 - £1.98
Met green candy apple vinyl - £6.58
Green SATA cable - £3.29
Bitfenix Alchemy USB 2.0 extension (black) - £5.99
Feet - £8
Fans - £39.94

 

Fittings

 

O-rings - £3.30
Barrow fittings - £5.60
Hose - £10.77
XSPC straight - £6.64 and £7.80
45' after refund - £4.72
Acrylic - £17.88
Black acrylic (A4 ) - £3.85
OCUK order 1 - £10.73 (ball valve)
OCUK order 2 - £10.98 (coolant and face plate for res)
OCUK order 3 - £12.97 (fittings and coolant)
OCUK order 4 - £16.97 (fittings)
OCUK order 4 (XSPC temp guage) - £5.99
Other order 1 - £11.92
Other order 2 - £17.92
Rear radiator - £10

Total cost £303.86

 

At some point today I will rake back through the figures and basically deduct anything that I did not use. For example to this I bought 6 Thermochill fittings that are still wrapped in paper, four Monsoon 45' as back ups, a white chain gun fitting no longer needed and so on.

So that's the cost of water cooling a PC "on the cheap". When I say on the cheap I mean it. Every fitting was at least 1/4 of the price it should have been. It's actually quite scary when you sit down and do the calculations. You start to see the costs rack up and then realise just how much you've been had :D Joking aside though I have really enjoyed the project so far and a couple of hours will get me to the finish line. I will then snap some pics, before a complete redesign of the living room and most notably PC area.

 

Three days ago my wife (after having used her desktop only twice) said I could have it back. It's not just any old desktop either. 2009 Area 51 8 core Ivy with a Fury X and all bionic fans and AIOs. So my plan is to basically take all three desktops down, get rid of her chair, monitor and speakers and then set all three desktops up on her old desk and get myself a 4 port USB switch KVM thing. I don't need to switch video, as my monitor has three inputs IIRC so I only need to switch the K M and my mic.

Pics coming soon (I promise) but until then it's all something to ponder :)

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Where were you while we were getting high?

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So yeah imaging buying a proper EK stuff, where is gpu waterblocks starts from 85 for simple and 115 full cover, cpu 50 and more, a pump with high flow top 70 and it is only a beginning. So spending a 1k, if it's a dual gpu system isn't a joke. So people be aware before diving into water cooling xD

i3570k @4300Asus P8Z77-VKingston Fury 16Gb DDR3Asus 7970 Direct CUII TOP x2Samsung 830 256Gb, Enthoo Primo, EVGA 1000W P2 psu

Corsair K90Logitech G9xSamsung S27A750D 3D monitor, Pioneer A400Monitor Audio BR2 - 600T Enthoo Water Cooling Build blog

Pentium 4 HT 3.2GHz, Radeon X800Pro 256Mb, 2Gb DDR Ram, WinXP - Retro'04 Build log

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About Waynio.

 

Waynio, AKA Wayne Wilkinson was a modder who used to frequent the Bit-Tech community. That was where I met Wayne. Wayne's work was incredible, and he soon became the modder I looked up to. Wayne was such a nice person.

 

Sadly Wayne died recently of a very aggressive form of cancer. Please take the time to have a look through Wayne's work logs. You can find them [http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=3783064&postcount=26]here

 

Even though this build is not befitting of the work Wayne produced and his incredible talent I would still like to dedicate this build to him.

 

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eECKA18.jpg

 

423oNdt.jpg

 

BomNRYj.jpg

 

The end :)

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  • 1 year later...

Dianoga, Redux.

 

The PC has been happily chugging along since I built it. Have not had any leaks, nor any issues. I have been running Ubuntu on it since I built it because I had a networking issue with a Windows update that broke all of my soccer (football) streams. So I was just using it for that. Few things irked me though. It was pretty darn slow. Mostly because it was running on decrepit DDR2 and a Phenom 2 X6. That didn't matter so much because it was on Ubuntu, but recently my health as declined and I am finding myself at my mother's house for a week or sometimes two weeks at a time. I have no technology there apart from my Macbook 11" and it struggles running games. Well, if you could call it running games. More like walking.

 

I recently upgraded my Triad build and improved the cooling for the GPU with a larger rad, as well as a 14/28 BE Xeon I got cheap.

 

Cy4AkbD.jpg?1

 

However I was paranoid about the Alienware board supporting the Xeon I bought. There is no information on whether they work or not. The last thing I wanted to do was strip the rig down only to find it would not boot with the Xeon in there. So instead I bought a MSI X99 SLi Plus ! for cheap. It was like, £107. The clearout for X99 had begun. Any way, I had confirmation that would work and indeed it did. So I was very happy with that.

 

This then left me a X99 board "free" if you will. It's a bit of an ugly duckling really.

 

gs1klDx.jpg

 

Now I did this upgrade last June. I also put in a Titan XP. The board then went in the cupboard, for what was going to be long enough for me to be happy my rig was stable. Well, you know how it goes. A month turned into 6 and it was still sitting there. Now these fetch a pretty penny on Ebay so I put it up on there. It's a very well specced board tbh. Intel Proset wireless (M.2) with Pro Bluetooth. Intel Gigabit network, Killer E2200, SB Recon 3D and so on. Also supports tri fire/SLi. It does all of this whilst looking like ass. Still beggars can't be choosers. The board sold within about five minutes (well, I was made an offer I would have accepted) but then the seller withdrew the offer before I even got a chance to accept. I should have known he was a messing asshole then and I did, so I blocked him. However he kept emailing me (after I had dropped the price) saying he wanted it etc etc. I left it over Christmas and then told him I would accept £120. No offer made, so out of rage I pulled the board from Ebay, who then accused me of selling off of Ebay and gave me a 72 hour ban and a warning. I was pretty feckin furious at this so I fought them over it and won.

 

I was so pissed off by this stage I put it up for £60 posted on all of the forums I frequent. But then something inside of me was nagging saying "Don't be stupid".

 

So I pulled it from sale completely. Then I started scouring the internet to find out what this thing could run. I found nothing. After days and days of typing in different search terms I *finally* found a working link to a post on the Dell forums. It was from a Dell rep saying they supported all Xeons. Then something clicked in my head about my old Dell I had (the Sagaris) and how that also had a ES. Now I was prepared to take the chance.

 

So I bought this.

 

fu8ikYx.jpg

 

Or, in English.

 

https://ark.intel.com/products/92981/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2630-v4-25M-Cache-2_20-GHz

 

For 160 of your finest British pounds. See, ES Xeons offer more power per performance than anything else in the world. I bought my 14 core for £360 last summer (£30 cheaper than a 1800x and destroys it). This is why I was prepared to take a risk, because had I seen it and then seen some one else put a CPU like that in it and it work I would have been proper pissed lol.

 

For those of you who remember Dianoga V1 you will remember I used a £8 block from China. I then cut the "wings" off of it because it looked stupid, forever cementing it to AM3 socket. Not good, but whatever at that price it was disposable any way. And TBH? it wasn't very good either. Temps were nowhere near as good as the GPU.

 

So I found this mega cheap. £24.99 on OCUK. Brand new, open box.

 

yoW5jgk.jpg

 

That is a £80 block. It's machined from a single (very very heavy) lump of solid brass. It has a copper cold plate and a stainless top. I did some digging (I was going to mod it myself) but I found these for £11.

 

UgML9II.jpg

 

So £36 all in. Can't resist a bargain haha.

 

Then of course the next, and biggest stumbling block. RAM. I'm not really the rent boy type so I was kinda stuck. It costs £100+ for 8gb now and very hard to find two modules (I at least wanted dual channel for that sort of bread). This was a sticking point for me, as it would erase any value whatsoever that I had managed to amass so far. I spent days on Ebay and then these popped up for £70.

 

I2XrJBB.jpg

 

Just basic Hynix 2133. I did not want faster RAM as Xeons don't like it. However £70 was too much (to me at least) so I sent an offer of what I had left in the spend account, £50. It was initially refused and a counter of £60 was sent but I offered £50 again with the message "Sorry mate it's all I have". I wasn't expecting it but the seller accepted. See now, I can live with that. I paid more than that for two modules right at launch time when I bought my Triad. However, look at it. Looks like ass. Beggars can't be choosers.

 

6xxUAKj.jpg?1

 

I had four of those lying around for what feels like forever. I bought them for £5 when RAM was cheap (4x1gb 1866) and they just sat gathering dust. In order to get them off I had to heat them to skin bubbling temps. I got burnt, a lot. Corsair use glue that sets hard when it cools. I ended up getting them off OK, then set to work. First under the scanner.

 

spysS4Q.jpg?1

 

And, after a few hours of heating them up in leather gloves and scraping off glue, cleaning etc etc.

 

9AeCfUx.jpg?1

 

ysRIkwK.jpg?1

 

sbh7IKJ.jpg?1

 

QiCYiTB.jpg?1

 

And yes, Hynix have literally been cutting corners. They are not bent.

 

 

How many special people change?
How many lives are livin' strange?
Where were you while we were getting high?

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Block ready to be fitted.

 

VWnsRtt.jpg?1

 

jQkd60Z.jpg?1

 

jdlTAFT.jpg?1

 

And what I got up to yesterday.

 

2RGx5rl.jpg?1

 

c1Wk7yo.jpg?1

 

hzISI0s.jpg?1

 

3xCcyDR.jpg?1

 

PM42j5Z.jpg

 

I have bought this (only want the back plate and antennas)

 

UGixe5x.jpg

 

I also had this issue, but managed to disable it under Halt On error menu.

 

jkUiYOc.jpg?1

How many special people change?
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Cleaned and fitted the block.

 

jRm0qmh.jpg?1

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Teste sack :(

 

Before.

 

rF7nIyo.jpg?1

Look very closely at the bottom outlet on the WB, and how it connects to the rad using a butt load of chainguns.

What I now have is this.

 

qyrK6Wp.jpg

 

I got the inlet in OK. I can't use the green 45 degs I bought. It just ain't happening. I am also faced with a massive issue. Due to the spacing in the G 1/4 holes on the WB I can not put a fitting of any sort in there. What I mean is, a proper fitting that you connect hose to. Due to the honking great hose the fittings are also honking great, and none will connect up next to the 45'. So, what do I do? well you can see the issue, and it is a pretty bloody massive one. Look at this pic.

 

9JogbNL.jpg

 

Look closah.... Closah... DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE? (two movies there..)

 

2pWLVXH.jpg

 

Due to the board being quad channel (and thus two DIMM banks) and the fact the block is lower, and flipped upside down there is a massive space.

Now it was already suggested to me that I just use a hose and bend it. However, that will not work. It will kink. This stuff is a real Alan B.Stard. I also cannot use any fittings.. Or can I?!?!

The solution, after about an hour of feeling like it was never going to work. OK, so I need to basically do this when the new hose arrives.

 

bh2Qelb.jpg

 

IE - extend out the hose from the rad inlet, moving that black acetal 90' block over the CPU. And it will literally go right to line up with the outlet. However, I can't use a 19mm fitting because it won't go in the WB. So what to do? this. Basically.

 

One 5mm.

 

5Du2ejo.jpg

 

A 10mm, for Justin.

 

ZoKKqRY.jpg

 

And then I ordered four of these.

 

AuqFA51.jpg

 

Rotaries. I measured the spacing and it is basically smack on 30mm. So I am going to have to use those fittings to make a straight, solid pipe coming out of the block into the 90 deg box.

How many special people change?
How many lives are livin' strange?
Where were you while we were getting high?

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