|||| |||| |||| |||| Wall PC Build Log |||| |||| |||| ||||

[KzE]

Power supply

What a mess in the back. Before I clean that up, the two laptop poweradapters need to go in.

After Ill see how much space I have left to do the «cable management».
The quotation marks let you know that I’ll be streching that term.

 

 

A while ago I discovered one can buy velcro in bulk, on a roll. Guys, and ladies, this will change you

Life forever. It ties just about anything and is really easily detached and attached and detached and attached and detached
and attached and detached and attached and detachted.…reusable you might say.

 

 

In the end there will be a cable bundle exiting below of the PC. But I want as few as possible. I guess I’ll even overcome my disgust for wireless periphery. Two power cables are too much, and the cord from the power adapter is too long too.  Power adapter cable, soldered and double shrink tubed.
What's the thin green one for?

 

I made the classic power cords into a Y, one end for the wall plug and two ends for the two poweradapters.
I am not putting the pictures of that modification here, they are NSFW.

 

[KzE]

Cable management

Here’s my excuse for a cable management. It sure cleaned things up but there’s just too much and it’ll be hidden behind it all anyways. The only thing that bothers me a bit is that they will be visible from the front when they cross over from behind one tray to the next. (look at the renderings and you’ll know what I mean)

I might try to put them all close toghether later on to create a similar appearance as the copper piping.

 

Have you ever had access to a labeling machine ? People, don’t do it. It’s addictive. I have many random things in my appartment now that are labeled.
Like « chair », « bowl », or « cat ». Keep your hands off it, or use only under supervision.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, take this, 3feet-raisercable !

So ghetto,.. any ideas how to make it keep that folded? Yes it really needs to be that way around.

No, there’s no performance drop with one or more raiser cables, did my research.

 

Also, flex tubing is in. Quick and dirty. Don’t judge me.
The dry couplings will allow me to take this insert out of the main cooling rig. They are by alphaUNcool. What a shitty product, couldn’t find anything else tho.

The sealing came off on two of them after just a few uses. 2x30$ gone. But once you started such a project you just keep throwing money at it here and there
and apathetically stop to count.

 

 

 

Here’s the raiser cable on the other side. Took me half a day to find a good looking black one.

After all this is the prominent side. Plugged into a close PCI slot, apparently they are all 16x, props to my adopted IT-Guy for clarification.

[_Hustler_One_]

This is the trully next level of PC building

[husseinHr]

Bloody amazing! I hardly survived my own standard DIY PC building process with my amount of patience! Looking forward to seeing this when it's complete!

[KzE]

Water test

First I had to switch the pump’s in and out, since the CPU-block cares about the direction of flow, gosh, so needy. RTFM, right?

Time to test whether I tightened all connections correctly everywhere. With all these fittings I have about 30 of them, and some 30 more in the cooling rig.
If you do this, run the pump with a jumper adapter. In the picture it is the 24pin molex with the red cable. 5$ or so. Really handy. (just to the right of the dry coupling)
This way your hardware has no power and if there is a leak, no harm will be done.
It ran for about 36 hours successfully. Pic shows process of first fill.

 

Oh and look, a folded PCI raiser cable and a big moist turd of foreshadowing.

 

 

Used this bucket so any air in the piping can escape here.

 

 

 

 

Front view with the CPU GPU piping. Definitely looks cleaner now that it is filled.

 

 

Had to find out that coloured fluid apparently settles pretty fast. Here after 2 days or so.
But it mixes up again within seconds. Is this normal?

 

[KzE]

Insert locking

There’s light glooming at the horizon, dear friends of the computer crafts!
Both cooling rig and the hardware insert are finished. Now they need to marry.

 

The rig has been sitting on my CNC for ever, the CNC projects are piling up.

So a first test showed that the pump somehow doesn’t want to fit.
The opening in the glass had to be widened. With this thin mill it worked pretty well.

 

 

 

Once it fit, we attached two clear block which turn to hold the insert in place.
The aluminium plates are always in place and prevent the insert from falling out the other direction.

 

So to be able to work on it, we propped it up

Oh and yeah, tadaaa:

But will it blen.. I mean, boot?

[Ienien77]

After a year ... wow it's a very long project

[cluelessgenius]

have you looked into koolance  quick disconnects they are supposed to be pretty good

[myselfolli]

This is amazing!

[FezBoy]

Frickin beautiful.

[KzE]

thanks guys.

@cluelessgenius for now it works and if I need to replace I will look into it. Thanks.

@lenien77 actually two years now... it's not so much fun anymore. because right now I am dealing with lots of stupid problems -> next post

[KzE]

So I ran into really big problems with this build.

In this topic I am asking people for help:

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1046103-gpu-or-psu-causes-crash-wall-pc/

 

I separated it from here so this stays a buildlog only.

[KzE]

Sooooo, after a incredibly stupid amount of testing by myself, bribing a two man horde of drunk IT-friends

and months of dispair incl. questioning my sanity it turned out to be a classic RTFM moment.

 

 

yep

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aaaaaanyway, PC runs as should, it is hanging on my wall and I finally installed and played Witcher III, game of the year 2017.

(The game most appropriate for this build, which you realise when you scroll aaaaaaaall the way up and read the time stamp of the first entry of this topic)

 

 

But does it keep its cool?

The main question of this build though was always; will the cooling fins deliver enough cooling capacity to a system on fire?

Gondor called for help, so I lit the combined beacon of Furmark and CPU Burner to see what happens.

 

 

I ran both tests at the same time to simulate a heavy load which would never occure in a real world application.

The GPU stayed surprisingly cool while the CPU was much hotter, but concerning the load not too much either.

I wonder if anyone has an idea as to why the GPU is so much cooler.

The temps rise faster at the beginning and as the pump starts to work more the curve flattens.

It ramped up to 4700 RPM at the end. Unfortunately I did not record the RPM at each data point.

 

The hotter the cooling fins get, the bigger the difference to ambient temperature (room at 21°C) and the

better the cooling efficiency.

Compared to an forced air cooled system, the mass of the cooling fins, pipes and about 3.5 liters of cooling liquid makes

a big difference. This is why I think the system needed a full 1.5h to reach thermal max. as there was a lot of

thermal mass to be "filled" first.

I guess you could just hook up a water loop to a 200L rainbarrel and run your PC savely for at least 10 hours.

Good idea for an episode of "bad cooling ideas", right @Linus?

 

At around 1h 30mins it seemed to me that the CPU's temperature had reached a plateau.

Within 20 minutes it only went up 1 °C.

I turned the burners off to see how the system would cool down. (graph past 90 minutes)

 

 

 

Thermal Imagery

The surface temperature was monitored with a FLIR camera module for a smartphone. It is the cheapest way

to get thermal imagery. Looking at the gray graph you see some irregularities, which I think are due to the

"cheap" module. A curve is noticable, but there are some peaks like around 45mins, which seem out of place.

 

 

To visualize I recorded the whole test in a thermal video timelapse. This shows the full 2 hours of the test.

 

 

 

 

You notice that some of the elements stay cold.

This is because whereever there is an angle fitting, the brackets which transport the heat from the copper

pipes to the cooling fins couldn't be installed. If you count the big squares as one full cooling element then

there are a total of 19 elements. Of these, 4.5 are not used (marked blue), which is 23.7% of them. So there is almost

a quarter of the potential wasted. But at least it looks sexy

At the beginning I wanted to use solid copper blocks where the pipes would go into directly, eliminating the

need for angle fittings and providing a much more direct and efficient heat transfer. But as mentioned earlier, that

would have been 70kg more and something like 1000 bucks in copper alone.

I am glad the cooling capacity is enough nevertheless, but it made me think how I could have activated the

unused elements.

 

The diagram only shows the copper loop, not the flex tube loop to the pump in the back.

 

 

The pic below shows the two different mounting ways.

 

 

 

 

 

I will come back with photos of the finished product.

I'm still working out how to do the backlighting.

Does anyone know a good LED strip system which I

can hook up to the PC?

I need about 5m of strip though. So all these solutions

with 50cm long LED strips from PC tuners don't really

do it or are too expensive.

[KzE]

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kilcmd]

SUPER DOPE!

[MEC-777]

Bar far, one of the coolest builds I've ever seen!

[addaz27]

that's amazing... i would be in my element helping build that. Did you use a basic coolant of experiment a little?

... if it's sight-able maybe some mini plaques clipped on in placed to make it less uniform (bit of rick and morty here abit of pokemon there hahah)

[KzE]

[DoctorNick]

[Tonberry]

Jawdropping!

 

This is the greattest DIY PC build I've seen by far

[FezBoy]

Hot damn.

 

It looks beautiful.

[Tonberry]

This wall-mounted PC, and the one Matt from DIY Perks built are 2 greattest DIY PCs ever built

[Tonberry]

*Deleted. Double posted for unknown reason*

[vogelspinnen]

That looks dope af!!