[BUILD LOG] Water Box Inferno

[mgrisoli]

Hello everyone!

I am not new to water cooling but I haven't really built anything in a while.
Last time that I upgraded my system I turned back to air cooling because of some sh*t I found in the loop: 

 

I believe it was result of the corrosion of aluminum parts inside the radiator. 
Also, I was upgrading the GPU, so I had to turn down my awesome EK full coverage water blocks, lastly my reservoir was also showing some crackles. 

So, with my reservoir looking bad, radiator gone, GPU water blocks gone and the money invested in new parts: MOBO, PSU, CPU and GPU, it just made sense to go air cooling and save some of the liquid fun for later.
That was good because that's when rigit tubing became a thing and I fell in love with the idea of learning some new tricks.

I have an old case though, a Danger Den Water Box Plus, which I plan to reuse for this build.

I know, it's acrylic, all transparent and old fashioned, but it still looks darn good and it seems easy enough to mod if necessary.
The case itself is amazing, but it leaves nothing to imagination, I have to improve my skills on cable management because I cannot hide it anywhere in this case - no pun intended.

So, here is what I have today:

 

Don't be scared by the looks, this is just a temporary arrengement for the system to work. 
I feel like I have good components here and with your help I am going to sleeve these cables, put some lighting, watercool it and make it look awesome.

Even though I am not new to water cooling, my goal in the past was always silence and performance, almost never aesthetics.
So, I expect this time to struggle a little with sleeving and cable management, as well as dealing with the rigid tubing. 

 

Here is what I have today:

• MOBO Asus Maximus Vii Formula Intel Z97
• Processor Intel I7 4790k 4.0ghz 1175
• RAM Corsair Vengeance Pro 16gb (2 X 8 Gb) 2400mhz
• Blu-ray Lg Black Wh16ns40 Cache 4mb Sata
• NVidia GeForce GTX 760
• Thermaltake 850w modular PS-TPG-0850MPCGUS-1
• Ssd Samsung 840 Evo Mz-7te500bw 2.5 500gb Sata Iii
• HDD WD Black 1Tb
• HDD WD WD10JPLX-00MBPT0 500Gb

I know the GPU sucks, but I am upgrading it to an ASUS GTX 1080 STRIX. 
I use this rig for a little gaming and a lot of work, which includes Autocad, 3D rendering, business inteligence, data mining and some other heavy sh*t.

In my next post I will go through what I am planning to do. 
I hope I can receive some nice feedback and ideas to make this look great.

 

Cheers!
Marcelo

[samiscool51]

needs more RBG....

and water....

and everything else....

lol

[mgrisoli]

Hi everyone!

So, what I am looking for is to do what has to be done to extract an awesome performance in terms of thermal exchange.
I need some room for overclocking, nothing extreme, but enough to have fun, need room for a powerful GPU - I am replacing the 760 for a 1080 STRIX.

I also hate noisy systems and this one will have to look good as well, that means a pigeon's nest of cables and tubes is not acceptable.
I will watercool CPU, GPU, and chipset.
Not planning to watercool RAM nor HDs.

To take advantage of the looks of the MOBO I will stick with the black with red accents color schema.
I know... not an original idea, but I will be ok with it.
I don't want to make it too red, so maybe some white leds will help.
When I sleeve the ATX cables I may make one or two red on each cable.

 

I am thinking something like this:

 

I will need help on deciding routes for pipes and cables.

Also placement of the parts.

I never dealt with sleeving before, I watched some online tutorials and I hope I can make a good job out of it.

It will be my first time dealing with rigid tubing as well.

I hope you all enjoy the ride.

Main goal here is to have fun in the process.

 

At this point I ordered most of the parts and it will take some time until everything arrives, we can talk about the project meanwhile but there won't be too many actual pictures of the build until all the parts come through customs.

It is kinda hard to have this shipped to Brazil major players won't take international credit cards nor ship overseas, so I am doing what I can with the budget I have. 

Something I have is patience and attention to details so please feel free to provide constructive feedback and I will be eager to implement the suggestions I think make sense.

 

Cheers!

Marcelo

 

[mgrisoli]

On 08/03/2017 at 8:47 PM, samiscool51 said:

needs more RBG....

and water....

and everything else....

lol

Sorry, no idea what RBG means.

[samiscool51]

2 hours ago, mgrisoli said:

Sorry, no idea what RBG means.

Red

Green

Blue

the standard (one of them, it's the most common) of showing colors on a monitor

[nobiggieBIG]

22 minutes ago, samiscool51 said:

Red

Green

Blue

the standard (one of them, it's the most common) of showing colors on a monitor

you said RBG not RGB. Funny guy

[samiscool51]

1 hour ago, nobiggieBIG said:

you said RBG not RGB. Funny guy

i wasn't trying to be funny, my grammer, spelling and typing skills are crap

[nobiggieBIG]

8 minutes ago, samiscool51 said:

i wasn't trying to be funny, my grammer, spelling and typing skills are crap

i was saying the guy that said he didnt understand you

[mgrisoli]

11 hours ago, samiscool51 said:

i wasn't trying to be funny, my grammer, spelling and typing skills are crap

No problems with your grammar, it's just a typo in your acronym.

In fact, I agree with you, it needs color and some stuffing to fill in the empty spaces in that ice cube.

Unfortunately it's not space enough to acomodate all rads inside of the case... 

[mgrisoli]

Updates

 

Improved model with better tube and cable routing. I think the look improved from the first sketches but anyone has suggestions on that?

Added details and accuracy in measures and features.

 

 

and guess what?

first parts arrived today!

 

My old D5 will receive a retrofit...

 

and will look like this:

 

and how nice this drain port looks?

 

rads and fans on the way. 

and I can't wait to see the 1080 

 

M

[mgrisoli]

GPU arrived yesterday...
Nice unboxing experience!

 

And then...

 

Luckily the board itself is smaller than its cooler and would fit in the case. 
The water block is on the way, hopefully not exceeding the length of the board.

M

[mgrisoli]

While I am waiting for the rest of the parts to arrive, here is a new render.

[The Benjamins]

That is a cool case, it looks kinda easy to seal for mineral oil us. hmmmm ideas are coming to me. Is their a ITX case like that?

[mgrisoli]

Just now, The Benjamins said:

That is a cool case, it looks kinda easy to seal for mineral oil us. hmmmm ideas are coming to me. Is their a ITX case like that?

Well, unfortunately Danger Den is out of the business, they no longer make these cases, but I believe there are some other companies out there that make acrylic cases.

[The Benjamins]

5 minutes ago, mgrisoli said:

Well, unfortunately Danger Den is out of the business, they no longer make these cases, but I believe there are some other companies out there that make acrylic cases.

aww, I have the mITX mineral oil cool kit from pudget systems. I got a extra container and lid. but would be neat if I was able to replace the outer bucket with a clearer acrylic box when I do my upgrade. I may look online to see if I can get some sheets custom cut, and assemble and seal it. and use the existing MOBO tray.

 

I will not be doing a upgrade until AMD Raven Ridge is out, so I have time to get ideas.

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/mineral-oil-pc.php

 

mITX gallery at the bottom of the page.

[mgrisoli]

1 minute ago, The Benjamins said:

aww, I have the mITX mineral oil cool kit from pudget systems. I got a extra container and lid. but would be neat if I was able to replace the outer bucket with a clearer acrylic box when I do my upgrade. I may look online to see if I can get some sheets custom cut, and assemble and seal it. and use the existing MOBO tray.

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/mineral-oil-pc.php

 

mITX gallery at the bottom of the page.

Sounds like a darn good idea.

[mgrisoli]

Ok, we are almost there with all the parts arrived. 
Yes, believe me, it takes up to 3-4 months to get certain things here, so we really need to plan.
I am just missing the CPU water block, which may arrive this week.
Eveything else showed up.

Need an idea here...
I miss something in my case that is an audio front panel.
I use my headphones a lot and I have been connecting it to my monitor, instead of the case.
But my Audio card has some amazing features for headphones that I am not taking advantage of, so I would love to have a HD Audio front panel installed.
I bought one but I felt very disappointed with the overall quality and when I realized the problems I will have to install it in this case I kinda gave up.
I would need to carve out a 3 1/2" bay underneath the fan controller. Its currently not there...
The panel I bought is very common, it has mic in, audio out and a couple USB 3.0 ports. 
I don't really need the USB ports, so I always wanted is really a couple audio jacks that I could punch a couple round holes in the acrylic and accomodate somewhere not too conspicuous...
So far, I am failing on this mission, even if I take the audio jacks out of the panel I bought they would need to be soldered in a PCB. 
Then back to square one on this one.


Yesterday and today I dedicated to fix the radiators into the planned position. 
I also did some cable management for SATA and the fans:

 

[FosterGuy]

On 4/25/2017 at 3:48 PM, mgrisoli said:

While I am waiting for the rest of the parts to arrive, here is a new render.

Looks like an engine block, very unique.  I love it!

[mgrisoli]

3 hours ago, FosterGuy said:

Looks like an engine block, very unique.  I love it!

Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride, more to come!

[mgrisoli]

First time with rigid tubing. Have to mess up a couple times to get it right.
Mess up #1

Mess up #2

Success!

In place:

 

Not sure if I won't replace this one later but need to be sure I will have enough tubes for the rest of the rig.

[mgrisoli]

Hey guys, one setback.
I have been patiently waiting for my Bykski CPU block to clear customs. It finally arrived.
I bought it on AliExpress...

Here are the pictures, you can judge for yourself:

 

So, that basically means that I got screwed.
Luckily enough, I will be in US next week and I might order a decent EK block with no 3 months waiting for custom procedures.

I thought I would be able to proceed on mounting the rig before my travel but if seems like I will need one month more to get everything I need.
It is Ok! I knew the risk I was taking, it is more on the time that I had to wait than the money but I have some lessons learned here: you get what you paid for.
At this point I can say: Barrow is ok but Bykski is not. 

Cheers!
M

 

[mgrisoli]

Ok guys, there is no fun if there is no drama...
The yellow "stains" were just oil.
The seller brought to my attention that I should try to disassemble and clean it.
Well, it worked and I am now happy with what I got.

 

 

However, I get to travel tomorrow. It is going to be at least 20 days until I can do some real work in the rig.

Cheers! 
M

 

[Snooli]

Is it aluminium or nickel-plated? Not asking for what the seller sold it as, asking whether a magnets sticks to it or not. If it's aluminium, you got screwed anyway.

[mgrisoli]

On 6/9/2017 at 10:33 AM, Snooli said:

Is it aluminium or nickel-plated? Not asking for what the seller sold it as, asking whether a magnets sticks to it or not. If it's aluminium, you got screwed anyway.

It is nickel plated cooper. It is heavy and sturdy.

[mgrisoli]

Ok folks, I am back and I have been working on my rig.
So, a couple days ago I defined the res and pump placement.
Here is how it turned out.

 

So played with them a lot before punching the holes on the bottom of the case.
I experimented using the pump front inlet instead of the top one, but I would need to push the pump backward, then the outlet would have to have an additional bend when going up to the processor.
I even thought of having the res horizontal instead of vertical but nah, that would look sort of akward.
A couple things I learned: I don't quite like the options this res gives me. It has just only one hole on the bottom and it is excentric (not centralized). 
I also don't like that the two holes on the base of the res are not aligned with each other, they have like 45º angle between each other. 
The pump head also doesn't give you too many options for mounting. Two inlet options and one single outlet. Pretty limiting IMO.

But, lucky me, I think I got the best visual I could from this arragement.

Cheers!
M