HELIOS - ASSEMBLED 2015-SEP-06 - (Caselabs SMH10 | Black/Copper | EVGA SR-2 )

[alpenwasser]

:o You have TWO builds going on?

Well, techincally speaking three, but the third is just a rather unspectacular spare

parts rig so I haven't done a log on it (might still do that, not sure yet).

But don't worry, I'm not paying for all of them in full. :lol:

To be a bit more accurate: HELIOS has been the elusive dream I've been chasing

for the past two years or so, ever since I first laid eyes on the SR-2. I've been

saving up for it for a long time, and worked quite hard to get all the money

together.

ZEUS is partially paid for by my dad since it will be a PC that benefits our entire

household. I've paid the W/C parts and the some of the HDDs (they were from my

previous rig), while he paid for the M/B, the remaining HDDs, the case and some

other stuff.

The third rig will be dad's new work PC and will reuse some spare parts I have

laying around, for which he has reimbursed me (the Elysium, some W/C stuff, an

i5 2500 etc.).

The fact that I'm doing all three at the same time is just because I'm reusing

some parts from my build for ZEUS and dad's new work rig. I reckon I probably

won't be able to build another PC for quite a few years after this, so I thought

I'd give it everything I have while I have the opportunity. :lol:

[Nit3Rid3R]

This looks very interesting, waiting on more updates from you! 

[cYRoN]

Your dog didnt approve it, it seems. xD

 

 

At least, lets just say - That beauty looks kinda bored.
Talking about the dog... :P

[alpenwasser]

Your dog didnt approve it, it seems. xD

 

[...img...]

 

At least, lets just say - That beauty looks kinda bored.

Talking about the dog... :P

Haha, yeah he does not like to share attention. During the two hours while I was

assembling the case he was laying a few feet besides me and constantly whining

until I went over and gave him a pat. Then he was silent for a few minutes, after

which he'd start the whole routine from anew. :lol:

I recently joked to my younger brother that the dog was like a black hole for

attention: You can give and give and give and give and he'll just take it all,

regardless of how much it was. I once read an article by a guy who had two dogs,

and he wrote that whenever he wanted one of the dogs to come to him ASAP, he would

have to shout the other dog's name because the dog that hadn't been called would

feel jealous and run to him much quicker than the one he'd called.

He's very well behaved (towards people and other dogs), has a very gentle and calm

character, and has been very well trained (not by me though, he's actually my dad's

GF's, but I'm taking care of him for the time being), so he's quite a pleasure to

have and be around, but since he's rather old (12.5 years afaik) he just chills it

when there's nothing for him to do (which was the case here). He used to be very

playful, and every now and then you can still get him worked up enough to get a

glimpse of that, but he doesn't really have too much endurance anymore to keep that

up over an extended stretch of time. He's still in good health so far though (mixed

breed, Appenzeller and Newfoundland), which I'm insanely happy about. :)

But yes, he does not like to share attention, and he's rather clingy (at least with

me). But that's ok, because he's awesome, and I love the guy (I really do). :)

Update

Since I'm here anyway: The stuff I've ordered from Lutro0 and other sources is on its

way, so I should be able to continue in the next two weeks or so, depending on how

well the international postal services function. ;)

[itslegendddd]

Super cool

[alpenwasser]

This looks very interesting, waiting on more updates from you!

Thank you, and yes, they're coming. At some point. ;)

 

Super cool

Thanks! :)

[cYRoN]

Its funny tho.
My dogs kinda curious, almost as curious and ofter even more curious than my cats.
Everytime I work on my PC or build a new one even, my cats jump onto the table and relax inside the case.
They gimme that look that should tell me "Wow, thats comfy in here - And so spacious. You know, that could very well be my new home." or something like that.
Watching the cats do their thing, my dog desperatly tries to get onto the table too. Then starts to realize "Me? JUMPING UP THERE? Bad idea, dude." and starts chewing on that mainboard box.

 

Its funny cuz its like watching a comedy movie. 

As much as I enjoy PC stuff, I've to admit, I enjoy those moments even more :)

 

 

B2T

Get that build going, daaaaaaamn ;D

[alpenwasser]

As much as I enjoy PC stuff, I've to admit, I enjoy those moments even more :)

Pets > PC's, always :) 

 

Get that build going, daaaaaaamn ;D

Understood, sir! :lol:

[rhoscrazy]

Very nice.

[alpenwasser]

rhoscrazy, on 13 May 2013 - 5:55 PM, said:

Very nice.

Thank you, I appreciate the support. :)

[cYRoN]

It's wednesday now. Have your parts arrived yet? :D

[MR TECH]

It's wednesday now. Have your parts arrived yet? :D

Today is Tuesday  ^_^  

[alpenwasser]

It's wednesday now. Have your parts arrived yet? :D

 

Today is Tuesday  ^_^

:lol:

Anyway, the silicone wires arrived yesterday, but the sleeving tools are probably

still a while off (tracking last picked them up on 2013-MAY-11 in Chicago).

Thanks for checking in though. :)

[cYRoN]

Today is Tuesday  ^_^  

 

Well it certainly isn't, at least not in germany ;P

 

 

:lol:

Anyway, the silicone wires arrived yesterday, but the sleeving tools are probably

still a while off (tracking last picked them up on 2013-MAY-11 in Chicago).

Thanks for checking in though. :)

 

Meeeh.

Thumbs down for parcel services in Chicago.

 

Do you know aquatuning.de? They got sleeving tools, pryers and shizzloads of other stuff.

Plus, they prolly won't send a package to Switzerland over Chicago ;)

[alpenwasser]

Well it certainly isn't, at least not in germany ;P

Ah, the wonders of time zones. Although to be honest, since being on a break from

college and working from home I sometimes have difficulty keeping track of which day

it is. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday usually just blur into one contiguous block

for me. :lol:

Monday is distinct because it's right after the weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday

are distinct because my dad and his GF usually come here over weekends.

Meeeh.

Thumbs down for parcel services in Chicago.

 

Do you know aquatuning.de? They got sleeving tools, pryers and shizzloads of other stuff.

Plus, they prolly won't send a package to Switzerland over Chicago ;)

I do indeed. Most of my water cooling stuff I order from them, items they have in stock

usually take about a week to get here. But the things I ordered are sadly not available

from there, so I had to resort to intercontinental logistics. ;)

Ah well, I'm a man of patience, as long as it gets here within a few weeks I'm ok. I'll

keep myself busy with learning Perl and dusting off my C/C++ in the mean time. :lol:

[alpenwasser]

UPDATE

Well, sort of :)

Things went better than expected today. Apparently the tracking got stuck in

Chicago when the package left the US, but it's arrived here today. :)

Interestingly, the Swiss Post did not have it in their system, usually the

interface between USPS and Swiss Post's tracking systems works very well. I've

ordered many packages from the US over the years, and this is the first time

this has happened, although I've heard about it from other people, so maybe

I've just been very lucky with my parcel tracking in the past :lol:.

In any case, I will be starting to make some wires over the weekend.

So long,

-aw

[cYRoN]

YEAHAW! Awesome.

 

Finally time for some progress.  :wub: 
With that little patience I've, it sure felt like years... 

So I'll sit tight, knowing that it can't be long till I see a new post with some pictures in it  ;)

[ALXAndy]

Woohoo :D

[alpenwasser]

YEAHAW! Awesome.

 

Finally time for some progress.  :wub: 

With that little patience I've, it sure felt like years... 

So I'll sit tight, knowing that it can't be long till I see a new post with some pictures in it  ;)

 

As you may have noticed I'been rather busy with ZEUS. Reason for that being that while this rig

is my passion project ZEUS is a bit more urgent at the moment since it's needed by my dad for

work. Also, I can get good practice on ZEUS before moving on to this project.

Woohoo :D

What the hell? I did not get a notification for this post, saw it by pure dumb luck. :o.

Ah well, I guess it's time to check my settings, I must have misconfigured something. :lol:

Anyway: Woohoo back! :D

[Jimstah87]

This looks to be Fantastic!

[jscho]

Looking VERY nice man! :D

[alpenwasser]

This looks to be Fantastic!

 

 

Looking VERY nice man! :D

Thanks guys! :)

I'm really looking forward to continuing with this once ZEUS is done!

[Elbstrand]

Yeah finally a caselabs buildlog, looking forward to your finished build.

[alpenwasser]

Hehe, thank you! :)

I will be wrapping up ZEUS in the coming week (if I get my parts), and then it will

be full steam ahead on this one.

[alpenwasser]

PSU & Pump Mount, Making the 24 Pin Cable

Wow, it seems like ages ago that there was some progress on this. However, my hands have not been idle. Since ZEUS is finally more or less done (finishing touches, testing and then I'll post the last part of the log) I finally found some time this week to proceed with HELIOS, namely with mounting the PSU, the pumps and making the 24 pin wire.

As mentioned before, I will be using mostly 16 AWG Silicone wires, which have a few advantages over normal PVC wires, as well as one major disadvantage and one minor one. The minor one is cost; it is actually quite expensive. 10 meters of 16 AWG wire cost ~ 7.75 GBP (~12 USD).

The PSU

Not much to say here, it's just an absolute stunner.

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This is how it's mounted to the plate. There's also a cutout to fit the 230 V connector through and to access the ON/OFF button.

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The pumps are bolted to the same plate. Makes for a nice and compact unit. :)

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And inside the case:

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Making the 24 Pin Cable

Advantages of Silicone wire: It's extremely flexible and can tolerate much higher temperatures (this one is rated to 200 C). The temperature thing might sound a bit silly for a PC, but it actually came in very handy during making the wires.

The tools I used:

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Stripping the wire in preparation for crimping. You can clearly see that there are an insane amount of strands, which is the other aspect that makes this wire so much more flexible than PVC coated one (besides the Silicone, obviously). The disadvantage of this is that the wire itself is substantially thicker than its PVC counterpart, coming in at a bulky 3.1 mm diameter for a 16 AWG wire. The 16 AWG PVC wires that came with my PSU measure about 2.0 mm in comparison.

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The thickness of the wire requires me to press the crimp terminal onto the wire and then insert that assembly into the crimper, instead of first fixing the terminal inside the crimper, inserting the wire into that and then pressing down.

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Luckily, Silicone is very soft, meaning it compresses nicely under the crimping terminal's wings. Be careful though: There are (at least) two versions of this terminal floating around: One with longer wings and one with shorter wings. The short winged version is completely unusable for this setup. As you can see, this is not a flawless crimp, but the insulation does not come below the second pair of wings, which I deem good enough for my purposes (otherwise I'd have an insane amount of wasted crimp terminals ;)). Still, despite all this, the rate of failed crimps does noticeably rise when using such a thick wire. The most common fault I encounter is that one of the rear wings breaks of (the ones which are supposed to crimp down on the insulation).

Fortunately the core's large thickness due to the many strands makes most of these still perfectly usable since the forward pair of wings hold the wire in place quite tightly (much more tightly than if you had a rear wing failure with a PVC wire), in fact it takes an enormous amount of force to rip off the crimp terminal (I've tried a few times to test the blemished crimps).

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The indispensable sleeving tool:

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And with the paracord sleeve. Note that I haven't melted the ends, which is on purpose. Melted paracord becomes quite hard, which doesn't work for what I'm doing here.

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Distance gauge for what comes below.

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And here we have the trick to the problem of thick wires. Since the wires are much too thick to fit into the connector with a sleeve on them (they do fit easily without one), I had to come up with another solution than the usual one of melting the sleeve onto the crimp terminal.

Since I absolutely wanted to avoid using heat shrink I came up with this solution. If you have a look above at all the things I used for this, you will notice a roll of 0.25 mm Nylon thread. I took that thread and wound it around the wire's ends, making sure to have the right distance from the crimp connector's end to the Nylon thread and that each Nylon piece had the exact same number of windings (20). This is also why the paracord is not melted before; keeping it unmelted and soft makes it possible to tighten down the Nylon thread much more firmly.

The advantages of this technique are that it looks much better than heat shrink (at least to me, which is what matters :lol: ), and since you can tighten it down very nicely, it also holds the paracord sleeve in place much better than an equal length piece of heat shrink. Also, this nicely avoids those "steps" one often has to have when using heat shrink. The downside of this approach is that it takes an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to do. Doing this one wire you see here took me 30 minutes (including taking the pics). Without taking pictures I usually need around 15~20 minutes for one wire, and up to 45 minutes for a doubly crimped one (of which there are five in the 24 pin cable, an absolute nightmare).

All in all, the 24 pin cable has taken me around 12 hours of work so far. What I still need to do is lace it so that all wires run as parallel as possible, but that will only be done once I have it inside the case and can see where to best place the lacing bridges.

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This is where the heat resistance of Silicone comes in handy. Taking the extra paracord off with a heated box cutter nicely terminates the whole thing and secures it to the wire, while leaving the Silicone undamaged. I've tried this with PVC and the hot blade easily melts through the insulation if I do things identically to this.

However, one needs to be careful not to accidentally touch the Nylon cord with the heated blade, or else the Nylon will come undone and has to be redone (happened four times during the 24 pin assembly).

This is where I was presented with another problem: No matter how perfectly well placed the sleeve's ends are, there will always be a bit of unwanted colour at the end. Therefore, this needs to be painted (well, needs is a relative term :lol: ).

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering: They didn't have black wire in 16 AWG in stock and I really didn't feel like waiting a few weeks for that. Since you can't see through paracord this isn't hugely important.

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Also see here:

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Another wire in its painted state, this time with black sleeving. The black is a bit more forgiving of errors (sand colour is not at all), however it's also quite a bit trickier to see what's going on. I apologize for the blurry picture, it's quite a heavy magnification so I didn't realize this until it was too late.

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And finally, the 24 pin in its current state.

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Now it's on to do the remaining cables. :)

Edited February 11, 2016 by alpenwasser
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