Ruined $500 mobo, open loop dual pump, de-soldering, custom CAD everything. "Event Horizon" My ultimate PC.

[UberNiK]

I have been a lurker forever and I absolutely love the forums, especially build logs. I wanted to make a build log for this monster undertaking of a project, but events in my life prevented me from really keeping up on something like that.

I wanted to build an extremely unique computer. My first major idea that sparked this project was to have absolutely no wires showing, not even a 24 pin or cpu power plug, nothing except maybe the ends of the sata connection. My plans really snowballed from there, and then I let myself get completely out of control with the things contained in this rig.

 

I am very self conscious of my work, and I tend to only see the flaws. Before I even started the build I knew that I wanted to publish it online somewhere, but I kept finding things that were unfinished, or flaws I wanted to fix. There are still a handful of things that I don't like, but I decided I need to poop or get off the pot, or else I would never share it. Almost everything in this rig has been custom built and designed by me. I designed over 60 individual parts, not counting the ones I didn't use or re prints, which are contained in my humble ThermalTake Tower 900. The motherboard trim pieces and covers took an especially long time as I had to model intricate parts of the motherboard in order to get the fit right, and the distribution plate was pretty challenging. I could go on for hours on each individual part that I build, but I will just try to hit the highlights.

 

Sensors. Ever since I was a kid I would always marvel at peoples builds with all kinds of temperature sensors and flow sensors and such. So for this build I wanted to implement as many sensors as possible. I have a full digital power supply that gives me current and voltage on each rail individually as well a from-the-wall total. I have two separate water temperature sensors as well as a flow sensor, there is also an ambient air sensor that is measuring the air coming into the radiators, as well as all the usual sensors build into the hardware.

 

H20. This is my very first time building an open loop. I lapped and polished my water block to a perfect mirror first. It has addressable RGB's built into it with an ugly wire coming off of it. I had to disassemble the entire block to take apart the harness, I then carefully ran the wires between capacitors on the motherboard and out through a hole under the IO shield. I have two D5 pumps at the very bottom, they are soft mounted to a cradle that I designed, mounted to clear acrylic, and then hung from O rings for complete vibration isolation. They are PWM pumps, but even at 100% they are completely silent to my ear. The star of the show, my distribution plate, took about 3 weeks from conception to holding in my hand, but then another week or two to completely finish. I had to hand tap all of the holes, and then polish the machined areas. I found a local company here in the metro Detroit area to do the machining for me. After receiving quotes up to $700 I was considering building my own CNC, the local company I found charged me $120! There is an amazing article by Alex Banks at bit-tech about building your own distro plate, I cannot understate the value of that article. Link below, as well as a link to the company that did the acrylic machining for me, I do believe they ship.

 

No-Show wires. I killed a brand new Asus Crosshair VIII hero wifi attempting this. My first plan was to remove the 24 pin connector, desolder the pins, and then solder a new one onto the back. After doing all that, I kept having random shut downs. Apparently when I was removing the plastic section of the 24 pin socket, I had knocked loose a tiny capacitor. This was when it was still over $400, haha. I bought an Asus Crosshair VIII dark edition after that. The new method I came up with was to cover the back of the motherboard in painters tape with the 24 pin and 8 pin connectors solder joints exposed. Using my dremel I flattened out each solder joint so that they were all level with each other, I did the same to the new connectors I had, they usually have sharp tips. Once I had two flat surfaces I prepped them both and soldered the new connectors onto the back of the board, rewired my 24 pin PSU connector to match the new pinout, and I haven't had a single problem since, no joke. Even under high load stress tests while overclocked, no issues at all. My next version I want to 3D print a bed-of-nails type solution with pogo pins that just presses to the back of the motherboard, attached to a 24 pin adapter. I also had to de-solder all of the pins that I plan to use and flip them to the back of the board, stuff like the power button, fan connections, and all of the water cooling features on this board.

 

Dashboard. The LCD mounted to the case I found on amazon. It is capacitance touch screen, and a weird resolution I don't remember off hand. Aida64 has a very cool "sensor panel" feature that I am sure a lot of you have seen. I havent gotten around to it making my GUI for it yet, but this will display all of the temps and stats of anything I can dream of. Also I think it looks really cool.

 

The Case. For some weird reason the folks over at ThermalTake designed the case so that the motherboard is not centered. I ended up taking every rivet out of the case and hacking up the motherboard tray to fit the distro plate, and I had to design and print little standoff adapters that move the whole motherboard about 1/8 of an inch to one side. I then had to cut out the IO and move that over to match. I drilled two holes in the bottom for the supply and return lines to the pumps. I put the rear panel on a hinge so that it can be opened up while the computer is running, otherwise it would get hung up on the power cord. I added some IO to the rear for my keyboard and primary display as well.

 

The hardware. I had to buy my Ryzen 5900x from a scalper back in December for $600. Just for kicks I spent hours and hours lapping and polishing it to a mirror finish, it looks almost gold now. I stripped down my Asus CH8 dark for the modifications above. The 6700XT is the only GPU I can get ahold of right now, that is why you only see a U pip on the GPU section of the distro block. I hope to one day replace it with a 6800XT with a full cover block, and my own custom trim piece on the block. I have 32Gb of G Skill 3600 CL16 memory. For now I only have a 500Gb corsair NVME drive, but I have 3 sata connections ran for an array of hard disks and an open M.2 slot for the future. My PSU is a rebranded Seasonic unit by NZXT. It is a digital power supply, but I am very very unhappy with the acoustics. 90% of the time its dead silent, but sometimes when I am pulling over 300watts the fan will ramp up to 100% for no reason, the PSU temp stays below 50c. I believe this is a bug. I am planning on replacing the fan with a Noctua. My radiators are corsairs with 3 140mm Noctua's each.

 

 

Anyways, I went on a little longer than I intended to. Thank you so so much if you stuck with me through all of my rambling. What does everyone think? Be nice please  I am pretty nervous

 

 

Article on making custom distro plates by Alex Banks

 

Local company that machined the acrylic for my distro, and supplied the acrylic!!! (highly recommended)

 

 

 

[jaslion]

I really like it and how extra you went.

 

But I do have a question why not go for some cable covers? Seems you did it with the gpu?

[UberNiK]

Thank you!

 

The GPU I only plan on keeping until I can get ahold of a 6800XT, which I will then treat the same as I did my motherboard.

 

I love the idea of being able to see the empty 24 pin and 8 pin sockets, but the computer is still running full force. I know it isn't economical to void my warranty in this manner, but I already destroyed one board so I was committed to making it work. I spent over $800 on this "feature" alone, hah! I can laugh now, but I was certainly not laughing at the time.

[Vishera]

It looks like a UFO catcher machine:

Spoiler

 

The aesthetics are not to my taste but if you are happy with it then who am i to judge.

[adarw]

so is that mini monitor the monitor your going to use for gaming?..... lol anyways its really nice! good job!

[Blue4130]

Where are the build log pictures? All I see is a completed machine.

[UberNiK]

I have 100's of photo's that I took along the way. I didn't really think anyone would be too interested. 

 

I would be happy to upload them tonight!

[Captain Matt]

Can you detail how you did the 24 pin power? Pics?

[zogthegreat]

On 9/15/2021 at 12:00 PM, UberNiK said:

I have 100's of photo's that I took along the way. I didn't really think anyone would be too interested. 

 

I would be happy to upload them tonight!

Yes, please upload the build pictures... 

 

A complete rig is always nice to see, but we want the real porn shots of the build!

 

Really nice work though!