350D Water Cooled Budget Gaming Build

m1n1h4mm3rd · April 26, 2014

Here is my Micro-ATX gaming build on a reasonable budget with some very descent results. Some parts were transferred from my previous build.

If anyone has any questions about the 350D or any other component mentioned in this post, PLEASE feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my very best to help you out with an answer!

This is simply talking about what parts went into my most recent build and why I chose them. At the end, there are a few links to pictures to give you an idea of what it looks like with the parts installed, as well as cable management and the general look of the 350D. Please keep in mind that all of the pictures were captured using my Galaxy Note 2 in terrible lighting conditions so quality isn't high. I have also included a few screenshots of maximum temperature during stress tests so you can see what sort of difference a liquid cooler makes. The total price for all of these parts would have been just shy of $1600AU

Case/Fans/LEDs/PSU:

I built into the Corsair Obsidian 350D windowed Micro ATX case using only the stock 120mm & 140mm fans. The rear 120mm fan was taken out and moved to the front panel right below the 140mm stock fan. I wanted to keep the interior looking as neat as possible without simply removing fans; this was the best way to do it based on my CPU cooling choice. I have only currently got 1x30cm Bitfenix Alchemy Blue LED strip on the bottom - right beneath the base of the windowed side panel - as I forgot to choose 2 of them when I sent through my order. My PSU is the Aywun 'MegaPower' 650W 80+ Bronze. It is not modular, it is not gold efficiency or higher (this will be my next requirement for a PSU), it has god-awful sleeving and a subtle - but irritating - ticking noise, however I have stuck with it for two solid years now because it was the original power supply in my first gaming PC. That beauty was running a Core 2 Quad, 4GB DDR2 memory on a P5Q-Pro Turbo and a GTX560Ti DirectCUII (a card which I still own). I guess it has a bit of sentimental value of sorts. I should also note that I have removed the 2.5" drive bays which normally sit underneath the 5.25" ODD bays.

Motherboard/CPU/Memory/Cooling:

I wanted to maintain a very neutral colour scheme for the board while staying with ASUS due to my great run with their products so far. It was difficult to find an m-ATX board by ASUS without that hideous brown-yellow theme but I'm glad that I stumbled across the Gryphon Z87. Its PCB is solid black with metallic-brown heat sinks and ports/slots. In my opinion, it looks fantastic with my Corsair Vengeance plain-black memory. I'm running 2x8GB 1600MHz DIMMs. It's not overkill, while still being plenty for me to run multiple games and programs at once. For my CPU, I opted to step back from the i7 range (previously i7-3770) and decided on the highest performing i5 on the market - the 4670K. I did this not only because it was less expensive than an i7, but because I felt like it would encourage me to be brave and experiment with overclocking - something that I hope to use with all future builds. To cool the processor I purchased the younger-but-brighter brother of the h100; the Corsair H100i. This, if you aren't yet familiar with it, is a dual-120mm-rad pre-filled water cooling kit. Water cooling was an obvious choice this time because of a few things: I have plans to overclock and a standard cooler won't be up to the task, the Intel air coolers are UNBELIEVABLY BORING AND SIMPLE AND LOUD AND CANCEROUS (not literally), and I wanted to beat my brother to becoming a part of the liquid cooling bandwagon. (I really like it). I haven't yet decided to change the stock fans for a couple of the higher quality Corsair fans because I only installed the cooler yesterday and I haven't really had a chance. I'm okay with how it sounds at the moment because at stock clock speeds, I can run the 4670K at 100% load and the fans spin up to about 1590-1610rpm each. This is very, very shy compared to the 2650rpm that they are capable of.

PCI/PCI-e Adapters:

Filling two of the four PCI-e (who needs PCI these days anyway?) slots, are my wireless adapter and video card. Let's get the boring part out of the way first. My wireless solution is a TP-Link 300Mbps adapter for when I visit my Mum or where ever else I may go. Normally I use the on-board gigabit ethernet but the WiFi option is handy. Above that, by a few millimetres, is the GTX570 DirectCUII by ASUS. It is positioned in the very top PCI-e x16 slot but denies access to the second and third slots. I'm glad that they learned to steer away from tri-slot cards after this series and extended the length instead - it's way more practical!

Storage:

For my data storage needs, I just stayed with my 2TB Western Digital Green 5400rpm HDD as it has a fantastic GB:dollar ratio. (exactly 15.2GB/$1AU based on 1.81TB of usable space at the time of purchase! ) For this great price, I don't mind the fact that it takes a couple of seconds to spin up after leaving it sit for a while - it's still about 3-4 times quicker with spinning up than the god-awful seagate 1TB drive I thankfully removed. For installing all of my programs, games and of course my Windows 8 OS, I use a 120GB Intel 330 Series SSD. It's not the latest and greatest of the solid state range, but it takes advantage of my board's SATA3(6Gbps) ports, of which it has six. And that being said, the slowest of the SSDs will be miles quicker than any consumer HDD out there anyway - not that this is at all the slowest!

Future Plans:

ASUS GTX780 DirectCUII

Corsair RM-750 80+ Gold

Samsung 250GB 840 EVO SSD

Full custom water cooling loop

Another Blue LED Strip

Maybe an i7-4770K if I require the HT capabilities

http://i.imgur.com/R35MXYS.jpg - A general look at how the various components look when they're all installed with the side panel on. Featuring the glorious lean of the GTX570.

http://i.imgur.com/xM7Is1U.jpg - This was as neat as I could personally get the cables to look. It's messy as all hell but I had to keep it as flat as possible to reduce the regular bulge.

http://i.imgur.com/dP7zYO9.jpg - I've noticed that a few people have been complaining about the front panel and 5.25" bay covers not being flush. I had no problems like that with mine.

http://i.imgur.com/8b7g28s.jpg - Terrible lighting conditions but you get a pretty good idea of how the LED strip looks at night.

http://i.imgur.com/byx3TcD.jpg - This is looking at the top where I thought I should point out the fact that there is some light leakage due to the dual 120mm rad not stretching all the way to both sides of the top vent - obviously.

http://i.imgur.com/jG6Bzz9.png - I let Prime95 run until the CPU reached a peak temp and fluctuated below and equal to this value. It didn't go any higher than 71 degrees celcius and takes 4-5 seconds to drop from 70-odd degrees down to 40 after stopping the stress test, then slowly eases down to 35 from there.

http://i.imgur.com/YueVoDz.png - This is the Corsair Link software which works with the H100i. It shows 100% load at 70 degrees and 1650-odd rpm on both fans. Ridiculously efficient.

Thanks for reading! And again, if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask! I will be more active than I have been over the past few weeks.

Oshino Shinobu · April 26, 2014

Looks pretty nice, well done. Card looks like it's sagging quite a bit though ):

I'd suggest actually adding the images into the post and maybe putting them in spoiler tags instead though, would make it easier to look at the pictures for those of us who have loads of tabs open (: