Restoring my 4 year old watercooled rig

Seabottom · August 10, 2016

Back in February 2010 I bought my very first computer from scratch with watercooling on literally everything because I didn't know better.

I like blue a lot, it's my favorite color, so I filled it up with a blue, ready-to-go solution.

After 2½ years (October 2012), it had gunked up pretty severely and as I was forced to clean it, I went and purchased completely new hardware.

I then cleaned the CPU waterblock, the radiators (360 & 140) and the pump to my best extend, as those were the only parts I would recycle in the new build.

Lo and behold when the new rig was done, I was pretty proud of it myself and it looked nice for a 2nd ever watercooling build.

I had to make a wooden base for the case since it was going to be on a carpet and I had to make sure that the airflow wouldn't be too restricted, and to minimize the dust intake of the PSU.

i7 3820

Asus Rampage IV Formula

3x EVGA GTX 670 FTW 4GB

4x4 GB Corsair Vengeance low profile

NZXT Phantom Black (case)

1500W Silverstone Strider

3x Samsung Syncmaster 2233RZ

1x140 + 1x360 beefy Radiators

Swiftech CPU block - the thumbscrews died after reinstalling the block, so I had to use other bolts instead.

I believe the pump is a laing with an X-Top v.2 on it.

The wooden base

You can't really see it, but I added a twisted strip of silver at the exit of the reservoir to the pump and I used destilled clear water to make sure it wont gunk up like it did in the past.

With the cathode rods turned on it looks so much nicer (2x 20cm + 2x 10cm) (The other 20cm is stuck to the back side of the 360 rad)

I had to make some small modifications to the case to make the radiator fit inside of it as well as to not restrict the airflow.

Basically just shows how I setup the front bay.

Ok so now you know what it looked like 4 years ago when I build it. During that time it has seen a lot of use and the things that have changed/failed are listed below.

Front intake fan died, I replaced it with a metal blade fan
140mm Noctua fan on the bottom radiator wasn't good enough for the tight fin spacing, so I replaced it with a much beefier one
2 of the 4 beefy fans on the top died so I removed one of them and repaired the other, but it later died again
The 200mm NXZT fan died after about 3 years of service
The middle GTX 670 died because of temperature. It didn't the first time, but the 4th or 5th time I forgot to turn on the radiator fans it did. And there was a strange smell too. Luckily I could just disable the PCI-e lane and unplug it's power so that I didn't have to drain the loop.
The case has got negative pressure which means that a ton of dust accumulates in there and provides a risk of static electricity
It's slightly leaking at the pump so I have to fill it with water once a month
I didn't clean the recycled watercooling parts well enough so the tubing has turned completely green but there isn't any gunk present which is nice
I ran out of storage space so I put a HDD on top of the PSU and the SSD just randomly tucked in between the Optical drive space
2 out of the 5 fan controllers on the NZXT case died after about a year so I put in some switches that I can manually turn on the fans with
My desk setup has gotten a mini fridge and a printer table which I have long sought for including a mini desk fan for when it's +30°C inside

Current condition of the loop. It's not all that great

The bottom most fitting is leaking, but only when a small bit of outside force is applied to it.

You can clearly see the amount of gunk buildup in the reservoir and corrosion of the plug fittings.

Dust accumulates easily with negative pressure in the case.

Now, since I'm going to travel far far away for a long long time, I don't need this rig anymore and I'm giving it to my sister. Her computer is an old timer and she really needs a serious upgrade.

All of her stuff is still on the old HDD, at least they're sata but they're only 2x 250GB drives. I'm going to make that a RAID 1 array for for backup and important files.

I then made her purchase (literally) a 250GB Samsung 750 EVO and a 1TB WD Green for mass storage

However, she is not tech savvy by any means which is why I'm going to make it aircooled instead.

I have long since thrown away the stock cooling units for the graphics cards and the cpu came without a fan so I had to purchase those as aftermaket solutions

I am going to make some changes to make it look nice again but I just ordered the parts I need yesterday and the ETA is tuesday.

To make sure that the case pressure is positive, I'm going to block off the big 240mm hole in the side panel with a piece of black carton. All I have to do is remove the shroud, pop in the carton, put back the shroud, done deal.

I cannot tell how annoyed I am by the fact that the monitors are so wobbly and it's been going on for too long now (6+ years) so in order to save my sister from the same pain as I endured, I asked my dad to help make a monitor stand since they're crazy expensive online. Heck, we're gonna weld one together for like $50 worth of materials. There's no need for them to be so expensive.

That's about all for now.

Seabottom · August 14, 2016

All right, so I've got the parts and I have already installed them. Well, we all know how to build a computer right?

Temps are actually pretty good. Without any airflow in the case CPU and GPU temp are at about 50°C and 40-50° respectively.

With airflow the temps are 37°C and 32-41°C respectively and that's all in a 26°C room.

I think that's pretty solid as to before the temps were pretty much the same. The rate of heat dissipation is the only difference I can tell so far.

Here are the highlights

Removing sidepanel to insert the carton

Inserting the fitted carton

Not too bad, gets the job done and looks more or less undetectable from the outside

The same was done to the backside panel

Upon removing the watercooling loop I discovered some shocking things as I forgot how and what I used when I build the machine back then.

Apparently I had used liquid metal or whatever it's called and there was nothing left between the cpu and waterblock.

Under those conditions I'm not suprised I had an idle of 50°C.

The blobs and such that you see are solid chunks and I was really carefull not to let anything into the socket as it was quite thin and fragile.

The gpu block wasn't too bad, I knew that there would be gunk present since the idles here were also quite high.

And then I threw out the copperblocks in the scrap.

Noteworthy changes I made to the case was to remove the drive cage completely. That was easily done by drilling out the rivets.

Unfortunately I had removed some of the bay area so the optical drive is only haning on in one side.

The SSD is tucked away along with the cable management on the back.

It's not the biggest cooler ever but I'm not going to do any overclocking beyond 4 GHZ and even then it won't ever be used fully.

Gotta remember, it's my sister that's going to use this and she just browse the web and do school work and whatnot.

Unfortunately the optical drive doesn't extend as much backwards as the hot swap bays so the wire is a bit messedup.

I bought a 4x sata power extender which I think is worth the $4

And the front for good measure

As I said in an earlier post, me and my dad made a monitor stand ourselves. It took quite a while though it doesn't look like much.

It's not perfect unfortunately, the metal bent a bit due to the heat and only 3 of the 4 holes on all plates fit.

It's bolted to the table with two french screws in the back as the monitors are quite heavy.

Apparently the measurement has gone wrong somewhere; it's a bit close to the table but it's fine. I can live with it.

So there you have it. A transition from the glory days with maintenance to a simple, easy and much more quiet system.

The windows installation took about two days, don't ask me, Microsoft should get their shit together.

Heesleemer · August 14, 2016

Do you have Andy's bedroom from toy story?

That looks very clean. Still a pretty capable machine you got there! I enjoyed reading through it. What are you going do use for your personal rig?

Seabottom · August 14, 2016

I don't know what you are implying by the first senctence.

As for my next system, I do not know yet. At the moment I'm in the process of moving abroad for a few years and so I want to purchase a new computer there.

In the meantime I've got a Sager laptop. It's only an i7 3820m and a GTX460m but it'll do. It can run metro at medium DX9 settings, so it's not too bad.

Heesleemer · August 14, 2016

29 minutes ago, Seabottom said:

I don't know what you are implying by the first senctence.

As for my next system, I do not know yet. At the moment I'm in the process of moving abroad for a few years and so I want to purchase a new computer there.

In the meantime I've got a Sager laptop. It's only an i7 3820m and a GTX460m but it'll do. It can run metro at medium DX9 settings, so it's not too bad.

Ok the movie Toy Story. The human character andy has a room with clouds on it.

Ah I see! it may be cheaper depending on where you go