Old PC resurection on a budjet [Build Log] A watercooling thriller

[MaratM]

THE INTRO

I have a kind of old pc. It was bought in 2007. It's original exact specks are history now, but luckuly enough the motherboard died after 2 years of use.
Therefore it was replaced with

- "top of the line" lga 1366 motherboard Asus p6t

- a really fast i7 920 cpu cooled by coolermaster gemini double 120 cpu cooler,

- topped up with 6GB (3x2gb) corsair dominator (1600mHz)

- 850w thermaltake psu

- asus gtx470

all of it was placed in all aluminium Thermaltake tsunami case (made out of aluminium foil)
It was mighty and powerful at that time.

Few years down the line gtx470 died, and on the tight budget was replaced by msi 750ti.
Nowdays it it's performance was enough to surf the internet, do world processing and play civilization 6 (with a coffee break inbetween turns).
The main problem of that pc was the noise, it was never configured for silent airflow. And it is probably the reason why it survive for 9 years. It was never overclocked, even RAM was running by default profile @1333 mHz.
Now it is 2017. It was time to upgrade and i desided to build a new one from scrach here is a link for the build log of unfinished build http://www.overclock.net/t/1625793/lian-li-pc-q-37-the-show-off-htpc/20#post_26362929 but at the time all the case mods were finished I cold not afford to buy all the planned hardware. Thus desided to upgrade the old rig.

[doomsriker]

28 minutes ago, MaratM said:

I have a kind of old pc. It was bought in 2007. It's original exact specks are history now, but luckuly enough the motherboard died after 2 years of use.
Therefore it was replaced with

- "top of the line" lga 1366 motherboard Asus p6t

- a really fast i7 920 cpu cooled by coolermaster gemini double 120 cpu cooler,

- topped up with 6GB (3x2gb) corsair dominator (1600mHz)

- 850w thermaltake psu

- asus gtx470

all of it was placed in all aluminium Thermaltake tsunami case (made out of aluminium foil)
It was mighty and powerful at that time.

Few years down the line gtx470 died, and on the tight budget was replaced by msi 750ti.
Nowdays it it's performance was enough to surf the internet, do world processing and play civilization 6 (with a coffee break inbetween turns).
The main problem of that pc was the noise, it was never configured for silent airflow. And it is probably the reason why it survive for 9 years. It was never overclocked, even RAM was running by default profile @1333 mHz.
Now it is 2017. It was time to upgrade and i desided to build a new one from scrach here is a link for the build log of unfinished build http://www.overclock.net/t/1625793/lian-li-pc-q-37-the-show-off-htpc/20#post_26362929 but at the time all the case mods were finished I cold not afford to buy all the planned hardware. Thus desided to upgrade the old rig.

Thank goodness you did not go ahead with a cpu platform upgrade. 1366 zeons are still very powerful and if you had a good board anyways it's a no brainier. I remember  when skylake came out. I had just picked up a i7 4770 system for next to nothing (250$ for a whole system minus the hard drive). I looked at the skylake benchmarks compared to haswell and said wow look, literally no advantage in games if I were to upgrade. 

[MaratM]

PART 1. THE OLD HARDWARE

As a starting point I decided to fight the noise. I've replaced all the fans with Be Quiet Silent wings 3 120mm, they were bougt for the Lian Li case, but unfortunatelly (or fortunatly) they did not fit in that rig. As most of mini-ITX builds the space is an issue and the fans were too close to the fan grills and made horrible turbulence noise.

During the reassembly and cleanning process I found that one of the CPU fans was connected to flat 12v connector on the motherboard and both chassy fans were connected directly to the PSU @12 volts. The old fans were not the best quality ones (they came with the case)

With help of the new fans and proper configuration the noise went down but not as expected.

I've also tried to overclock the old i7 920, but was not very successfull

After 15 minutes of stress tessting AIDA64 crashed with temp rising up to 95C on one of the cores. So I went back to stock. 

6 Gb of RAM, 9 years old CPU and "top of the line" 750ti just would not perform as I wanted thus I decided to upgrade the rig to something a bit more productive

 

On 18.12.2017 at 4:17 PM, doomsriker said:

Thank goodness you did not go ahead with a cpu platform upgrade. 1366 zeons are still very powerful and if you had a good board anyways it's a no brainier. I remember  when skylake came out. I had just picked up a i7 4770 system for next to nothing (250$ for a whole system minus the hard drive). I looked at the skylake benchmarks compared to haswell and said wow look, literally no advantage in games if I were to upgrade. 

It is a BUDGET upgrade, it is gone just a bit above the budget later. The story will continue))

[Ashiella]

3 minutes ago, MaratM said:

It is a BUDGET upgrade, it is gone just a bit above the budget later. The story will continue))

I would recommend first going for a used X5660 on ebay, maybe get two just in case one overclocks horribly and sell the worst one. (4ghz+) Aida 64 WILL make these pretty damn toasty. I have a noctua NHD-14 and I reached about 103c at 4.35ghz (Equivalent to a stock 5820k) 

[doomsriker]

Just now, MaratM said:

It is a BUDGET upgrade, it is gone just a bit above the budget later. The story will continue))

I mean if I were you I would not upgrade the cpu until you upgrade the graphics card. New CPUs are only going to give you moderately more compute performance until you get to the higher end cpus. And at least in video games, you will see almost no effective performance bump. I would expect that zeon to handle up to 1080ti sli with few problems. Not to mention that unless you go very high end, you will be dropping from triple channel to dual channel ram. And when you do buy ram you will have to pay crazy DDR4 prices. 

[MaratM]

PART 2. THE UPGRADE

The upgrade path was a Budget one.

First I went to aliexpress and found X5680 for a bargain price of 3500 Rubles (around $60US)

Next step was RAM. As it was a cheap upgrade. I found an exactly same kit as I had - Corsair Dominator 1600 6Gb somwere in UK for a price of a few pints of lager) 20 pounds (including delivery to my door in the middle of Siberia)

The last was the grafic card. My choice was GTX 980ti. They were not affected by mining craze and the price was reasonable. So picked up one EVGA 980ti FTW on ebay. ($350 including shipment)

Asus P6T BIOS was updated to the last one and All of the "new" hardware was installed in the old case, The Xeon was mildly overclocked to 4.0 gHz @ 1.35 volts. The ram was set up to 1600 mHz. The GPU Run stock

All this upgrade delivered around 180 FPS in Doom on ULTRA settings on 1080p monitor. I was happy. Untill I took my headphones off.

[doomsriker]

1 minute ago, MaratM said:

Ddr4 prices is one of the reasons why i put my new rig (mini ITX) on hold. I went the xeon way with my old rig. It is the best value to performance ratio especially if the budget is tight. According to some youtube reviews x56 xeons perform the same as modern i7 in games and outperform them in multi threaded applications. They are probably capable to run 1080ti, but missing some modern features such as nvme, large size hard drive support and usb3. But who cares about it if it a gaming rig

I literally said most of that in what you just quoted so.....yea.

[MaratM]

PART 4. WATERCOOLING GEAR

The mighty EVGA 980ti paired with an ancient 6 core server monster delivered great performance, but the fans were spining a bit too fast, the temperatures were high too my liking and the airflow of the case was not the great feature of the old thermaltake case.

I drilled out all the hard drive cages and 5 1/4 bays, opened up the front door of the case and the temps started to go down. However the gpu was still runing loud. I was thinking of get a dremmel tool out and increase the airflow, but one day I was browsing the adverds on the internet and found a watercooling set including:

EK supremacy evo

EKWB D5 pump res combo

EKWB full cover titan X/gtx980ti waterblock for 7000 Rubles (around $120)

I just could not say no to it.

After I bought all the watercooling gear I've contacted EKWB to get the thermal pads for the GPU waterblock, backplate and a 250mm tube for pump-res combo. To control the fans I wanted to use aquaero but could not find one for a good price, but I found it's little brother called Powerajust 2

The watercooling jorney has started

[MaratM]

PART 5. THE NEW CASE

At first I was thinking to get the dremmel out and modify the old case so it could be used for watercooling, but I could not be bothered to do so. So I've started shopping for a new case. After narrowing my options I had a choice between Phanteks evolve TG edition and Thermaltake Supressor F31 TG. The Phanteks got a great looks, but it also has bad airflow to make it work with old top of the line equipment which is relatevely hot compare to the modern standards the case must be modified, therefore some panels had to be sent to be laser cut or get a kit from modmymods.com. On top of that this case is not availiable in Russia, so it had to be ordered from US or EU. The shipment fee would of double the price for the case.

On the other hand the Thermaltake F31 is not that expensive, has support for watercooling, has a diecent airflow and was avaliable in nearest big city for around $100 just a 1000 km away from my town. With some help from my friends it was bought and brought to my door.

Compare to the old case it was big. And it looks like a big black box with a glass panel on one of the sides.

At the same I bought a 360 hardware labs gts (slim) rad, additional Be quiet fan, some tubes, fittings and some coolant concentrate. For fittings I went with Barrow they are much cheaper than EKWB or Bitspower ones. As for tubing I desided to do a hardline build, it looks cleaner and it was a bit more chalanging for me, It was a first watercooling build.

[MaratM]

PART 6. THE WATERCOOLED BUILD (1-ST ATTEMP)

All the hardware was in place. In order to start the build some tools were requiered

For cutting tubes I used a cheap tube cutter and a dril bit to clean the inside adges

The Silicon insert was a bit too large for the tube, it just would not fit inside the tube. A solution came from a car parts shop. A vacuum silicone hose 9mm OD did the job

To fill the loop I used a gigantic 160ml syrringe bought from a local farmacy and the same silicon hose 

It took me around 2,5 hours to complete the loop. But I've got a major problem while buiding the loop.

EVGA GTX980 ti FTW was not compatible with EK full cover waterblock. According to the pictures I found on the internet the only difference between FE card and FTW card were 6+8 pin power connectors on the FE card and 8+8 power connectors on FTW. So my plan was to shave off a little bit of the acetal part of the waterclock.

BUT I was wrong. FE card has 6+2 phases than FTW card has 8+2 phases, in order to keep the pcb size same as FE EVGA placed the elements of power delivery vertically instead of horizontally on the FE card. The waterblock just would not fit on the card. The card was reassembled back and installed in to the build as is. The overkill CPU loop was complete and put to the leak test

While filling up the loop the D5 pump would not start withot the PWM signal. The solution was found on the internet. I've connected +5v (red wire from molex/floppy connector) to the 4-th pin of the fan header. 5v constant is an equivalent of 100% PWM signal. The pump started and filled up the loop.

To add a bit of colour to the build I've installed an RGB sprip without an RGB controller (twisted red and blue wire together to get some purple colour.

And the cherry on top were some custom sleeved extentions in newtral black and white (got them from aliexpress).

 

[MaratM]

PART 6 (CONTINUE)

CPU loop was leak tested overnight, next morning I finished istalling fans and pressed the power button.

One of the problems with X58 platform is the North Bridge and VRM temps. To lower down the temps I placed 2 80mm fans

One of them was placed ontop of GPU to cool down the NB

 

The other one was placed next to the top rad, just obove th top VRM heatsink, both of them were connected to one oth the motherboard headers and set up to a silent profile.

The drain valve was installed on the bottom pump inlet, The control header (PWM/RPM) is connected to the CPU header on the motherboard

As I mentioned before I use AquaComputer Powerajust 2 Ultra to controll the fans

Here is some pictures of RGB strip

It was time to overclock the CPU

I've managed to get the CPU as high as 4.5 gHz @ 1.4 volts and even passed the Cinebench, Aida 64 stress test heated up the CPU cores up to 90C and that was a bit too much to my liking. So I downclocked it to 4.2gHz@1,38v which is stable and has reasonable tems of 80C after half hour Aida 64 stresstest.

[MaratM]

PART 7. THE GPU V-MOUNT

The next step of the watercooling aventure was the GPU

I had a choice to either sell EVGA FTW and buy 980ti FE or try to find someone who was willing to swap FTW to FE card. Fortunatelly enough I found an add of someone who was selling 980 ti FE card not far away from me (just around 1000 km, I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere) Gave him a call and asked if he wanted to change the cards. He agreed and the card was sent to him via one of my friends. Here is some pictures he had sent me before the deal took place

 

While waiting for the card I've put an old GTX750ti so rig was functional. I placed vertically. It involved some modding to be done to the Thermaltake vertical mount bracket. The raiser cable was slightly different than the original thermaltake one. But if there is a will there is a way

A few days later GTX 980ti FE arrived and was placed instead of 750ti.

I've ran few stress tests on the FE card, it was fully functional, but I had a strange feeling that instead of a graphic card I've put a hair dryer inside of my rig)

[Nicnac]

I never knew there were dual-fan cpu coolers! 

[MaratM]

7 minutes ago, Nicnac said:

I never knew there were dual-fan cpu coolers! 

I have one for sale if you need some "exotic" cooling? Its only has lga775 support bracket.

[MaratM]

PART 8. THE WATERCOOLED GPU

Next step of the watercooling adventure was to put the 980ti under water. Looks like a simple task - take the stock cooler off, put the waterblock on, add some fittings and bend some tubes. But i've run into some issues. In order to make nicer bends I decided to use the silicon insert instead of the vaccuum hose. So I've sanded the insert untill it had a propper size to get inside the tube and started to bend the tubes. Instalation of waterblock and backplate was an easy task. Except one thing the waterblock was missing 2 standoffs

I had another waterblock for 1080ti, which was bought for the other project so I borrowed a couple of standoffs and a couple bolts from the 1080ti waterblock, also contacted the EKWB support and asked them if they sell spare parts - they do and they are very helpfull.  

The loop was assembled and put to the leak test. Unfortunatelly one of the dual rotary (used one) leaked. I've drained the loop, changed some fittings around, bent one more tube and the problem was solved. No leaks!!! sonds great time to bleed the system and fire up the rig. BUT the air bubbles just would not go out of the system . I've tilted the case on its side, on its back and soo on it just would not help. After close look at the CPU  waterblock I found the problem. The CPU waterblock was filled with gunk.

  

The gunk was bits of silicone insert which shaved off by the sharp edges of the tube when I pulled it throug the tubes. I washed the waterblock, all the tubes and the reservoir twice, but could not get all the gunk out. I called it a day and went to sleep.

Next morning went to the nearest gas station, got some more distilled water and a cheap fuel filter and introduceed it to the system

 probably the electrical tape is not the best sealant, but it worked. a couple of drops do not count. it was not going to stay there forever. So flushed the system a few times with half on hour pump runing time. Finally the loop was reassembled and filled up again, leaktested again, this time i could not wait for 24 hours. If there is a leak it will show up straight after the pump is started.

A coulpe hours later I fired up the system and started Heaven benchmark

50-55C under load!!! that was great and the fans were spinning at under 1000 rpm the coolant temp rised up to 39-40C and stabilised.

It was time to properly tune CPU and GPU and find a sweetspot between fan noise, coolant temp and performance. BUT this time I could hear the PSU fan!!! It was getting to the maximum speed of around 2000RPM and it was 10!!! years old. It was working fine as a power supply but the PSU fan was getting on my nerves. The choice was to change a power supply or to change the PSU fan.

[NelizMastr]

The ShitPower series wasn't that amazing anyway  looks like the "budget" upgrade got a bit out of hand  

[MaratM]

33 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

The ShitPower series wasn't that amazing anyway  looks like the "budget" upgrade got a bit out of hand  

It is a diecent psu (for a 10 years old one), got a funny fan curve based on load.

If it was a simple "budget" upgrade it would not be here?

[NelizMastr]

2 minutes ago, MaratM said:

It is a diecent psu (for a 10 years old one), got a funny fan curve based on load.

If it was a simple "budget" upgrade it would not be here?

Ghetto upgrades are fun too 

[MaratM]

PART 9. DA AIRFLOW

I am still experementing with the airflow.

Current setup:

3 top Be Quiet fans as intake, bringing cool air to the rad

2 front Be Quiet fans as intake as well

1 140mm Thermaltake riing is at the bottom as an intake

1 140mm Thermaltake riing is at the back of the case as exhaust

Thermaltake Riings are moded. They were simple blue led fans came in a box

As I mentioned before I've installed an RGB strip and blue LED fans do not really mach with RGB strip

So I took my RGB strip and replaced thermaltake LED with it

The fan is disassembled

White

Red

green

blue

The cables on both fans were also resleeved so the sleeving starts from the center of the fan

The bottom fan sinc with the rest of the RGB strip

The original plan of RGB-ing the fans was to put an RGB strip on each corner of the fan, after soldering together 3 strips with sleeved cables and heatshrink the rgb strip was not working properly, the red became pink, the green would not work ect. So I went with a simple 3 led strip in one corner. Later I've figured out that then I was heating the heatshrink I overheated the strip and it stopped working. But i could not be bothered to redo the whole thing again. The result is good for me.

As for Riing fans they have a very low starting voltage at around 2,5-3 volts and can spin very at very low speed, but at above 1000 RPM they become loud, probably I will change them unless I figure out the way to control them, probably the aquero might help with its 5 independently controlled fan chanels. As for now all fans are controlled by Poweradjust2 based on the coolant temp and the minimum voltage to run the Be Quiet fans is around 4,5 volts and at 4,5 volts the Riing fans run at around 700rpm, which is a bit too loud.

[DJ46]

On 19. 12. 2017 at 1:08 PM, Nicnac said:

I never knew there were dual-fan cpu coolers! 

Wait till you see the Scythe Susanoo!

 

And OP, stunning progress so far. I love budget upgrades and the problem solving required. Great job!

[MaratM]

On 20.12.2017 at 8:40 PM, NelizMastr said:

Ghetto upgrades are fun too 

They are the most rewarding ones, especially if it all works as planned. It is all part of the game - parts hunting, modding, building, finding solutions for problems and squising a little bit of performance out of old hardware. There is no fun in putting a tonn of cash on the counter in a computer store and get it all new top of the line parts of the shelf

[MaratM]

After all upgrades were done I've found out that X58 motherboard can support NVMe ssd as a main boot drive. There are a few things which are required to make it work.

- a PCI-E to NVMe adapter card (easy around $25)

- an actual SSD, but it has to be Sansung 950 pro (it is the only one with legacy BIOS support)

It is out of production and can be bought only used. Unfortunatelly new egg does not deliver to Russia

Should I do it or the performance gains will be unsignificant and just get a normal SATA SSD as a fast storage device

Due to the fact that ASUS P6T does not have PCI-E 3.0 only PCI-E 2.0 I will not be able to get all of the speed of NVMe but it is significantly faster than using SATA 2. 

My storage configuration is:

1 Kingston 240Gb SSD as a boot drive

2 x 2Tb HDD as storade drives for films, games (it was very surprising how much hard drive space modern games take)

 

 

[MaratM]

PART 10. ANOTHER RAD and PSU UPGRADE

The first configuration of the radiators was - 2 radiators: 360 on the top and 240 on the front. The front was set up as an intake, and the top was set up as exhaust both rear and the bottom 140 mm fans were installed as intake. The radiator fans were controlled by powerajust and the case fans by the motheboard.

This configuration was good but It was originnaly planned to use 2 360 rads. So i did. Used another Blackice nemesis gts 360 rad and another 120 mm be quiet SW3 fan.

The rad change was almost a a straigt forward one, however once again one of the dual rotary fittings leaked. I've replaced it with 2 45 degrees rotary. All was great. I've also chnged top rad fans to the intake so both rads get fresh air from the ouside the case.

But the PSU 140mm fan was too loud at the full load. The PSU has an interesting fan curve. It runs the fan at minimmum speed untill the the PSU load goes to around 300 watts, after that it gradually increases its speed to the max RPM at around 500 watts power consumption, after 500 watts the fan as running at constant full speed. The power consumption was measured by an ammiter on the main power cord. I'm not saying that my measures were exact (due to the flactuation in the current) but they give more or less correct power consumption figures

CPU Stress test Aida 64

1.67 amp x 220 volts = 367 watt - the fan was getting louder

2.24 amp x 220 volts = 493 watts (PSU fan became very loud)

GPU stress test (unigene heaven)

CPU and GPU stresstest (Heaven + Aida64)

2.8 amp x 220 volt = 616 watts

Therefore the fan curve was figured out

I needed a good fan for the PSU with low noise level and diecent static pressure. The choice was:

- Noctua 140 mm fan (estimated delivery time 2 weeks)

- Noiseblocker 140mm 1300 RPM  (estimated delivery time 2 weeks)

- Be quiet SW3 140 mm high speed (could not find it in Russia)

- EK Varder 140 mm  (estimated delivery time 2 weeks) 

The next thing was to figure out the starting voltage of the PSU fan. I could disassemble the PSU and by using the multimeter get the numbers but I found a different way.

The Thermaltake case came with 2 140 mm fans

140mm Riing Led blue - good static pressure 1400 RPM

140 mm Pure good airflow 1000 RPM

Thermaltake Riing Specs state that the fan operates at 9-12 volts, however after I connected it to the Powerajust I saw that this fan starts at 3 volts. So I replaced the PSU fan with Thermaltake Riing. The tacho wire (yellow) was connected to one of the mobo fan feaders so I cn see the speed of the PSU fan.

Now I've got a nice blue glow inside the PSU.

It was time to play around with overclocks.

 

 

[MaratM]

PART 11. THE OVERCLOCK

As I said before the CPU is overclocked at safe 4.2gHz. I've tried to go higher and it can boot at 4.6 and even pass the Cinebench, but it became kind of unstable even if the temp was far away from thruttling. So I decided to stay at 4.2 and on top of that I did not see any significant performance gains in games.

Here is cinebench result at 4.4 gHz

However then I overclocked the GPU I've got around 10% gain

Stock

overclocked gpu

stock (Rise of the tomb raider all settings maxed out)

overclocked

overclock settings

+250 on memory

+150 on core

+50 mV

power is maxed out

It all sounds very nice and it is a real gain in performance with a little increase in fan noise (I had to put the max fan speed to 80% insdead of 70%

It is nice to know that the rig is capble of, but I'm not an FPS juncky, I just put v-sinck on, lock the frame rate at 60Hz and called it a day.

I play old school single player games, without online battles (like PUBG or CSGO) where the frame rate matters, but I've got almost silent high performance rig, nice low temps and a lot of satisfaction while building the rig.

I might re-do the loop - add some south/north bridge and vrm waterblocks, add another ssd in order to lower down the loading time and deffinetly put an NVMe ssd into the rig, but for now it is done and it is almost perfect for that it is used for

 

[MaratM]

USB3.0

Asus p6t is probably the first x58 mobo to hit the market in 2009 the "new" usb3.0 was a bit rare and was not really availiable to the masses till 2011, thus p6t as a "budget" mobo (compared to rampage iii) did not support this "new" technology

But we live in 2018 and usb3.0 is a nessesity with file sizes increased compare to 10 years ago

So once again I used aliexpress and ordered a pci-e -> usb3.0 adapter board for just over $6 (350 rubles)

After 2 months waiting it arrived in the post

The instalation was as easy as it gets with a watercooled vertically mounted gpu - a massive pain in the bottom, after some operations with a screwdriver I managed to free the top pci-e slot and insert the card.

All the drivers were installed automatically and 2 usb3.0 front ports started to work

Now I had to check if it actually worked as intended. I grabed a couple almost identical 700mb files from my kids cartoon collection and copied them from ssd to the usb3.0 flash drive the time was identical 35 sec!!! That was not that i was expected!!! So i dowloaded cristal disck benchmark and run the test for both usb2 and usb3 ports using the same drive

the results were surprising (the flash drive was the chippest possible)

usb2.0 port

usb 3.0 port

old kingston ssd (p6t has only sata2)

Lesson learned the hard way: upgrade all of hardware first and only after that watercool the rig especially if using rigid tubing

P.S. I've ordered another pci-e device from aliexpress