Project Envy - Pointless Watercooling

[FakeGamerGuy]

It's been a while since I posted on the forums, so uh... hi. Feel free to skip all the talky backstory bits and jump straight to the video at the bottom.
 

Spoiler

 

Last year I built a custom case out of oak, featuring a hand-made frame to mount the components to, artificial grass, and the Chinese characters for "ground" and "bean" (collectively meaning "potato") laser etched into the front. The goal of that build was to make a computer that didn't look like a computer at all, but rather a relaxing piece of decorative furniture. I brought the system to the PAX Prime 2017 BYOC LAN and... I guess the effect worked, because it drew a lot of attention, but only when I was carrying it around (it's quite small and lightweight), but when sat next to other machines it maybe hid in the shadows a little too well. Meanwhile, the open test bench with hardline cooling was getting all the attention, which sort of rubbed me the wrong way. For next year's BYOC I decided to build something a lot flashier, but without throwing thousands of dollars into a system that's effectively being built to show off for a single weekend.

 

That's where Envy comes in. Rather obviously, it's called Envy because it was being built out of envy, but also because my girlfriend was the one who picked the primary color for the system (seafoam green). I wanted to do a build that would show you don't have to burn a ton of money to have a beautiful, custom computer, so I decided to build a top of the line gaming rig (or what would have been a top of the line rig) from 10 years ago. Due to various circumstances, what I ended up with was a Core2 Quad Q8200S, EVGA GTX 295 Hydro Copper, Zotac G43-ITX, and a Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ITX.

 

I thought it would be fun to do something like an Extreme Edition Core2 Quad and dual GTX 295s in SLi for a retro quad-SLi setup, but a few things stopped me. First, I wanted the whole system to be water cooled, and getting matching factory water cooled cards, matching cards with water blocks already installed, or matching cards that could have matching blocks installed onto them, was quite challenging. Second, the Extreme Edition CPUs are still unreasonably expensive, and I couldn't justify the cost for such little (relative) power. Lastly, I was gifted a brand new Enthoo Evolv ITX from a friend for helping him buy his first gaming PC. It was given to him by a friend, but his board didn't fit into the case, so he passed it along to me. So I had this ITX case, which meant I needed an ITX board for a socket 775 CPU that had a PCI Express slot. I had no idea at the time, but that would be pretty hard to find. Most boards I found were old school PCI, and Zotac was the only manufacturer I could find that had all the features I needed. The big question, though, was would it support SLi?

 

I found a Zotac G43-ITX on ebay, which came with a Celeron already installed, plugged in some old RAM I had left over from an old Atom server, plugged in a power supply and... Well, it kind of started? The fans would spin up at full speed, but nothing seemed to happen. I checked for shorts or any other obvious issues but didn't see anything, I resocketed the CPU, memory, nothing worked. A few days later I started probing around with a multimeter to see if I could find anything strange, and I saw that a few places that were supposed to be getting 3.3v were getting 5-6.6v, then I saw smoke and yanked the PSU's power cord. That whole saga is documented in this thread. I got a refund and ordered another G43-ITX. This one worked just fine, except when it didn't, which seemed to be cause by a short that only occurred sometimes when it was installed in the case...? I got it resolved, and the system was up and running with a Core2 Duo.

 

Next was the GPU. I ordered a GTX 295 (air cooled), and a new-old-stock Swiftech full coverage block. After some additional research, I discovered that my 295 was a dual-PCB card, so my block wouldn't work. I stumbled across an EVGA GTX 295 Hydro Copper, which was a perfect solution. The copper was a little tarnished, but some Brasso polished it back to a mirror finish. I was a little worried the copper would look bad in the system, but as I looked at the seafoam paracord I ordered, I realized it was almost perfectly the color of oxidized copper, so that fit perfectly in with the color theme of the build.

 

Going off that, I ordered a copper (powdercoated) radiator and fittings from PrimoChill, along with Teal SX Vue (which I thought would be greensih, but it's quite blue).

 

The CPU cooler was an XSPC from my old Phenom build. I didn't have any Intel mounting hardware, so I ordered the RGB upgrade mounting kit off Amazon and opted not to install the LEDs.

 

After installing the radiator in the front of the case I removed the upper radiator mount and replaced it with plastic sheets cut to fit the weird angles at the back of the case. Above that I mounted 4 LED strips for an NZXT Hue+. The diffuse lighting worked well, but I really wish the Hue+ had more options for user-programmed lighting effects. As it is right now, the lighting effect I want only uses 2 of the 4 strips at a time, and with how much light the diffusion panels eat up, it's quite a bit darker than it could be.

 

The most stressful part of the build was finding a location to mount the pump and reservoir, and getting the tubing bent. Luckily, EKWB has a very small DDC pump/res combo (there were smaller options but they were super ugly and had unknown pump quality), so I picked up that and a radiator mounting bracket. By repositioning the radiator I was able to juuuuuuust clear the GPU. Bending the tubing was kind of a nightmare, given how little space I had to work with and how many tight bends I needed. The end result is okay, but you can tell that things don't line up perfectly. Eventually I'll bend new lines, and maybe even get some proper fittings so there aren't so many awkward bends.

 

The screen is a 5" touch screen meant for Rasp Pi projects. It was originally powered by HDMI (yes, HDMI can power a small screen), but I didn't know if DVI could provide power, so I opted to install the USB cable onto the mainboard. Between that and the Hue+, all my front USB headers got used up, so I wasn't able to connect the front USB ports to the motherboard.

 

I installed a 120GB SSD I bought for under $30 last-minute just to save room and act as a faster scratch disk.

 

That's pretty much it. The CPU definitely holds the GPU back, but I'll see if I can remedy that with a Q9505S. If you're wondering why I don't use a better Core2 Quad, it's because this board only supports 65w CPUs, and most of the good CPUs were 95w, so RIP performance. If anyone is interested I can post benchmark scores and game FPS figures.

 

 

Anyway, here's Wonderwall.

 

 

Here's a demo of how my lighting works before I installed it:

 

And some unicorn barf after I got the water stuff all hooked up:

 

[FakeGamerGuy]

Decided to do some overclocking after seeing all these 2080 Ti overclocking videos. According to nVidia's specs, the reference card has a core clock speed of 576 MHz and a memory clock of 999 MHz. I was able to push my EVGA 295 Hydro Copper up to a 710 MHz core clock (23% improvement) and a memory clock of 1235 MHz (another 23% improvement). Unfortunately I can't adjust the power targets because the 295 doesn't have power sensing (??) but that's fine. From 10 seconds of Googling it looks like a typical 295 gets a graphics score of ~21,000 in Cloud Gate, and I was able to hit just shy of 28,000 in graphics-only runs.

 

I might have mentioned in my original post that this board has zero overclocking support for the CPU or memory, so I'm pretty much stuck where I am. I'll try to give it a tinker when I'm back in the country, but for now I think I'm happy with the results.

 

https://www.3dmark.com/cg/4360528

 

 

[FakeGamerGuy]

Managed to overclock what I assumed to be an un-overclockable CPU. Gained an extra 350 points in Cloud Gate (or a hair over 4% gain) by bringing the FSB speed up from 333 MHz to 340. I'll try to to get a little more power out of it but I have to reset and reconfigure the BIOS every time I get to a non-POST state, so that's... fun...

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/28800420?

 

Edit: Ran it a few more times with the same settings (345 MHz wouldn't POST) and managed a 9126.

 

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/28800736?