Well as might be blatantly obvious by the Thermaltake system, this is my first attempt at WC. I used to have my equipment in an Antec P180 but there was just too much to fit in there and the case ended up looking like this:
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that I had heat problems with a GTX crammed in there. This was my cue to invest in a new case and if possible some form of better cooling so being on a budget I opted for the Thermaltake Kandalf VD4000BWS. Here it is running a wet test on the floor, Antec on the desk:
I put my setup directly into the case but it was still quite messy:
So I bought new cables, fans, coolant and just for the hell of it two 500GB Seagate 7200.11's:
Just a reminder of the mess:
I replaced all the ribbon cables with UV Green rounded cables and all the multicoloured SATA cables with UV Green clip-in cables. It was then a good few hours wait while all the data transferred from the 600GB RAID to the new 1TB RAID:
Much tidier:
It glows nicely in the dark
The full setup:
I've still got some things to add and I've just taken delivery of a drive bay reservoir and some FluidXP Alien Green so once AquaPC deliver the GTX block I'll begin draining the loop and adding the rest. A set of UV cathodes hidden in the back should light it up quite nicely
Edit: Just received delivery of this beauty:
The EK8800GTX Block with both Black and Clear tops for just £38
Update:
Just ran some benchmarks on my RAID to see which is the fastest loading. I picked the worst case scenario of random loading where every next bit is read completely at random from anywhere on the HDD. These were the results:
Green line - 2x500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 RAID0 SATA2-SATA2 Port
Pink Line - 2x320GB Maxtor 7V RAID0 SATA2-SATA1 Port
Yellow Line - 1x150GB Western Digital RaptorX JBOD SATA1-SATA2 Port
The Seagates used the least CPU during operation; 10% for a full load? Mad! They're also immensely fast and look how stable the read is, even at random. Just for comparison purposes the the two Seagates cost as much as the RaptorX alone did. I'm moving all my programs to the Seagates now and games load so fast
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that I had heat problems with a GTX crammed in there. This was my cue to invest in a new case and if possible some form of better cooling so being on a budget I opted for the Thermaltake Kandalf VD4000BWS. Here it is running a wet test on the floor, Antec on the desk:
I put my setup directly into the case but it was still quite messy:
So I bought new cables, fans, coolant and just for the hell of it two 500GB Seagate 7200.11's:
Just a reminder of the mess:
I replaced all the ribbon cables with UV Green rounded cables and all the multicoloured SATA cables with UV Green clip-in cables. It was then a good few hours wait while all the data transferred from the 600GB RAID to the new 1TB RAID:
Much tidier:
It glows nicely in the dark
The full setup:
I've still got some things to add and I've just taken delivery of a drive bay reservoir and some FluidXP Alien Green so once AquaPC deliver the GTX block I'll begin draining the loop and adding the rest. A set of UV cathodes hidden in the back should light it up quite nicely
Edit: Just received delivery of this beauty:
The EK8800GTX Block with both Black and Clear tops for just £38
Update:
Just ran some benchmarks on my RAID to see which is the fastest loading. I picked the worst case scenario of random loading where every next bit is read completely at random from anywhere on the HDD. These were the results:
Green line - 2x500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 RAID0 SATA2-SATA2 Port
Pink Line - 2x320GB Maxtor 7V RAID0 SATA2-SATA1 Port
Yellow Line - 1x150GB Western Digital RaptorX JBOD SATA1-SATA2 Port
The Seagates used the least CPU during operation; 10% for a full load? Mad! They're also immensely fast and look how stable the read is, even at random. Just for comparison purposes the the two Seagates cost as much as the RaptorX alone did. I'm moving all my programs to the Seagates now and games load so fast
