Frank - A Beast of a Water cooled rig

The1stCAVVET

New member
Meet Frank - one beast of a PC. This is a personal build of mine that I have done over the last 9+ months through multiple iterations and hardware change outs, custom cabling, and other mods, Frank finally came down to this final configuration and look. I then took up photography as well during this process and its quite an eye opener when you start getting addicted to two very expensive hobbies - lol. Lens or GPU - dang, decisions, decisions, decisions...........

Frank not only looks "cool" but he can back it up. The water cooling system keep Frank chilling while the beefy hardware lets Frank tear up BF3 @ 1920x1080 with everything as maxed as possible over 200FPS, but in 5980x1080 resolution he is somewhat humbled with everything maxed he runs around 45-50FPS, but so nicely I must say. Crysis 2 we get 78FPS+ at 5980x1080 with everything maxed out, but at 1920x1080, Frank rips it apart over 200FPS.

The Core i7 990X @ 4.6Ghz certainly helps feed the THREE EVGA GTX 580 3072MB GPU's in 3-WAY SLI while using 12GB of Corsair Dominator GT DDR 3 at 2006MHz and 9-10-10-27 timings. With this much power and speed - the last thing I wanted to do was have them held up waiting on the hard drives - so Frank was built with dual RAID 0 configurations. The first is a set of 60GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD's that are for the OS/BOOT. The second RAID 0 set is another set of OCZ Vertex 2 SSD's that perform Programs duty - all programs and games are loaded on these dual 60GB SSD's. For data storage I also dropped in a 2TB and a 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Black set of drives.

For the cooling, Frank uses two solutions. First the Koolance ERM-2K3uCU external system in the rack does the heavy lifting by cooling down the liquid after going through three GTX 580 3072MB cards overclocked to 877MHz as well as the motherboard. Once it is done bringing the water back to ambient, it feeds the GPU directly, which then pushes the water into the top internal BlackIce Xtreme Performance 360 Radiator that is sandwiched between 2 rows of 120mm fans in a push/pull config. The water is then pulled through with the MCP 655 pump inside Frank which acts as the primary pump (the ERM just works as a backup and to keep the flow consistent). The MCP 655 inside then pushes the cooled water through the GPU's, the motherboard and then back to the ERM unit. This enables Frank to stay cool under all conditions from benchmarking, working, and gaming.

Frank's YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/FrankNSteinPC?feature=mhee

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OMG 9GB of Graphics, thats awesome

Nicely done mate, great cable management and a clean watercooling loop
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What did you use to hold the brading together on the GPU and motherboard 24pin cables, it looks very neat
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This build is fantastic. Want more pics! You have already got loads up, but I want more!
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Love the name too haha
 
@ JackyBoy - > All the "Frank" content you can handle - lol

Frank's YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/FrankNSteinPC?feature=mhee

Franks Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/frank.n.stein3

Flicker – All the photo’s you would want of Frank: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frank2011/

Frank’s Build Log: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1588626&page=52

@ S_I_N -> Yes the case is the Corsair 800D - full tower. It is a beast of a case to hold a beast of a machine.

@ yassarirkhan -> The monitors are Asus 24" 2ms GTG 1920x1080 monitors I run using Surround at 5980x0180 resolution - thus the reason I have 9GB of video ram. Most games use at least 2500MB per card to push that resolution in wide screen gaming.

@ SieB -> Frank has a way of making men love him and turning lesbians bi - is just him being Frank.

@ dispy -> the thread I used was some nylon stuff I got at a hobby store. I put up a series of videos on YouTube (see Franks YouTube channel link above) on how to sew cables. Apparently many seasoned builders saw something totally new to PC modding and cable management, so I got tons of questions on how I did that and how to do it. So I did a series of videos showing how to sew cables - all those are sewn by hand.
 
That's a beautiful rig!!!

Really wish I'd done more research before buying my 2 580s. It sounds stupid now but I thought 1.5GB across 2 cards is 3GB and that 3GB would be more then enough to play any game at 5760x1080.

Nope! most games I have to lower the AA settings because 1.5GB just isn't enough. Thought about selling and getting 2x 3GB cards but with the potential losses involved I might as well wait until the 680 is out.

BF3 though I can play on max setting (so it can't use a massive amount of GPU memory) but only get around 30FPS.

I also recently got into photography and just bought a Canon 550D! I feel your financial pain
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