From the beast to a beauty (hopefully)

[jonnyfgm]

Well, today I finally took the plunge and bought a rather large upgrade for my PC.

First of all the current rig, yes its a beast, no not in a good way.







Specs are

i7 960 Clocked to 4GHz

CoolIT ALC all in one liquid cooler

Asus P6X58D-E

6GB KINGSTON HYPER-X

2x Intel 80GB SSDs in RAID 0

1x 2TB and 1x 1TB storage drives

2x GTS 450 in SLI

All nestled in a Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case

Yes i've murdered that poor side panel on the case, the graphics cards were getting very hot so i gave them some quick DIY ventilation including drilling a mount for a 120mm fan in the side panel and strapping a 120mm fan and a 60mm fan to them

I always intended to make a side window in the side panel, in the end i just bought one.

Despite its ghetto looks the performance isn't too bad, this is after an hour or so of running prime.



So the real fun starts when this little lot arrives tomorrow (hopefully)

XSPC Rasa CPU Waterblock Intel 1366, 1156, 1155, 775 :

EK FC7970 Full Cover Waterblock for AMD/ATI HD 7970

Phobya 180mm G-Silent 18 Case Fan : Black (x4)

Phobya Xtreme Nova 1080 Radiator (and adapter plate to mount 4x180mm fans)

3GB Power Color Radeon HD 7970

850W PSU, OCZ Technology ZX Series

XSPCX2O 750 Dual 5.25” Bay Reservoir Pump

And a few extra fans, fittings, tubing, liquid etc etc, i shall post a picture of it all laid out lol. I bought 3l of liquid, just hope its enough lol

Cant wait to get this one started!

 

[tharionos]

well good luck and ull prob turn it into a beauuuuut

keep us posted !

 

[jonnyfgm]

Well today has turned out to be a day of epic win and epic fail.

Scan as usual full of epic win, ordered off them yesterday, arrived just over 24 hours.

Overclockers, epic fail, ordered at same time, at time of posting still haven't even dispatched the item! despite me paying for "next day" deliver and their website saying if ordered before 4pm it will be dispatched next day

Special Tech, sort of medium fail, I rang them up to ask them a few questions about the stuff i was ordering, and i asked them how long delivery took, they said usually the day after it was dispatched, i asked if i ordered yesterday would it get dispatched same day as it was quite early, they said yes, well they only dispatched this afternoon, so while not breaking any promises it was sort of contrary to what i was told.

Anyway as a result, all that arrived today was this. (linking to photobucket account as i cant figure out how on earth to upload photos to a reply)

I stripped out the old power supply and graphics cards, put the new ones in. Cable management is nowhere near final, the 8 pin needs running up behind the motherboard, the 24 pin wont fit around the back of the case and still let me close the side door, i think im going to either need to mod the case or remove the brading around the middle of the cable.

But here is how it looks for now, you can see i've also fitted the new side panel with the window

i think it already looks a lot better than it did

 

[SieB]

Looking good

If you put img at the beginning of the picture url and /img at the end but in brackets like this [ ] the pick will show.

Overclockers are always fail, never rely on them. The sooner the Germans take over the better

SpecialTech are usually spot on though, I have always had my items dispatched the same day and got them before 12 in the afternoon the next day, I do live pretty local to the FedEx depo though.

 

[jonnyfgm]

ah there we go

i had tried putting img tags in another post but said all the image files i tried to use weren't allowed

Yeah I'd heard bad things about overclockers, but they were the only place i could find who had my resevoir/pump combo in stock

Thought i'd give my impressions on the products.

The 7970 is excellent, so far i've thrown BF3 and Metro 2033 at it, both with everything maxed out and it was able to handle them both at around 60FPS. The package was great, even came with an active display port to DVI adapter which i thought was a really nice touch, Glad i'm putting it on water though as it seems to idle around 50, get up to 75+ under load and the fan can get rather loud (or at least louder than i would like)

The PSU is likewise excellent, the cables feel really good quality, braided right up until the ends and it is really quiet, no annoying cap whine like my last one had.

 

[jonnyfgm]

so i thought seeing as i'm bored i'd post up some thermals results. The following was taken after 15-20 minutes of running prime95 and furmark together

As you can see, things are getting toastie!

Its amazing that by going from the scythe (not the gentle typhoons, the really loud ones!) in push/pull to a single noctua NP-F12 i've got a rise in temps of almost 10C! The GPU is also rather toastie, although this is significantly higher temps than i was getting during gameplay. Notice however that the fan only worked its way up to 50%, now its loud enough at this temp but it does show there could potentially be room for more overclocking on air alone.

As a little aside, i cranked the fans manually up to 80% at which the card topped out around 67c, and at 100% it was running at around 64

The heat being kicked out of the back of this thing was insane though, it was getting to the point where i nearly couldn't hold my hand in the air flow, good news is it does seem to be ejecting all the airflow out of the back and very little into the case

 

[jonnyfgm]

well, special tech outperformed overclockers, no surprise there. This morning this little lot came

Got a few surprises, first of which was "i was sure i ordered blue tubing" which i didn't realise until i put it under the uv lamp that it was

Here's the EK block, looks really nice, a lot heavier than i was expecting too!

Here's the XSPC RASA block, again looks really nice

and finally the phobya 1080 radiator, this thing is quite a beast

So at the moment just waiting on overclockers to get their arse in gear and send me my res and coolant!

 

[ThatBattlefieldGuy]

That is a BIG radiator. You could cool a car engine with that thing. Wow

 

[jonnyfgm]

*sigh*

well i rang overclockers, apparantly the mayhems coolant is out of stock which is why it's been queued in the wharehouse for so long, well its a good job i rung up and asked because doesn't look like anyone was going to tell me about it.

 

[grandpatzer]

Good luck with build!

Did you pick quick disconnects for the Phobya 1080 rad so that it can be easily installed and removed from case?

Also a tip I read a user who filled the Phobya 1080 with water and once full attached tubes for easy filling, something to keep in mind for easier filling of loop.

 

[jonnyfgm]

thanks for the tips, i'll keep them in mind.

I didn't get quick disconnects, got 2 ball valves instead

 

[jonnyfgm]

wowsers

so it's all in, pictures to follow tomorrow as i'm pooped out and need to go to bed soon. But wow, this thing performs! just doing a quick burn in test and after 15 minutes running prime 95 the hottest core is 68, thats 20 degrees cooler than on the old cooler!

 

[grandpatzer]

thanks for the tips, i'll keep them in mind.

I didn't get quick disconnects, got 2 ball valves instead

What's that never heard of it, can it be bought in watercooling store?

 

[jonnyfgm]

ball valves are basically just a tap

http://specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/Ball-Valves-cid-1305.html

oh and i dont think i mentioned this in my previous taps, the temps that were a 20c imrovement, were achieved by running the rad totally passively

 

[circit]

cant wait! like always MOAR pics

 

[jonnyfgm]

Ok, so its been a busy couple of days, got a lot of pics to upload, think i may split this up into one or 2 posts.

So, I needed to do a case mod, so I stripped everything out of it.

A hacksaw, an angle grinder and a dad later and i got this

It looks a bit rough and ready in that pic, but after a bit of sanding down it looks a bit smoother.

The XSPC RASA block went on pretty easily, hardest (or at least scariest) part was pulling the old backplate off the back of the motherboard

The stock heatsink came off fairly easily, after all the screws came out i found pushing the prongs that come through the board gently while working the shroud worked quite well.

Now

**************NERD PORN ALERT******************

The water block went on nice and easy too

I got everything back in the case, and hooked up the loop, after a bit of leak testing that was pretty much all I had time for last night

 

[jonnyfgm]

So after I got in from work today i got straight to work on the rig

First up is a bit of cable management

Followed by putting the fans back in

The UV cold cathodes go in

And the LED strips

I fitted another pair of UV cold cathodes to the door and put the door on

And a shot with the LEDs turned off and just the UVs on

And here's a shot of it in its final place

Still got a few things left to do, gotta see if i can try and tidy the cables up a bit more. Also going to completely rewire the cold cathode ballasts to neaten that up significantly and then see if i can mount the switches for them in the front panel, i see a trip to maplins in my future.

 

[jonnyfgm]

Just thought i'd post a few of the issue's I had during this build.

First, despite my case mod, the side panel still has difficulty fitting on. Its a bit hard to see in this shot but the side bulges out quite concerningly

Also I lost the gromit for one of the holes in the back of my case a while ago, what I didn't realise was the weight of the ball valve was causing the cable to kink over the case eek!

But cable ties can fix just about anything

Also a similar thing happened with the res, I had the in and out port at the top, and the weight of the tubing caused the cable to kink over, i've managed to prop it up now so the fittings are at the bottom so the tubing straightened out.

 

[yassarikhan786]

Loop looks fantastic

. Cable management is good given the lack of grommets.

 

[jonnyfgm]

Thanks for the kind words

Just a few more preliminary findings from running the radiator passively. These temps are after 20 minutes or so of battlefield 3, on the jet mission, which seemed to be rather taxing on the GPU.

Wow, just wow, max temp of 53C on the GPU! Thats over 20c lower than i was getting on air. 72 on the CPU isn't bad either, about the same as i would have got on the old cooler with the scythe fans.

Oh, for some reason i did a prime run, and the CPU temp got up into the high 80s, I dont know why i was getting such low temps before, but it's still not bad for passive