Finally Finished!
So I'm afraid I was so eager to finally finish this rig, that I didn't take anything else in the way of assembly shots, but I hope the final product shots will make up for that
I took that long to get watercooling up and running that swiftech brought out a new CPU block in the mean time. So this is just the Apogee GTZ, else I'd probably be running whatever the new one is.
Spot the GTX480!
If you're wondering what the extra metal things sported in the middle of my tubing, they're Koolance Quick Disconnects, so that I'll be able to remove either the GPU or CPU without having to drain the entire loop and faff about with un-barbing parts of the tubing.
I'm rather pleased with how clean I managed to run the cables here. The pipe on the left is the return pipe from the CPU/GPU loop, and it has the T-Line filport on the top. While the pipe on the right is the flow towards the CPU/GPU loop, straight from the radiator.
I was just sat looking at this picture wondering why I decided to cross the inlet/outlet over on the radiator, and then realized it was so I could make smoother bends that were less likely to kink.
That on the bottom left is a T-Balancer BigNG fan controller thing. It's pretty awesome actually, and there is no end of customization you can set on the fan profiles and temperature sensors. I modified the power connector on the Laing DDC Ultra to use a 3pin header, so I can use the fan controller to power the pump speed as I see fit.
I'm running a Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD for boot, and a Samsung F3 500GB for storage. They're suspended using elastic, so any of the HDD's vibrations wont get passed through to the case (which amplifies the sound). I know SSDs don't vibrate, but I was going for a uniform look with suspending that one too
(Click for a very large view)
And that's how she looks.
And the outside. With some internal lighting, you'll be able to see through the tinted perspex which should look pretty sweet.
You can probably see that the outside of the panel is kind of distressed. Not to the point where it's obvious looking at it in normal lighting, but enough that I'm kind of miffed with it. The distressing happened when I had to separate the aluminium from the plastic inside of the case to cut the window hole out. It was stuck on pretty good and the aluminium kept bending as I tried to ease it off, hence the distress marks. I've considered trying again with a new panel, but I can't think of a way to get it off cleanly or find a clean way to cut the inside plastic hole larger than the outside aluminium hole. So I'm going to leave it for now.
I like to think that even my cable runs are tidy
So that's my mod pretty much complete. And it only took me just over a year!
I blame Fermi's delay for my lack of reason to get it ready quickly.
Hope you enjoyed reading it.
Dan
PS. I'll probably still post a couple more updates at some point if I ever get round to spray painting the Noctua's and lighting the inside up like it deserves! But with how long it took me to get to this point, don't hold your breath
