This is a project build log for my watercooled PC. I left this in draft mode for a while and have added stuff over a few weeks while this thing traded blows with my daytime responsibilities. Here it is.
I started planning a new rig in November last year. I have suffered from an overdose of PCs and multiplicity of data. One audio rig, one download rig, one gaming rig...
So eventually I decided I would have only two active machines, one dedicated to audio duty and the other to gaming, browsing, casual music and the few TV eps I do end up watching. All media except music for critical listening would reside on a fileserver which doubled up as a 24x7 downloading rig as the need arose. The fileserver would have at least one set of backup disks and in the case of my precious music collection, three backups.
This is where the problem started. I have a 2560x1600 screen and this requires serious graphics horsepower. Which requires serious power supply power. And generates lots of heat.
And noise. Lots of it. In fact, too much of it.
My best combination of graphics was a pair of 9600GTs in SLI, which gave me medium detail at full resolution, after which I upgraded to a 4870x2. The 9600s had passive sinks, and were dead silent. By comparison the 4870x2 was a banshee. Or so I thought, till I got a pair of 6970s off a fellow member here. Those things are loud. Between the GT-R on the screen and the fans on this thing, I can't decide which is noisier.
This is where watercooling came in. Instead of two 50mm fans going like turbines, I would have 4 or 5 quiet fans and a pump (which was an unknown quantity in noise terms). So far so good.
I faced another agonising choice. I could either pick the 2500/2600k processors but put up with a feature-hobbled chipset and 8x Crossfire. Or plumped for a 3820 and X79, whenever that decided to show up. Or, I could update my AMD rig to a DDR3 setup and a reasonably quick processor - given that at my resolution and max detail, the processor would not be a bottleneck. And for everything else, even my Athlon 620 was sufficient anyway. So AMD it was.
I placed my first order with Sidewinder in the beginning of December. When the order reached me four weeks later (after spending three of those weeks in customs) I realised I had got the barb sizes and tubing sizes all mixed up and there was no AMD bracket in the package of my Apogee waterblock. So another order had to happen, and that got sent off to Calcutta. Gary Stofer of Sidewinder was most helpful and retrieved the package, resending it to the correct address before it left the US.
Simultaneously, I had ordered the motherboard, CPU and power supply from Flipkart, who were the only sensible place with reasonable prices.
And so, eight weeks after I had ordered, here was everything I needed to get my build up and running.
In the foreground is one of the cards all heatsunk and waterblocked. Not sure if the VRM sinks were enough. Guess we'd find out soon enough.
Here is the case all ready to be invaded, the Xigmatek Elysium. This was purchased in Delhi and still has some remnants from the build it housed earlier - chiefly the fan controller and the optical drive.
Loki is not the most powerful adversary, but still formidable, and does one or two things very well. Also, it does have hand-me-down lineage, a first for me. Plus, it's a bit dark.
The build comprises:
AMD Phenom II X4 970
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5
Corsair DDR3 1600MHz CAS9 XMS3
Sapphire Radeon HD6970 x2, Crossfired
Seasonic X-850 80+ Gold
OCZ Agility 3 60GB primary drive
OCZ Agility3 60GB swap file and some games
WD 750AAKS x 2 in RAID 0
Coupla optical drives, maybe 2, maybe 3
Swiftech Apogee XT CPU block
Swiftech MCW82 GPU blocks x 2
Random RAMsinks from Lamington road
Swiftech MCP655 pump
XSPC barbs, 1/2" for rads
Swiftech QP360 rad + 3x Antec Tricool 120mm
XSPC 120mm rad + 1x NZXT FN120RB
NZXT Sentry LE for all fans except the Tri-Cools and the pump. I would probably need pump speed control at some point.
Swiftech Micro-res
Tygon laboratory tubing, clear
Silver killcoil, 5N silver, from Calcutta jeweller
Onboard Dolby Digital encoder
Marantz SR5005 receiver
Wharfedale Obsidian600 5.0 speaker system
Logitech MX518 and Razer cheap keyboard (dunno name).
I spent a few days getting the fittings bolted to the blocks and rads, and having the fans and rads know each other.
Build Day 1: Fitted the rads to the case. Not as straightforward as I thought. The rad head wouldn't clear the PSU support base (remember this case supports two supplies) and so the fan had to go in first. Then came the motherboard. This posed a new issue.
This was leaning tower of Pisa sitting on top of a board curved like a shaving mirror. Umm, what to do? Ironically, I contacted someone at Asus. Following the advice I made a few posts on the Gigabyte India Facebook page.
The people at Gigabyte thought I was a tosser who was using a different I/O shield, or had installed the board incorrectly, etc. The truth:
Build day 60:
Flipkart messed up the replacement of the board and it took about a month to get to me. Note to self: No more IT buying from there. And the replacement board was very similar but not that extreme, it took a bit of handiwork (literally) to get things sorted.
Once I got the board I couldn't wait, so I just built the dam thing. I was a little impatient at this stage so excuse the lack of intermediate photographs. I had to deal with three leaks, one due to a loose clamp and the other two due to loose-ish fittings. Paper towels are really handy.
Eventually though, 4 months from when he was conceived, Lo-Ki is alive! I still have to deal with some bubbling though I'm not too worried just yet. I'm using plain distilled water and a 5N silver kill coil. Reservoir mounted externally even though this resulted in long runs.
What I learned:
Ask. A lot of people. A lot of things.
Prepare to be scared of leaks. This was really my biggest fear.
For the above, have a lot of paper towels ready. A hairdryer is also very helpful to get a wet rig started up quickly, or to prevent long-term issues.
Worm drive clamps are not a good idea. Buy the cheap plastic ones, and have lots of spares. This is my next venture, to rip out all those horrible worm clamps.
Thick tubing needs more space to turn. This is not trivial. I think the 1/2" was a bit of overkill, I will get smaller and more flexible tubing next time. This one needed 15 feet to avoid kinks, and even then I wasn't 100% succesful in avoiding a kink.
Air is something we take for granted. In a WC loop, it's an opponent.
The Xigmatek Elysium has multiple issues with a 120mm rad at the back. You can't fit the rad flush to the case because of the power supply support bar on the upper mount, the 200mm fan obstructs the rad if the rad is mounted behind a fan. It is really meant for a single 360 on top, and not much else unless you mod the case. anyway I turned the 200mm fan 90 degress to be able to shut the case properly.
Here are some pics - I'm aware of the kink in the tubing of the lower 6970, can't do sweet nothing about it because of the path of that tube. Excuse the cable mismanagement. Not my specialty:
And he runs cool. The CPU is about the same temperature as my Athlon 620, and that is saying a lot for a four-core 140W CPU. The graphics cards are at about 55 degrees at full load, and the VRMs are toasty at 80 degrees (but they'll live). Apart from the hum caused by the water pump, the rig is fairly quiet - much noisier than my regular browsing rig, but much quieter than the ai-cooled cards and CPU. I suspect I'll have to turn the fans up in summer, but it will be quieter than the airconditioner and that's the important thing.
Looking forward to a cooler, quieter summer than usual.
I started planning a new rig in November last year. I have suffered from an overdose of PCs and multiplicity of data. One audio rig, one download rig, one gaming rig...
So eventually I decided I would have only two active machines, one dedicated to audio duty and the other to gaming, browsing, casual music and the few TV eps I do end up watching. All media except music for critical listening would reside on a fileserver which doubled up as a 24x7 downloading rig as the need arose. The fileserver would have at least one set of backup disks and in the case of my precious music collection, three backups.
This is where the problem started. I have a 2560x1600 screen and this requires serious graphics horsepower. Which requires serious power supply power. And generates lots of heat.
And noise. Lots of it. In fact, too much of it.
My best combination of graphics was a pair of 9600GTs in SLI, which gave me medium detail at full resolution, after which I upgraded to a 4870x2. The 9600s had passive sinks, and were dead silent. By comparison the 4870x2 was a banshee. Or so I thought, till I got a pair of 6970s off a fellow member here. Those things are loud. Between the GT-R on the screen and the fans on this thing, I can't decide which is noisier.
This is where watercooling came in. Instead of two 50mm fans going like turbines, I would have 4 or 5 quiet fans and a pump (which was an unknown quantity in noise terms). So far so good.
I faced another agonising choice. I could either pick the 2500/2600k processors but put up with a feature-hobbled chipset and 8x Crossfire. Or plumped for a 3820 and X79, whenever that decided to show up. Or, I could update my AMD rig to a DDR3 setup and a reasonably quick processor - given that at my resolution and max detail, the processor would not be a bottleneck. And for everything else, even my Athlon 620 was sufficient anyway. So AMD it was.
I placed my first order with Sidewinder in the beginning of December. When the order reached me four weeks later (after spending three of those weeks in customs) I realised I had got the barb sizes and tubing sizes all mixed up and there was no AMD bracket in the package of my Apogee waterblock. So another order had to happen, and that got sent off to Calcutta. Gary Stofer of Sidewinder was most helpful and retrieved the package, resending it to the correct address before it left the US.
Simultaneously, I had ordered the motherboard, CPU and power supply from Flipkart, who were the only sensible place with reasonable prices.
And so, eight weeks after I had ordered, here was everything I needed to get my build up and running.
In the foreground is one of the cards all heatsunk and waterblocked. Not sure if the VRM sinks were enough. Guess we'd find out soon enough.
Here is the case all ready to be invaded, the Xigmatek Elysium. This was purchased in Delhi and still has some remnants from the build it housed earlier - chiefly the fan controller and the optical drive.
Loki is not the most powerful adversary, but still formidable, and does one or two things very well. Also, it does have hand-me-down lineage, a first for me. Plus, it's a bit dark.
The build comprises:
AMD Phenom II X4 970
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5
Corsair DDR3 1600MHz CAS9 XMS3
Sapphire Radeon HD6970 x2, Crossfired
Seasonic X-850 80+ Gold
OCZ Agility 3 60GB primary drive
OCZ Agility3 60GB swap file and some games
WD 750AAKS x 2 in RAID 0
Coupla optical drives, maybe 2, maybe 3
Swiftech Apogee XT CPU block
Swiftech MCW82 GPU blocks x 2
Random RAMsinks from Lamington road
Swiftech MCP655 pump
XSPC barbs, 1/2" for rads
Swiftech QP360 rad + 3x Antec Tricool 120mm
XSPC 120mm rad + 1x NZXT FN120RB
NZXT Sentry LE for all fans except the Tri-Cools and the pump. I would probably need pump speed control at some point.
Swiftech Micro-res
Tygon laboratory tubing, clear
Silver killcoil, 5N silver, from Calcutta jeweller
Onboard Dolby Digital encoder
Marantz SR5005 receiver
Wharfedale Obsidian600 5.0 speaker system
Logitech MX518 and Razer cheap keyboard (dunno name).
I spent a few days getting the fittings bolted to the blocks and rads, and having the fans and rads know each other.
Build Day 1: Fitted the rads to the case. Not as straightforward as I thought. The rad head wouldn't clear the PSU support base (remember this case supports two supplies) and so the fan had to go in first. Then came the motherboard. This posed a new issue.
This was leaning tower of Pisa sitting on top of a board curved like a shaving mirror. Umm, what to do? Ironically, I contacted someone at Asus. Following the advice I made a few posts on the Gigabyte India Facebook page.
The people at Gigabyte thought I was a tosser who was using a different I/O shield, or had installed the board incorrectly, etc. The truth:
Build day 60:
Flipkart messed up the replacement of the board and it took about a month to get to me. Note to self: No more IT buying from there. And the replacement board was very similar but not that extreme, it took a bit of handiwork (literally) to get things sorted.
Once I got the board I couldn't wait, so I just built the dam thing. I was a little impatient at this stage so excuse the lack of intermediate photographs. I had to deal with three leaks, one due to a loose clamp and the other two due to loose-ish fittings. Paper towels are really handy.
Eventually though, 4 months from when he was conceived, Lo-Ki is alive! I still have to deal with some bubbling though I'm not too worried just yet. I'm using plain distilled water and a 5N silver kill coil. Reservoir mounted externally even though this resulted in long runs.
What I learned:
Ask. A lot of people. A lot of things.
Prepare to be scared of leaks. This was really my biggest fear.
For the above, have a lot of paper towels ready. A hairdryer is also very helpful to get a wet rig started up quickly, or to prevent long-term issues.
Worm drive clamps are not a good idea. Buy the cheap plastic ones, and have lots of spares. This is my next venture, to rip out all those horrible worm clamps.
Thick tubing needs more space to turn. This is not trivial. I think the 1/2" was a bit of overkill, I will get smaller and more flexible tubing next time. This one needed 15 feet to avoid kinks, and even then I wasn't 100% succesful in avoiding a kink.
Air is something we take for granted. In a WC loop, it's an opponent.
The Xigmatek Elysium has multiple issues with a 120mm rad at the back. You can't fit the rad flush to the case because of the power supply support bar on the upper mount, the 200mm fan obstructs the rad if the rad is mounted behind a fan. It is really meant for a single 360 on top, and not much else unless you mod the case. anyway I turned the 200mm fan 90 degress to be able to shut the case properly.
Here are some pics - I'm aware of the kink in the tubing of the lower 6970, can't do sweet nothing about it because of the path of that tube. Excuse the cable mismanagement. Not my specialty:
And he runs cool. The CPU is about the same temperature as my Athlon 620, and that is saying a lot for a four-core 140W CPU. The graphics cards are at about 55 degrees at full load, and the VRMs are toasty at 80 degrees (but they'll live). Apart from the hum caused by the water pump, the rig is fairly quiet - much noisier than my regular browsing rig, but much quieter than the ai-cooled cards and CPU. I suspect I'll have to turn the fans up in summer, but it will be quieter than the airconditioner and that's the important thing.
Looking forward to a cooler, quieter summer than usual.
