Project: Waterfish

[zoob]

Still haven't heard back from Asus yet

mATX board looks out of place, but it also gives me a few ideas.. I might end up sectioning off the entire bottom for the rad.

Here's my latest mod -- Scythe Quiet Drives each containing a Samsung 1 TB HDD. Suspended on Stretch Magic, with a block of foam between so that they do not slide down towards each other. Velcro on the top and bottom to hold it in place.






Deadens most of the idle whoosh and the seek noise too.

[zoob]

Silicone caulking, linoleum flooring from my spare junk in the garage. Pressed and cured for a night.

Eggcrate foam from an Intel RMA stuck to the linoleum using double sided tape.

Similarly done for the other side, but only near the front as there's no space behind the motherboard tray.

[WiCKeD]

I've used that eggcrate foam on many cases. Does an amazing job. Just be careful to keep it away from any electronics - it's spectacularly flammable!

[MomijiTMO]

I can't believe you used lino . .. . lol. I know it will work but it's the thought.

How's the ASUS RMA going?

[Serpentarius]

funny you used this name "Water Fish" as your project name ... for english speaking chinese .. this word meant for soft shell turtles, but normally used to tease ppl for guilble fools .. as the ease way to caught those soft shell turtles ..

oh back to your setup .. down you think those foams might discourage heat dispersal for your HD?
on your polyurethane .. you could get it spray with design and still work with sound dampening

I can't believe you used lino . .. . lol. I know it will work but it's the thought.

well i dont understand why the purpose of placing ceramics on the pc???

[MomijiTMO]

Lino is a soft plastic like substance so I believe it would absorb sound quite well in conjunction with the foam.

[Serpentarius]

ohh i see ... it looks like ceramic here .. lol

any chance to use this? http://www.greengluecompany.com/

[philbrown23]

wow that really suck about your board dieng bro. everytime I have to take stuff all apart I get a tad nervous that something will go wrong, no matter what the precautions. I've had alot go wrong, you name it, it happened to me. anyway what I was going to say is that your setup is almost the exact opposite of mine, if you flipped my rocketfish upside down it would look like yours but a different color, lol. well good luck, and subscribed

[MasterChiefElmo]

that green glue makes me think of apple flavored jolly ranchers!!

[Serpentarius]

that green glue makes me think of apple flavored jolly ranchers!!

lol ... i came across this greenglue which checking out HTPC .. which then ventured to construction of home theatres

[zoob]

Thanks for all of the comments. I used whatever was readily available in my house. We had a roll of lineoleum in our garage sitting there for the past 10 years so I put it to some good use. The caulking was sitting there for 5 years and most of the tubes had dried up. :P

I received my board earlier this week. Pretty quick! Booted it up with a junk chip and PCI video card to make sure it turns on. Stole the heatsink for the SB from a dead nForce 2 board. I didn't have compressed gas so I took a hairdryer to my board for a good 15 minutes. Arcticlean a couple of times and it was all ready for the blocks!






Ghetto feet. 7.5" pieces of 2x2. Found some spare wood screws and some compression washers in spare parts jar. The holes for the feet are 1cm in diameter.

May or may not get a paint job... most likely not. I'm too lazy to go buy paint, and this will sit on the floor anyway (or get sold :P).

[zoob]

Wow such horrid luck with Asus.

This one was working fine for the whole day with my E8500 @ 9.5x453.

I decide to update to the latest BIOS and BAM it hangs at 81% writing BIOS That's fine I think to myself.. boot block wasn't erased.. reflash with the CD.
TESTCMOS error because of the old frigging version on the CD and wolfdale. Swap in a Pentium D 630, reflash to 1204.

Boots up with DET DRAM.. !!!!!!!!!

I swap in some OCZ DDR2-667 RAM, STILL no go. Eventually with enough fiddling it boots, I bump voltages for everything and it works for a bit, but I could no longer get past 425 FSB without immediate lock ups.. Thinking I should try the older versions of the BIOS, I reflash sucessfully a few times to 1004 and again to 1201 (or whtaever) because my CPU started saying it was Unknown! Leave it powered off for 1 hour so I can finish watching a movie, booted it up and it detects and hangs after 1 minute in BIOS.

So now I AGAIN swap in the 630.. nothing AT ALL!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nothing but troblems with a frigging Maximus Formula.

EDIT: I did test the E8500 in another board and it still clocks fine to 4.3 :|

EDIT 2: Yanked the mobo from my case, took off all the heatsinks and placed some crappy heatsinks over the NB + CPU. Boots up fine, but I don't have enough time to play with it today. Looks like another complete rebuild this week. At least the board isn't fried... going to put a decent heatsink on it to see if I can get back up to 4.3 with my E8500.

EDIT 3: Rebuilt the thing and it's booting up knock on wood. Hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr................

[zoob]

FINALLY SOLVED.

My problem was:
- Touching the SB heatsink would cause my computer to reboot
- Take it out of the case, go back to air cooling, works fine
- Go to work think about it, figured it was shorting somewhere
- Come home, did some more air cooling testing, everything was fine
- Reassemble rig, but ensure that all backplates (MOSFET in particular) are properly insulated with a few layers of electrical tape.
- Screw everything in, touch the SB sink, EVERYTHING'S FINE.

Insulate those MOSFET back plates! Something so stupid I can't believe I overlooked this -- even though the rig was fine without insulation on it for 3 months+.

[zoob]

Pretty good temps so far. S-Flex F on rad @ 5V, DDC3.2 @ 7V.



Time to tidy up the wiring, get it a DVD drive and we're set.

[zoob]

Spent some time cable-tieing everything I could. Please forgive the over-exposure on the top right.

- Enermax Modu82 PCI-E power cable is too short so I had to run it along with some tubing.
- Folded the PATA cable for the DVD-ROM up top along the wall.
- Tied all the USB/firewire/audio/front panel cables together
- Stretch magic strategically tied to hold the 80mm fan over the RAM. Some neoprene is used on the fan cage to prevent it from rattling against the RAM.
- Some neoprene is also used on the pump to prevent rattling against the front case fan.


Next is to splice all three case fans onto the same power connector to reduce a little more clutter.