Project Thief - CaseLabs TX10-D Dual Workstation/Gaming Build - Gulftown and SB-E

[stren]

Yeah it starts to look like that around 6 weeks of 24/7 use. I was surprised temps weren't affected more, only about 5C. In comparison I had a corsair H100 that was similarly dusty and temps dropped 20C after cleaning!

[Endgame]

Have you ever considered directing an external air filter toward the air intake for the pc? I did that for quite a while at home with a slightly ghetto setup using a cheap air filter from Home Depot ducted with cardboard into the intake for my gaming rig. It doesn't completely eliminate dust, but for me it moved me from having to clean the PC every month or so to every 6 months.

[stren]

Have you ever considered directing an external air filter toward the air intake for the pc? I did that for quite a while at home with a slightly ghetto setup using a cheap air filter from Home Depot ducted with cardboard into the intake for my gaming rig. It doesn't completely eliminate dust, but for me it moved me from having to clean the PC every month or so to every 6 months.

Yeah I figured if I'm cleaning anyway I may as well just do it more often and run with quieter fans

[stren]

Alright a quick update as I got some more time to process photos (on a side note the first mdpc package came woot!)

I got the workstation back up and running:



But I had to use the gaming side for location of the power supply as the cables were not long enough to reach the real location. As you can see it makes a good storage room also:



Workstation in action - no 2nd 8800gt yet because I'm only driving two screens, the card is being used as a test card for now for some other rigs I'm building.



Again a lot of fittings are temporary. So now back to the gaming rig. I transferred the sweet trident ram from my worksation to the gaming rig (I think it maybe hypers), it can do 2130 CL 8 and probably more but that's the limit of my 990x IMC. Should have tried two sticks in the 3770K rig I slapped together to see what it could really do! The ugly p6t board that was being used for the workstation is now going into a generic network maintenance use and will be put in a rack.



A shot of that sexy ram:



And the motherboard tray:



Here you can see I had soldered on an extra molex connector to the board (just to the bottom of the STX). My old case didn't have room to connect a power cable to the real connector, so this helped me give the gpus enough power.



And now time to swap the 920 for that sweet 990x:

[stren]

Alright time to swap those cpus - out with the 920:



And in with the 990x:



Close it up:



Mount the CPU block and add the g3/8 adapters - luckily the 5Noz has a very wide port spacing:



Which means you can mount the high flow VL4N quick disconnects - unfortunately they are g 3/8 and don't come with right angle options, so I have to have adapters both ends and then a g1/4 female to female before I can add in the 90 degree rotary fitting:



Here we are with the old GPUs mounted too:



And here's how it will look as this will be the reverse ATX side:



Now it's time to repurpose that clown board:



And done til the case comes:

[stren]

Second update of the day - sleeving came in:



Always interesting to see stamps from a foreign land And of course the obligatory nils drawing



The results from the last survery were clear:



So now I made them with real sleeve (24 pin left and 8 + 6 pin right) (only one row of course) (photographed outside under cloud, the background is the pedestal back plate which is powdercoated the same color as all internal parts):



















I'm leaning towards D or F. However there's one last complication there is red or the "x" color that is basically a deep red-brown kind of color. As far as I can tell, the x looks better when next to white, the red otherwise:



Let me know what you think!

[Mefist0]

Options B and C are nice

[Saltire]

Option E looks cool.

[LeoAndrade]

option C rocks!

[stren]

Thanks to everyone - results are in:



So now we can eliminate the less popular and simulate these with the motherboard tray - yes it's a walk off! Jeppzer's suggestion is now also included:



Option C



Option D



Option G



Option Jeppzer



Let me know what you think - and please keep it to these four only!

[Liderc]

Don't really have a choice for you sadly, but I think you definitely need some black sleeve in there, the 3 with the black look much better than the one with mostly gray.

[LeoAndrade]

option C, come on!

[Makymaco]

Option Jeppzer

[Mefist0]

Option C

[ACEkombatkiwi]

Option C

[chaotic]

Option C

[matt220]

You know what to do

[LeoAndrade]

lol

[Liderc]

Agreed, option C.

[fr0wn3r]

C is definitely the most appealing.

[Endgame]

option C, by far!

[stren]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Alright - another diversion to clean up the odds and ends - well I got some packages to help with that:



Inside a box..... is another box:



And inside - the opposite of a CaseLabs case - cheap design, cheap steel, cheap manufacturing:



Despite knowing how badly the edges were finished I still managed to cut myself!



Mounting the old workstation board:



Now let's see what's come in from the egg:



The PSU for that mATX build I did (those photos were slightly out of order), another ssd (because 7 isn't enough) and a cheapo gpu for the 4u case:



Passive GPU is passive, crappy sas card is crappy:



Got those straight to straight sata cables too:



BTW if you haven't voted on sleeve design - please do!

[arkadur]

option D, i liked the fadeout from the center red.

[stren]

So Primochill came through on delivering me the replacement tube. They also sent some extras in order to sponsor the build and I guess future builds because there are multiple colors:



two dual gigabit cards came in for the network upgrades:



Fitted one to this box:



Then mounted that box in our rack in the office:



Thought you might like to see our main server - it's a supermicro barebones 4u box that's capable of fitting two gulftown xeons, however we only have one hex cpu fitted right now:



You can see they built a plastic shroud around the ram and cpu to force the air through the heatsinks. Anyway back to the real project. Sanded down another radiator:



Masked it up:



Ready to go:



Primed:

[stren]

While I've been busy working on this, my sponsors have been busy with new products. Detroit Thermo has come out with a new block called the "sniper", it's a tiny bit more restrictive but is supposed to have better temps:



I'm hoping to do an apples to apples comparison with the rasa/raystorm/ek hf supreme/5Noz/Sniper

Also Monsoon Free came out with some sexy new rotary fittings:



Including a special version with optional end plugs:

Yes the other version has Light Ports that let you install several different types of plugs. An LED plug that has super bright 15 degree LED's that make your tube glow sort of like a fiber optic cable or neon tube. A temp probe plug. A shorty version of the silver bullets, and of course our standard Monsoon plug. The plugs are available in all 10 Monsoon colors. The Light Port Rotaries will sell for a buck or two more depending on where resellers price them.

Actually the LED plugs don't come in the two color form shown below, but you get the idea.

Excited to use these, but it gives me more decisions to make as to which color to use lol.


Quick update on my project:

While I was procrastinating sleeving/custom wire harnesses for the power supply I figured I'd work on getting the radiators up and running for the gaming rig - I mounted the AP16s to the 140mm adapters:



Then got ready to resolder and sleve:



First time sleeving so did a pretty uneven job:



Decided to move that to the back side of the radiator and now that I had my system down, did a much better job on the front side:



Both sides done, but still awaitng fan headers:



Mounted back in the case: