Project: Blue on Black

[Bolas]

At last, the motherboard shows up on April 7th.



Fancy packaging. I wonder how much I paid for the packaging?



The other shipment of watercooling stuff showed up too. Now I have darn near everything I've ordered.



Only waiting on the sleeving and the DisplayPort to DVI-D adapter.

So now I can start building... but where to start?

The water blocks look nice. Really nice. EK did a good job with these, it's obvious. Nice craftsmanship, good packaging, good instructions... and they even included some GOOD thermal paste, some MX-2. I'll be using that on the CPU when I mount it. EK just made the "nice" list.



I opened the boxes and familiarize myself with the... dang that's a LOT of work to install a block. And it looks like I need to wear ESD protection, so that means wait for the weekend and bring my work smock home to "wash" it. And by wash it, I mean wear it non-stop while I build and take it back to work stinkier than when I brought it home.

Hmmm... fans look fun.



They came with some kind of rubber screw substitute, it seems.



Trying to fit a fan on a radiator using the screw substitutes looks like it is just not going to work. No way to get my fingers underneath to pull them through. Maybe if I install them using rubber gaskets and regular screws.



Only problem is... I don't think I'm ready to install the fans to the radiators yet. The radiators don't look so clean inside.



What's this? Dang it!! Radiators are all banged up. I thought I bought new ones?!? Are all Swiftech products like this, or just the radiators?



Hmm... now what? Maybe I can mess with the pump and reservoir.



This looks pretty cool. I gotta hand it to XSPC, their bay mount reservoir looks pretty sweet. Good craftsmanship, from what I can tell.



One problem though. The pump isn't sleeved yet. Well, OK, two problems. I also don't have a TORX head bit handy, it's in the garage somewhere and I"m not dressed to go out on the cold concrete floor and squeeze past the car to get to the tool box. Maybe I can sweet talk my wife into finding the bits and the screwdriver for me. Another day though, she won't brave the garage at this time of night either. So on to something else.



Let's take a look at the case.

Use the key to cut the tape on the box please, sweetie. No, please don't press daddy's car alarm...



Ah that's more like it.









Open up the case is easy enough, press one button and the panel comes off with no tools. Nice.

Looks like the case has some things stuffed in the cavities, like giblets in a turkey.





Nothing much to do with the case yet. Let's check out the knick-knacks.



Aha! At last, something that I have the skill to do. O-Rings!!



That looks fun. I think I'll do them all.



That leaves two blue ones left over, just enough for the O-rings on the plugs on the gpu block.



Ok, that's done. What else?

Not much to do with the tube yet. It's darker than I thought it would be. And also smaller diameter, guess I should have gone with the big stuff.



Ok, I suppose I could install the power supply into the case, since it's modular. What's this? A white ROHs sticker on my black power supply? Off, off, sticker of stupidity! In the trash can with you!

So let's check out the anti-vibration gasket to use for the power supply.



Looks like it doesn't quite fit over the power supply due to the special plug and the LED. I guess I'll get to do my very first CUSTOM MOD for this build, and cut a small amount of the rubber gasket away so that it fits better. But how to do it in a way that doesn't look totally sloppy?

I know, I'll get my wife to do it. She's got all those fancy precision cutting things for her scrapbooking, she's bound to have something that will cut the right shapes out of this rubber. "Honey? Help please!" Mark it with a pen? Ok... where to get a pen. I guess a cheap pencil will have to do the trick. Can you see that? Not really, and it's too late to mess with this... so I guess that's it for Wednesday, April 7th.