[The Wizzard Project] Rincewind's U2-UFO Liquid Cooling Adventure (large pics)

[Rincewind]

Sometimes it starts with luggage. In this case it all starts with a box. Or two. Or about a half dozen. This is the box that started it.


Before we open the box, lets look at some naked parts:


The naked shell of the Mountain Mods U2-UFO. The OCZ Silencer is sitting in there chilling out.


Here's my storage media. The HDDs are already attached to the MM HDD brackets.

Okay, back to the unboxing:


Taking a look inside these boxes reveals a trove of water cooling goodness. On the table is (from left to right) the Koolance Liquid, XPCS reservoir, SB cooler, case lighting, nozzles, Danger Den IONEs, Zalman fan controller, and a kitchen knife.


A close up of the IONEs. They're pretty hefty for a one piece water block.


A shot of the Zalman front panel controller. It took one night to sleeve up the wiring included with this unit. It looks MUCH better internally when the wires are sleeved up.


The Evercool VGA cooler. This will be used on the 780i MCP chip.


A shot of the Swiftech pump & clamps, the Thermochill PA 120.3 Radiator with gaskets, and some sleeving. The butane soldering tool is hiding in there too. (:

Okay, enough unboxing


In this photo I'm beginning to align my radiator fans on the Thermochill 120.3 shroud. Initially I wasn't going to go with the shroud, but I changed my mind when I got a closer look at the radiator:


Yeah, that's right, the Thermochill is bent on the back side. This kink renders the screw holes on the top right half of the radiator useless. Unfortunately, I ordered from NCIXUS.com. They have a strict no return policy on water cooling hardware. But they also have the best prices. I guess I know why now. Grr. So with the shroud I must go!


After measuring how much wire on each of the three fans I needed, I moved on to sleeving. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of my awesome wiring and sleeving skills. It's a lot of fun though. The whole time I was building this system I was having a blast. Too bad it's an expensive hobby to have (; In the above picture I am taping the shroud with a 6-32 taper. This is so I don't have to mess around with nuts on the bolts that pass through the front of the case, through the fans, and into the shroud.


Here is the complete radiator assembly mounted to the front of the MM U2-UFO. Yeah, I accidentally installed the middle grill on backwards... I need to fix that sometime... (:


Below is a shot from a naked 8800GTS 512 and of my Q6600:

[Rincewind]

The reservoir sitting tight in the 5.25" bay. "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave." Eventually, I had have to take the reservoir back off for some minor modifications to the bay.


Here's a shot of ViperJohn's North Bridge chipset cooler. It's a great piece of work.


A shot of the inside. All smooth and coppery and stuff (:


Here's a picture of ViperJohn's mosfet heatsinks. That's a Koolance swivel angle barb lurking behind the heatsinks.

Next up is assembly!


This is the MCP chip cooler. These spring clamps are not easy to install.


To seat the 8800 properly, some the MCP fan fins had to be bent slightly.


This is the NB water block about to go in.


All the water blocks attached


A close-up of the cooling assembly.


Here's a look at the SLI water bridge. You can see that I used the 3603 lab tubing.


Here's the bit of modification I did to the 5.25" bay. I'll be mounting the pump through these holes.


Here's the underside of the pump. I used some double sided 3M foam tape as padding. It's also very handy at keeping the pump attached to the bay for mounting (:

After finishing up the install, it's time for the bleeding!


Here's a shot of the bleeding in progress


The reservoir


A closer look at the pump mounting. All that cabling has been tucked away (:

After a 14 hour bleeding and leak test, I assembled the parts together. The final results are below.





This is the messy side of the case (: I didn't do anything super special (other than tuck away wires and zip tie things in place). I just never get the opportunity to see this side of the case! On the wall is some Scott Kurtz and Frank Cho art. (;


Here she is in her native habitat! All spruced up and ready to go. On the wall is (the much better) art of my 6yo son. He free handed the African continent and filled in the names for the countries. Apparently, there are many pirate islands, sea serpents, and huge spiders surrounding the African continent.


The parting shot.

[Rincewind]

Overall, the experience of building my first liquid cooling setup has been great and I accomplished what I had set out to do in my system.

For starters, the noise is gone. I can actually hear my very silent hard disks seek. I can hear the gentle gurgle of water against the bubble window in the reservoir(that's had me nervous more than once (: ). It's really kind of nice.

Also, my temperatures are running much lower. My CPU has been as low as 29C idle after sitting around doing nothing all day--I've booted it up and had it running at 26C for a few minutes It was running in the mid to upper 30's on air. This is clocked at 3.6. The 8800GTS's are running in the upper 30's idle and upper 40's under load (stock speeds). The fan on the MCP has dropped the temps from 65 idle to 45 idle.

A water cooling solution isn't for everyone, but after having done it for myself I would recommend it to anyone thinking about doing it. It's very satisfying work.

I'd like to extend a thank you to the liquid cooling gang here at Xtremesystems.org. This is a great group of people and I got a lot of help and inspiration from reading this forum.

Well, that's one itch scratched. Who can give me another?