Here are some photos of my upgrade/redo (the first major since 2007). The project is named for a famous text written by Danial Bernoulli about the mathematics and engineering of water flow (hence the name Hydrodynamica). The 'DS' stands for dead silence and the '3X' means that the build has three separate water loops (one for the cpu, one for the gpus, and one for the chipset, .. although, in this current configuration, the third pump is off and the XSPC RX 120 that would be used for chipset cooling is currently helping out on the ATI 5870s). The project produces 18 dB at almost exactly 30 cm and from three feet away is truly dead silent. It also features some custom work, including a special negative pressure airflow system with custom backplates to radiate heat, a rebuilt PhysX card with a custom circuit board add-on and passive cooling, a custom built handle on the XSPC dual DDC reservoir for pulling it out to add coolant, etc..... All three water loops and cooling are internal. Notice that I did not use a SLI bridge for the water blocks on the two GPUs, as this cuts flow and increases temps. It is not as decked out as some of the mega rigs I have seen here at XS, but then it is also not a show piece either. It is a day in and day out rig where I cannot stop operations just because Bitspower came out with a new color combo.
The temps are:
When flight simming or gaming; cpu ~41 deg C, gpus 44 deg C, northbridge 39 deg C, PhysX card 34 deg C
When running Matlab, finite element analysis or simulating neural networks; cpu 43 deg C, gpus 46 deg C
When running Prime95 on 12 cores (at the one hour mark); cpu is roughly 63 deg C
The current specs are:
i7 980X @ 4.4 GHz, ASUS P6T Deluxe Version 2, 12 GB Corsair Dominator @ 1866, 2 x 5870 (Crossfire), Ageia PhysX PPU card, Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatalt1y Pro, 2 x OCZ Vertex 120 GB in RAID 0 (Firmware 1.6), 2 x OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB in RAID 0 (Firmware 1.11), Seagate 1 TB, Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W modular, Lite-On 24x DVD burner and Pioneer BDR-205 Blue Ray Burner, Apogee XT on the cpu, MCW-80s on the GPUs, DDC 3.25 pumps, XSPC rads and XSPC dual DDC reservoir, Lamptron FC2 version 2, Scythe S-Flex and Yate Loon low speed fans, Logitech G510 keyboard, MX Revolution and Razer Mamba, Creative Gigaworks 750, Sharp LC-46D85U, Track IR 5 and CH Fighterstick/ Pro Franken Potato Throttle/ Pro Pedals
(some of the wiring and the speaker cables are run behind the walls for less clutter)
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