JR404's revenge of the Cube

[Leeghoofd]

Lo lads , it's that time of year again, too much time on my hands ( sadly not enough , Tibo is keeping me very very busy) and very eager to get my hands dirty again... yeha blimey another Cube thread, sorry I'm not skilled enough to make it oval or sphere like...

I have build a cube before if you guys still recall it, but it was really too big and not very practical to transport, though that was not my initial goal with that one, cooling and workability were number one items on the list... what it did pretty well....



Cube in working mode without sidepanels

As mentioned in the end of my other Cube project, I already had some ideas to get it done way faster and more easily, so not to start from scratch but take existing cases, bolt 2 together, fiddle stuff around in them and get gaming again...

Victim of the year 2007 :2 Antec 6000 cases, a Striker mobo ( yes it's still alive and kickin), 2 waterloops with one thermochill PA120.3 ( for CPU/GPU)and one dual rad Extreme flow ( NB/SB and PWMs)



My 8800 GTX could fit nicely in there with the PA120.3 fitted to the front, not much room left but it would be doable and shorten tube length drastically.

As I mentioned before I wanted a 2nd loop for the NB and SB as the 680i still runs very hot even with my fans... also I had a hard time to get my q6600 stable and with watercooling I would hope to get it at 450FSB like the other forum members.

[Leeghoofd]

First up was the mobo, , I took the heatsink of again and am still amased ( or is it amused lol) how board manufacturers want us to believe this is real copper the heatpipes are yeah but the heatsinks are painted... also for the Striker I always found the one for the NB not big enough to get rid of the heat generated by the 680i...




Board butt naked


I ordered the complete EK waterblock kit from Aquatuning in Germany as I had very good deals with them and packages have been sent very fast.

The kit comprises the NB and SB waterblock and 2 PWM's ones...



The full kit installed, mobo feels warmer now lol, I have no bending on the PWM's as some users had though I didn't screw them completely down, plus the mobo is reinforced with a Thermalright socket 775 backplate and please use Arctic ceramique for the NB and SB

As I read a few times before, Size of Tubing matters but temp changes weren't so drastic as I initially expected... don't shoot me but I opted for 8mm tubing for the mobo loop and 10mm tubing for the CPU/GPU loop all bundled with quick fittings... a real pleasure to install and it works out of the box...



8mm tubing looks like dwarfs to the 1/2 tubing I originally had, this picture was a trial for the NB/SB and PWM loop

[Leeghoofd]

Next up the case ofcourse :

Here's the case stripped of it's HD and optical drive bays, loads of room , very light and without the reinforcing strut pretty flexible



if a mouse jumped onto the case it would collapse, hope the rad in front and some L shaped struts will get it rigid again

Opting for the radiator on the left side of the case ( to keep tubing to an absolute minimum, I need to cut out the front panel to fit the rad... I'm gonna use the old radiator supports and hook them to the case via 4 L shaped pieces of Alu

After some fitting and marking here's the cutout I want to achieve :



Some Dremel disks later :



Don't look at the lousy cut, it has to be corrected

And finally the human conquered the case :



Who's the boss !!!

Popped the 120.3 in together with the shroud to verify the cut :



Fits pretty nicely, why did I take the Antec cases ? that will become clear after a few more days

[Vice]

Good to see you back

[higgins]

Looking good man, will be nice to see what you cook up next.

[[XC] DragonOrta]

I'd think that the 8mm tubing would actually be better when used with the PWM blocks, as it would put less torque on the blocks than 1/2" tubing.

[Leeghoofd]

Yeppo that was one of the experiences I had when including the NB in the CPU/GPU loop, almost impossible to get done right (without kinking or stressing the NB sink) and unless with extra long tubing ( which I didn't want ), so now I opted for 8mm for PWM, NB and SB and 10mm to cool the CPU and GPU...

I had the whole rig already hooked up to the new tubing and for the CPU I lost 2°C under load ( 8 x 450 ) in comparison with the 1.2 inch one it goes now for 52°C instead of 50°C so which isn't that bad , taking into account the much easier routing and fitting of the tubing...

To be continued....

[Leeghoofd]

Did some more work on the case today, in fact most of the work is done , it's so easy to work in an existing case if you got a dremel...

I needed my rig up and running tonite to play for my clan... so I quickly assembled it with the 2 sides not joined quick piccie from the hardware side :



Look at the whirl coming form the graphics card, I need to calm this pump down as it's too strong, prolly the pump controller will handle that later on...

[Leeghoofd]

So to continue my small work log, I got out the Dremel today and used and abused all my availble cutting disks :

First up was the mobo case, needed some small adjustements to the case as I want the cable management as neat and tucked away as possible, think the pictures tell more than a thousand words, here's the case from both sides :



Now ze other side



Also I mounted the rad supports, by using 4 L shaped Alu profiles ( had plenty of them in stock after my homemade cube...

The case was tricky as I couldn't mount the supports where I wanted them, so I had to fiddle them around ( and measure measure measure ) but the rad is now mounted by 5 screws to the case. Really a tight fit...

Luckily for me the case felt more rigid again ( as I removed the case bracket to get more and easy handling on the inside )

[Leeghoofd]

Fitted the front and upper rad ( for the 2nd loop, nothing special there just good dremel action and 2 Ac Ryan 12cm covers to hide my bad cuts , I opted to go for an Extreme flow, because it was so thin ( surely in comparison with the Thermochill...



I have to mention, painting the case and getting it right will be done later on as I need the pc for the end of the season ( so still 3 weeks to go) before I can put the finishing touch

[cian1500ww]

Brilliant !!

[shabranigdo]

Hi do you have a link to more pictures of your original cube? I am looking to fabricate one myself and looking for information/ideas. Here is the thread I have of my plans so far.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=159867

Thanks for any help.

[Leeghoofd]

Thx for the nice comments again

Here's my other Cube link here :

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...highlight=cube

My previous build, all made out of alu L profiles, very lightweight though very rigid too, just adding the acryl panels ( chose 5mm for the strength ) made it very very heavy.... and I chose to go big (size wise I mean ) to keep it easy to work in and to reduce time for Acryl cutting (Ac ryan panels 47cm on 47), as I swap/test loads of hardware... it did all that fine but to carry that monster around at a LAN,... no thx

I'll take a piccie of it to compare it with the new build so you can see the difference in size, before it goes to my mate's for his test rig...

All I wanted was a UFO, but 260 euro's plus 200 euro's shipping is quite high to me... this baby will cost me 100 euro's and many many hours of fun time...

Hope to hear from you soon !! Too bad I never make drawings , it's all in the head here...

For your info I mainly used 25 x 25mm L shaped ALU which I bolted together with 3 x 4mm screws with locking nuts... I think it's very hard to weld ALU mate, but some fishing shops have special plastic mounts to put into the ALU so you can slide it over it... but that's too easy !!

Also for the mobo tray, look around for an old case (maybe at your local container park) and rip that apart like I did, saves ya cash again...

For the Acryl 3mm is plenty unless you want to hook up a rad to it, but I would never hook up heavy weight to the Acryl as it's so fragile....

On the new cube I will only use Acryl to top it off, all stock till now....

[Leeghoofd]

Next up the other case, power supply had to be kept in the original position, but I wanted to place the pumps where the drive bays are, to limit tubing and eventually if required to place a big reservoir in there, also I wanted more room for HD's as with my previous one ( limited to 3 ) but to keep accessability high...

I unscrewed the front hard drive bay and started to fiddle it around, with aminor modification and 4 screws in the bottom the case and one on the top of the HD bay the bays is firmly secured...



but how to acces them when the 2 cases are bolted together, easy not just cut a hole into the mobo tray of the 2nd case but I didn't want to compromise the rigidness of the PSU mount as the Galaxy is a heavy beast

[Leeghoofd]

Case from the other side :



I might alter the largeness of the window to get better access for the wiring but the drives are easy to get out thx due to Antecs sliding mechanism... Front room of the case will house the 2 pumps, I have one on the bottom now, and one mounted in the optical bay but it takes up too much space as I can only mount 1 optical drive now... Really thinking of hooking up one 15cm reservoir and to remove the top reservoir from both pumps... I have no idea if it will work as both pumps have different speeds and ratio throughput...

Here's how the pump is installed : used the 3 1/2 inch bay from the floppy to carefully hook up the pump with it's vibration mount so it was easily accesible to fill her up...

[Leeghoofd]

Pump from front view , I loose too much place with it as I still want to use my old trusty floppy or a 2nd optical drive, new idea is to place this pump on the bottom of the case where the CPU/GPU pump is now and to put the latter on a custom made pump bay... hooked up to a reservoir... or both maybe loosing the top reservoir of both pumps...

Any ideas if you hook up 2 pumps of different ratios to the same reservoir ? what will it give , does it disturb flow ? have a big influence on temps ?

[Leeghoofd]

One thing I found out after that first day of testing was that the tubing going from the rad to the CPU/GPU pump was slightly bend due to the sideskirts of both cases, so I had to cut some casing away to let it go without kinks from the rad to the pump :



Initial cut, still needs to be trimmed

one more picture of how the rad is fixed to case 1's front, really easy to do :



All the nuts will be repleaced by locking ones once the build/try proces is over

Here's the tubing from rad to pump looked at from behind :



Also note that I already removed the lower holders or rivets ( or whatever they are called in English) of the casing to install the case supports

[Leeghoofd]

So next up are the so called supports for the cases, initially I wanted to build a rack where the 2 housings would fit in and remove all the top and sideplates and replace them with Acryl ones... but having a kid around ( almost 8 months now) that is about to start to crawl, I opted for the original doors and tops ( saving me time and money ) so I wet for the idea to make 4supports: 2 rear ones and yeah you guessed it 2 front ones, though in the front I run into trouble due to the plastic mesh frontpanel thingy... so I had to rethink that... so I started working on the rear first....

As you saw in the previous picture I drilled out the 3 rivets that holds the rear and lower plate together... an L shaped Alu piece ( I stil had plenty left of my previous build) would neat to be aligned perfectly adjacent to the chassis and 6 holes were needed to bolt it on...

How did I do it:

First put some tape on the inside of the L shape :



Hold that plate to the rear with some supertape, from inside out push with a black marker where ya holes need to be... drill them bolt em on and hey you got a lightweight superstructure looking like this :



Right case fixed ,onto case 2, look at the supertape holding the 2 cases together

All 6 holes done and made ready for my countersunk 4mm screws :



They seem slightly misaligned though it fits perfectly



Here's how it looks form the inside, again all nuts will be replaced by locking ones and the interior of the casing might go blue or black

[Leeghoofd]

Though the stock L piece looked quite dull in it's rectangular form so I cut them at 55° angle to make them look a bit more ... undull ?



Here's it done, there's a small gap between the cases tha tmight need to be filled up with some black silicone, but that's only after the rig has survived some bashing at an upcoming LANparty, Also the rear needs some acryl panels to cover the whole thing up

The top rear support , opted here for only 4 screws as the 2 inner ones would be very hard to reach with all the hardware inside, not that I4m planning to take it apart once all is in lol



Only 4 screw here but with only these 2 supports in place the cube starts to come alive and is very rigid already, instead of the Silicone I might add a 3rd support in this way, then it would hide the gap and would add again to the rigidness. And then cover the left hand side with some black acryl with a tiny mesh in it to give some cool flow to the HD rack



More work for tomorrow... greetzz

[Leeghoofd]

I took care of the rad and countersunk all the screws to not allow them to touch the front plate, to avoid vibrations... :



All holes nicely done, and about 1mm clearance with the rad itself, I didn't take that into account, I almost got the screw through on one hole, luckily I noticed it immediately otherwise the rad would have been wasted

[Leeghoofd]

this is how the cube looks till now, without any added acryl or paint, pretty straightforward and so easy to work on...

[Leeghoofd]

Today I worked an hour on the front panels, due to the new front support I had to dremel them to let them to snap on again, very basic work and it hides the support nicely...



First cutout done, took me 2 mins as you can see the result is not fab but good enough to let it snap on like it used too without the case support

Here's the front bezel fitted to the PSU , watercooling side



Hope you guys had some booz , need to rotate the picture but too tired to do that now

And last shot from the bottom to clearly see the cutout I did to make it easy snap-onnable

[Leeghoofd]

Case fitted with both panels, though the left one needs some more cutting for the air flow of the rad



Cut out done, more can be trimmed but I wanna test it like this as the panel is still pretty rigid :



Left panel cut out for the air flow of the rad, maybe more can be trimmed , we will see later, batteries of the kodak also going dead

Cya lads tomorrow...

[TRG]

Definitely a promising mod!

Too bad your batterijen of your kodak also were going dead

[Leeghoofd]

Thx mate ( dag noorderbuur ) work is going fast , though I need more time to complete it and to clean up some rough edges...

anyway some more ( sometimes fuzzy pictures )

the PSU/HD side case with the 3 supports still fixed :



7 screws in total to get one side out

Hard drive bay placement, already drilled the 4 holes in the casefloor, now need one screw to fix it on the top :



HD bay is already well fixed though lacks top support, big screw coming through !!!



4mm nut used, one locking nut and then 2 HD bay grommets for dampening purposes