Hello all,
I'm a relatively new member to xtremesystems. I am a bit of an enthusiast, and recently built up a nice system:
Maximus Extreme Mobo
Q6600 G0
2 x EAH3870 in Crossfire
Coolermaster 850W PSU
Coolermaster Cosmos 1000
For the first month I owned this machine, I ran with a Thermalright Ultra 120 CPU cooler; the rest of the system was also air cooled. This worked fine, and I had a stable overclock on the chip, around 3.6.
After doing quite a lot of reading on this forum, and various others, I decided to take a stab at setting up a water-cooling solution. My main reasoning behind undertaking this was to achieve a near-silent system. I wanted to include the cpu, northbridge (the motherboard is prepped for this), and both 3870's. If anyone here owns these graphics cards, you'll know how loud they are under 3d load. Oh my.
I contacted a supplier in Australia, who was very knowledgeable in PC cooling. After chatting and researching, I purchased the following:
D-TEK FuZion water block
Laing D5 12 volt water pump
Radiical Triple dual pass radiator
Two Maze 5 GPU blocks
Three Xinruilian 120 fans
2m 1/2inch ID Excellon tubing & 1m 5/8inch Excellon tubing
Hose clamps
Helicoils
Acrylic bay reservoir
Arctic Silver
It was an eager wait for the package to arrive at my house, when the fun would begin. Enough text, I'll attach the series of photos that cover the installation:
Gutting the case
Obviously I had to pull apart the case, get everything out before I could start installing the liquidz:
Here are some of the parts for this custom liquid setup: Notice the sexy triple rad!
Time to butcher the 3870's Installing the Maze 5's was very easy, and reduced their profile significantly. You can see the beast stock air cooler, louder than a a 747 at takeoff when under load. It was nice to find ramsinks under the air-cooler, especially since I didn't order any!
Installation of the bits and bobs: I had taken measurements of my Cosmos1000 case before ordering the watercooling stuff. I was pretty sure that I could fit the triple rad at the top of the case, ensuring it was all neatly hidden away. The Cosmos 1000 has only two fan vent areas a the top, so I had to get a drill and modify the case (put heaps of holes in it!) so that the third radiator fan would be able to pull out warm air. Yesterday I discovered that the new Cosmos1000S is already rigged for a triple radiator! Oh well, I think my modifications achieve the same thing. I guess I should have made up a template and put the holes in some kind of order ... nevermind, it seems to work well.
You can also see the rad nicely tucked away at the top of the case:
The sexy mobo:
Putting it all back together: I thought I'd take a gamble and put the whole thing back together, install sinks and pipes, and make sure I clamp everything properly before I started filling up the loop. I was pretty sure I could do this, and get it right. I had read that it was safer to test the loop while outside the computer/components, to test for leaks ... but it was getting late, I had been working on the project all day, and i wanted it finished before I went to sleep.
The desk light is on now, the sun has gone down, but below you can see the system all plumbed and ready for filling:
I had mixed up the coolant, 10% corrosion inhibitor : h2o. It's nice and green! I used a funnel and filled up the bay reservoir while powering up the pump from an old power-supply. I did this just in short bursts, so the pump wasn't working too much air in the filling process. It all went smoothly, and the loop was filled easily. It was fun watching the fluid move around, I felt like I was giving life to my machine baby.
I sat and watched the computer for a while, to check to see if there were any leaks. God help me if there were! I did have a small drip start to show itself on the Maximus Extreme northbridge outlet. I powered down the pump, and did a few extra turns on that hose clamp, and all was well. I made another coffee, watched some TV and glanced over while the thing pumped away. No major problems, I went to bed and the next day plugged in all the peripherals to see if my computer still booted.
Success!!! Fresh the next day, I hoped that my computer would still start up. Plugging it all back together, it worked! I messed around with the bios and configured the fans. I used the three temperature probes from the motherboard, and linked them to the onboard fan controls. This way my systems only speeds up the fans as is necessary, and even gaming, this radiator keeps the whole loop cool @ 750 rpm on all three fans, which is essentially silent.
I had to cut a piece of plastic out of the top cover of the Cosmos1000 case, to enable the fans to vent properly. I stuck in a piece of black aluminium flywire, it's a strong dark mesh, so it doesn't detract from the looks of the top of the case:
It was FUN! I found the whole experience of setting up watercooling a lot of fun, and there were no problems during the installation.
I achieved my goals of a quiet computer, and it runs cooler. I'm running at a similar over-clock to my air, I'm currently 3.61 orthos looped stable. The couple of stress tests I've run (it's summer here) have seen the CPU sit around 45 - 50c. Please note that this is in a room ambient of about 29 - 30c. Coolant appears happy to sit around 10c above ambient at most (this is during stress tests or hours of 3d gaming) so I guess my radiator is happily able to deal with the heat.
I'm running my Q6600 @ 400 x 9, with Corsair 1333 memory @ 1280, 8-9-9-23, 1T. Vcore is 1.49. Northbridge 1.59.
I pencil-modded my 3870's, and they are currently at 925mhz core and 1250 mhz ram.
I have managed to complete 3dMark 2006 with my Q6600 @ 3.9ghz, but it simply isn't stable enough under prime for me to run that overclock 24/7.
A brief plug for the very helpful Les & Tricia, who run Radiical Computing, and supplied the parts for my watercooling project:
http://www.radiical.com.au/
My watercooling project was finished a few weeks ago, and it's nice to actually finish this post, which I intended to do sooner! Thanks again to all the members of this forum, I have found Xtremesystems a great resource.
I hope this post has been fun to read, I hope to make some more in the future
Linear Mode
