Phanteks Luxe Tempered Glass

OK. So it’s been a while since I posted anything but I recently got back into PC gaming and content creation so thought it was time for a little upgrade to my system. The X58 platform is still pretty powerful and the X5650 I picked up for £40 in January is a beast with well over 900 points in Cinebench. So I have held off an update to new systems as I don’t feel I will see a huge benefit with games being mostly GPU limited.

The Plan

1. Transplant setup into new case, re-pipe water-cooling loop
2. upgrade Fans and get some sleeved cables (because the look nice)
3. Have a go at Hard line watercooling
4. Upgrade to a 34in 1440p ultrawide with a water-cooled GTX 1070 to drive this badboy.

It’s been a while since I have built a full system and due to the age of some of my water-cooling gear (before things where standardised) there is going to probably be some unique challenges.

So let’s see how it goes

Current Status

I hope to keep this updated with where this project currently sits, and hopefully some sexy photos of the final build when I’m there

***

nice..

Progress made.

Radiator temporally fitted in the top, it fits !!!!!!!!!!!!
Most of the non-water-cooling hardware installed
unfortunately i have lost the top most drive bay due to thinness of Rad, I thought this would happen
pump mounted in removed drive bay area
motherboard 24 and 8 pin in place
front connections wired.
fan controller mounted
loop installed and and leak test
Top Fans installed
power and data cables fitted
Test Boot – no catastrophic failures, degraded my raid 1 array as I was fiddling with the power to the LED lighting (6Hr to re-build... no big problem)
Braded cables need fitted.
Speed controlling pump to make it less noisy
Finish cable management on rear of case
Speed controlling pump to make it less noisy
Finish cable management on rear of case
Speed controlling PSU fan to make it less noisy
Hardline - completed and filled with Pastel White

To Do

Work out what could fit in top bay
decided on GPU and Ultra-wide selection

baseline and case selection

My setup is as follows.

Motherboard – Asus P6X58D-E
CPU – X5650 6 core clocked at 4.4Ghz
Ram – 12GB of HyperX Fury (3 sticks)
OD Drive – 2xHyperX Savage 250GB SSD in Raid 0 – to get around the SATA 2 bottleneck
Storage – 2xSeagate 2tb in Raid 1
PSU - Corsair HX750
Waterblock - EK Supreme HF
Rad - Thermochill 120.3
pump - Laing 18W with plexi top
Reservoir – EK Tub Res

This is all currently (well not anymore) sitting in a Thermaltake Armor case, the case has served me well but this was of the age where internals off cases were not painted and cable management was not given any thought except in very pricy cases







Yuck

but it goes like stink...


https://c8.staticflickr.com/6/5681/30451568703_05b8859960_b.jpg

I picked the phanteks luxe TG for a few reasons. Firstly the non Glass version is very well reviewed and it has good support for water-cooling. It’s following the tempered glass craze along with the RGB one and doesn’t cost a small fortune. I also felt it was the only case i could see that would stand a chance of fitting my Thermochill 120.3 which does not have standard fan spacing’s.





this is one sexy case, I forgot to take a picture of the Glass window on, so you will just have to wait till I’m finished

On the positive note, the Rad does fit

I'll be watching this with interest since I'll be getting this case myself soon (at least when I can find one in stock over here) so will be interested in your thoughts on the case too.

Just a small update, as I haven’t been able to do much today due other hobbies and other items. Power to SATA and GFX card now complete, aquaero 5 LT mounted in the basement of the case. Power required to aquaero and pump still required, but should be fine.

Awaiting some fittings to finish loop off, then should be able to finish the loop and leak test, I hopefully should have a bootable system by Wednesday.

I have ordered new PWM fans for the rad, the stock ones look nice (all black) so i will fire them up and see how noisy the area before decided to replace them.

I cant fined the other reservoir mounting clip, so I only have one

leak Test Time

So the final fittings arrived today so i quickly attached them to the system and finished the loop off.



I have installed an EK valve to act as my drain (which is super important when I convert to rigid pipe) on the left, i think a 90 elbow will be needed to get it 100% right but it’s functional. i have also installed a Aqua Computer in-line sensor as i want to move to controlling fan speeds via water temp.

There is over 70mm above this setup, so i could easily fit a 240 rad in the basement if I need more cooling.



So the water loop is on leak test and everything looks ok, so far. I went a bit too short on the RAD to RES pipe, but it should be better when my new mounting clips arrive. unfortunately I’m out of pipe to fix it, however this is only a temporary measure until I upgrade it so I’m ok with it.

Only issues I think I’m having is the pump is a bit on the loud side, I plan to control the speed with the aquaero. However the PSU is a bit on the loud side as well.

I couldn’t resist get this up on the desk a bit early than planned...





All the fans are now in place and I am controlling them with the aquaero. Although they are all set at one speed for now i plan to control them using temperature data points and speed curves. The layout and plan is as follows.

FAN CH1 – pump (yet to install) – control via water temperature (delta to ambient?)
FAN CH2 – Rear 140mm case fans – control via motherboard temp
FAN CH3 – Front 140mm case fans X 2 – control via motherboard / HDD temps
FAN CH4 (PWM) – RAD Fans – control via CPU temps or water temps but need testing

The replacement clips I ordered for the reservoir where two big, so EK must have increased the size of the tubes at some time? have found some 50mm ones so will have to wait for them to arrive before I can fix it.

Braided cables are there way so when I fit them I can clean up the back and finish it off and make it much neater. One issue I have is that they haven’t put much thought into using the front two SSD bays and the reservoir bracket, there is no way of routing the cables without it looking dumb. I plan to cut a slot in it as below so I can feed the power and data cables straight from behind the plate so they are out of the way.

Looking a lot better than it used to. It's odd going back to old cases. Did one recently for a friend and I remember it being a really good case at the time and a good loop set up in it. Now I was like What the hell is this tat?!

If you're on an Aquaero 5 be careful sticking an 18W pump on it. It should cope with it - it's spec'd at 19.8W per channel - but watch the temperature of the fan amp (voltage regulator for each channel) in Aquasuite. Might be an idea to stick a heatsink on it (there's a specific heatsink available). Other option is a PowerAdjust Standard version (Ultra not needed) as that can do 30W (but not PWM) and is controlled by the Aquaero.

You'll probably find you can turn the pump speed down quite a bit without affecting temps much. The other thing you could try is the EK DDC heatsink. It cools the pump a bit (slap a temp sensor on it to monitor how toasty it gets) and also has rubber vibration isolating legs which help stop the case amplifying the sound.

Depending on what you're after, you may find the you're better to set up curves in steps. You can then run your fans at a quiet speed until temperature gets to a threshold and then step it up. Depending on your fans this may sound better as if you have fans speeding up and down it's more noticeable. Definitely don't base a fan curve off cpu temp as it changes so rapidly the constantly changing fan noise will irritate you.

Thermal Testing

So whilst I wait for cables to turn up I decided to do a quick benchmark of cooling performance, as I have moved from a front mounted radiator to top mounted and have fans setup as push not push/pull. I wasn’t planning to do a full set of 12Hr stability test so i settled with 2Hr of Prime prime95 small FFT (which I feel is a highly unrealistic loading) and 2 Hr of realbench (which is a more sensible test).



My old benchmarks a 12Hr Prime maxed out at 65C (core #0) and 64 (core #4). This new test settles in 73C (core #0 & #4). So it looks like the switch a single set of high static pressure fans has lost me 8C in thermal cooling.



However i find prime an unrealistic loading situation, so realbech shows temperatures maxing about at around 68C.

Not too bad... in normal use, i can run the system almost silent (except the PSU fan) and CPU temperatures dot go about 40C, although I have only don’t light gaming so far.

Cenedd said:

If you're on an Aquaero 5 be careful sticking an 18W pump on it. It should cope with it - it's spec'd at 19.8W per channel - but watch the temperature of the fan amp (voltage regulator for each channel) in Aquasuite. Might be an idea to stick a heatsink on it (there's a specific heatsink available). Other option is a PowerAdjust Standard version (Ultra not needed) as that can do 30W (but not PWM) and is controlled by the Aquaero.

Click to expand...

I have the heatsink attached so it should be fine. I can control the pump down to around 8V and its completely silent, amplifier temps are running at 85-90C. when running at 12V the temperature is 20-30C so it’s fine. I am starting the pump on full voltage then after 2-3 seconds ramp it down. I plan to leave it running in silent mode until the CPU temps get to 60C with max speed reserved for 70C

It's in spec but you want to make sure there's no cables touching the heatsink, you're not that far off hot enough to melt the insulation!
The Aquaero 5 will switch the output to 100% at 95°C and "permanently" disable (until cold boot) the output at 100°C....so you've not got a lot of breathing room!

What's your coolant temp doing through that benchmark? Can't be running away if your cpu temp levels out but worth knowing.

The front Bay Problem

So I’m trying to work out if anything can fit in the top bay, but as the radiator encroaches into the top 5.25” bay, I am very limited.





So I have 70mm of depth before I hit the Rad and about 30mm of height, I don’t know if can fit a card reader in this slot, maybe a 3.5” one?#

In the two bays below i have a CD/DVD drive (that i plan to upgrade to a blueray drive) and a tool less hotswap bay.

Cenedd said:

It's in spec but you want to make sure there's no cables touching the heatsink, you're not that far off hot enough to melt the insulation!
The Aquaero 5 will switch the output to 100% at 95°C and "permanently" disable (until cold boot) the output at 100°C....so you've not got a lot of breathing room!

What's your coolant temp doing through that benchmark? Can't be running away if your cpu temp levels out but worth knowing.

Click to expand...

The heatsink is lukewarm to the touch and no cables are near, I need configure the front fans as I have them set at around 400RPM, so that won’t help as its mounted in front of the bottom one. I can’t completely remember the water temps, but they where around 28C, but I logged it with aquasuite, I don’t know if i fully trust this temperate but i know it varied by no more the 0.5C in two Hr after it heated up.

I will see if I can output the temperatures to take a better look.

I've got an Akasa 3½" card reader and that's (just less than) 25mm tall and 120mm deep. It could fit but you'd probably be blocking a chunk of rad from air-flow.
That said, if you were to mod the box/mounting, it'd fit:




Seems a bit odd that the VRMs on the Aquaero are hitting 90°C but the heatsink is only luke warm. It could just be that the VRM is so small relative to the heatsink but it's worth checking it's making good contact through the heat pad.

The thermistor type temp sensors are only vaguely accurate. You'll find that they can vary by up to a few degrees between different sensors. They give you a good idea of what's happening rather than being super-accurate. You can always pick up a Non-Contact Infrared Digital Thermometer for £8 if you want something to check it against. Again, it may not be super-accurate - given the price - but it would give you a common reference and they're quite good for checking heatsinks, SSDs etc while it's switched on.

Cablemod





cablemod cables have arrived. i ordered 3 customer ones to sort out the 2 font SSD, optical drive area and a single SATA power to add a USB3 card as the motherboard has no header for USB3

I think I will have to wait until i take the Rad out to paint it to switch over the 8 pin as its impossible to get out.

need to do some cable management, but it looks much nicer.



will hook these behind the reservoir mount when I mod it.



I need to neaten it all up and put the PSC cover back on, but I like to the blue and black theme that matches the motherboard.

Looking good
Do me a favor? How much space is there between the top of your motherboard and the top of the case? I'll be putting a H105 AIO rad in there and would like to continue using a push-pull fan configuration.

Coolant looks watered down?

RevBillyG said:

Looking good
Do me a favor? How much space is there between the top of your motherboard and the top of the case? I'll be putting a H105 AIO rad in there and would like to continue using a push-pull fan configuration.

Click to expand...

My rad is 60mm thick, there is about 2-3mm to the top of the motherboard. remember you can fit a set of fans in the top compartment so you should just be able to get away with a 40mm thick rad if you want push pull

looks like a bit of thermal paste under the heatsink did the trick for the temperature on the aquaero

BriT said:

Coolant looks watered down?

Click to expand...

nope, but it was orderd on the 18 Oct 2015, so its over the hill a bit

crazyDAJT said:

looks like a bit of thermal paste under the heatsink did the trick for the temperature on the aquaero

Click to expand...

That's looking better....and on the plus side, you know you've got plenty of headroom!