Associate
Amazing. I love the way the pump is fitted to the floor using the standard EK fittings. Excellent job!
Chocolate Box
- Thread starter JR23
- Start date
Associate
Stunning build. Good work.
Associate
- Joined
- 14 Aug 2014
- Posts
- 1,070
Very nice pictures. The PC looks great and you've presented it very well.
great build enjoyed reading the thread, it looks good enough to eat. What drill bit did you use for the fill port holes, only im prob gonna do some port holes myself and just wondered what you used, il be using 10/12 tubing i know yours was 13mm but just to give me an idea what people are using, i was gonna use a cone bit, but i live in a flat so no man shed or anything like that, lol so ive got to be careful on that side.
plus how you finding the board, audio, overclocking, general use etc, there isnt many reviews of it at all.
Which holes do you mean dude? The holes in the mid-plate are 20mm to suit the M20 Alphacool bulk head fittings but I bet Parvum whipped round them with the same tiny cutter as the rest of the part. The outlet port in the pump block was milled out to 18.5mm by very weirdly putting a lathe boring bar into a chuck in the mill, somehow it just worked
The motherboard is great, obviously I haven't done any overclocking but the BIOS is very logical to navigate and the fan control options are great, it even gets on properly with the LED strip. The build quality visually looks phenomenal.
Thanks for your support guys, JR.
To go along with the biblically proportioned mouse mat today I received an epicly sized monitor. Well maybe it's not that big but it certainly makes the X1.0 feel small, it's a 25" 1440p IPS Dell Ultrasharp U2515H...
Can't wait to see my custom keycaps at the weekend and finish the little keyboard. Very close now, nearly ready for LAN's even if they are at my own house
JR
Can't wait to see my custom keycaps at the weekend and finish the little keyboard. Very close now, nearly ready for LAN's even if they are at my own house
JR
Soldato
Stunningly beautiful build dude a pleasure to read through.
What mini keyboard is that? do u go to lan events often?
What mini keyboard is that? do u go to lan events often?
It's a Keyboard Paradise V60 Mini obviously with MX Greens, a Vortex machined case and Signature Plastics DSA PBT keycaps. At the moment I only have the black modifiers on it but i've got 100x 1u custom brown keycaps waiting for me at home.
Actually i'm not a huge gamer but last year I went to i52 as a visitor and really enjoyed myself and was sad to go home so thought I better get my act together this time, especially now i've got to knowing a few more people in the PC community. I actually built my Parvum S2.0 as a secondary rig to take to such places but Parvum badgered me into this build (ok it wasn't hard for them) so i'll be taking them both to i54. I'm also hopefully maybe going to Loughborough Uni LAN this weekend, if I still can and it becomes possible. I believe my own University are planning some LAN's too so I may suddenly find myself inundated with events to attend. We'll see how the first few go
JR
Hey guys, not an update this time, but to make up for it I brought you all some Chocolate
Hold on, lets take a closer look, it appears to be hollow with a small cross in the centre
what could this special shape chocolate be for?
Monumental thanks to Signature Plastics for doing a custom run of 100 brown caps just for me, they are beautiful.
JR
Hold on, lets take a closer look, it appears to be hollow with a small cross in the centre
what could this special shape chocolate be for?
Monumental thanks to Signature Plastics for doing a custom run of 100 brown caps just for me, they are beautiful.
JR
Associate
Very nice build, extremely impressive with what can be done with such a small space.
Thank you to XSPC and HyperX for sponsoring this build, it's been a pleasure to use your components. Special thanks also to Parvum Systems and
Pexon PC's for your support and craftsmanship, as well as putting up with me over the past few months.
Chocolate Box by JR23
Case - Custom Parvum X1.0
CPU - Intel i5-4440
Motherboard - EVGA Z97 Stinger
RAM - HyperX 1600C9 2x4GB
GPU - Powercolor R9-290X
SSD - HyperX 3K 120GB
SSD - HyperX 3K 240GB
PSU - Silverstone SX600-G
Cables - Bespoke cables by Pexon PC's
Fans - Noctua IndustrialPPC NF-F12 2000PWM x2
CPU Cooler - Noctua NH-L12
RAM Spreaders - XSPC Universal Memory Side Plate
GPU Block - EK FC290X Nickel/Acetal w. Backplate
Radiator - XSPC AX120
Pump - Laing DDC 1T-Plus
Pump/Res - EK DDC X-RES 100
Fittings - Alphacool HT 10/13 Chrome
Tubing - Alphacool HT 10/13 Chrome
Rotaries - EK PSC and Bitspower mini-snake
Final Pics I
Thanks to everyone on OCUK for following this build, i've enjoyed your comments. There will be more photographs shortly.
JR
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Associate
Great looking build. How was your overall experience working with the Parvum?
The build wouldn't have happened without Parvum, they started it
It has been great working with them and I think we understand each other very well now, the same with Pexon too. The big step forward with this project I think came out of me having a little more input to Parvum at the start. Once most of my bits were done I handed it over to Pexon so he could see the bigger picture rather than working from what I could say on its own. That method was definitely needed where each piece was so dimension critical and that sets it apart. Quite a bit of CAD work went into it early on too. It will definitely take a couple more projects to turn it into a real slick operation though JR
Soldato
Can i ask is that chrome tubing bendable?
and did you cut it too?
and did you cut it too?
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I didn't try to bend it all, it's way too expensive to experiment with and it wouldn't of really helped anywhere on this build. I would imagine with the correct equipment you could bend it however you risk damaging the plating. I've seen modders to bend copper tube and then have it plated afterwards and presumably that's the most cost effective way to do it with the best results as copper tube is much cheaper than this stuff and quite available.
I did cut it as you can see in Post #72, I have access to a lathe hence choose to chamfer and face the ends to length but if with a hacksaw, vice and a file you could achieve acceptable results. I just did it because I could not because it's necessary.
JR
Soldato
Thank you i was looking at there black chrome version, i guess brass is soft as copper? I have seen the bending machine they use with copper tube quite straight forward, Where could you go to get it plated after? or is this something you can do yourself?
Also the 13mm primochill fittings would work or is it just Alphacool?
Awesome build just beautiful
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, so it has quite similar properties. They can both be very soft when annealed, I would imagine that the tubing is produced with that in mind rather than strength. There are plenty of companies who will plate stuff, finding somewhere that will take small orders is probably the tricky part. I guess looking for somewhere that plates classic car or motorcycle parts might not be a bad idea. I wish I could be more helpful on the matter but it's not something I have done.
Any rigid tubing fitting for the correct OD will work.
JR
Alright guys, quite a few people on the internetz have been asking for some performance figures of Chocolate Box. Similarly a lot of people found my thermal solution rather interesting so I thought it was appropriate that I put together a little project review.
There were a few decisions that caused some controversy, most repetitively I got 'why didn't you watercool the CPU' but also others like why not have more radiator area, a lower TDP card or an exhaust fan. And the simple answer all along has been aesthetics and the constraints of the case, I also wanted to be a bit extreme with it, just to push the design envelope. But at the same time I was pretty confident all along that it would perform.
SSD's - Atto
I decided that I would run a 120GB OS drive and 240GB Game drive although was tempted to RAID0 two 120's. Atto shows Performance between the two sizes as being extremely similar which I was quite surprised by. Both fell short of the advertised 555/510 but came very close.
SSD's - CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3
CrystalDisk was slightly less optimistic as usual however showed significantly better read speeds for the larger drive which I had expected to observe in Atto.
BootRacer 4.7
Average Windows boot time - 5.33 secs
Average overall boot time - 20.91 secs
To demonstrate some real world benefits of the SSD's I ran BootRacer several times averaging the results. With the motherboards insanely fast POST, improvements made in W8.1 and insane speeds of the SSD's this rig is amazingly fast off the mark often making it to the desktop before the screen has turned on.
Overclocking
As the CPU has a locked multiplier I honestly didn't consider it really worth tinkering with, even in my bigger rigs I generally keep the CPU at stock clocks for daily use. I had considered it may be worth undervolting it at stock clocks however the motherboard manages to be extremely lean rarely letting it touch 1.00v
The graphics card on the other hand was a different story! With afterburner installed getting some extra poke out of this chap was easy, the first thing I did was let it have 150% power limit as the SFX Silverstone seems to dish it out just fine. I prefer to overclock using Unigine Heaven as I find it easiest to recognise instabilities and artefacts. I worked up the Memory Clock in 50MHz intervals and to my surprise made it as far as Afterburner would let me go yielding 1625MHz or an effective 6500MHz, quite an increase from 5000MHz. The core and voltage I brought up together after that until I hit 1200MHz and that was limited by thermals more so than stability leading me neatly into my next topic.
Temperatures
Now I know I just said that the GPU OC was temp limited however before jumping to any assumptions let me elaborate on that. For all of the testing the ambient temperature was left pretty warm at 22°C, the case was entirely assembled with the window in place and both fans were set to a static 1000RPM. That's because I wanted this to be a worst case scenario, with a little bump in fan speed I can open up plenty more headroom but consider this a balanced set up appropriate for daily use.
As can be seen above the CPU reached a peak temp of 57°C during OCCT loading, it's highly unlikely this rig will ever see 100% CPU load so i'm really pleased with this. I think it easily justifies my aesthetic decision to run the L12. Infact this rig has already attended two LAN's and been subjected to 8 hours of gaming with no CPU fan installed!
The GPU side of things is even better presenting monumental gains over the reference cooler. Load temps have dropped from 95°C to 55°C which is incredible considering how much quieter it is. This has opened up enough headroom for some serious overclocks which I never really expected, with a fan speed of 1000RPM I managed to get 1200/1625MHz with a peak core temp of 67°C.
Accoustics
Unfortunately I don't have any of the required equipment to give any evidence here however I will state my subjective impressions. With the pair of iPPC's at 1000RPM they are hardly noticeable, similarly the PSU does an excellent job considering it's size and during my entire session loading and unloading it this evening I really coudn't pick it out even when pushing overclocks pretty hard. The main disappointment comes from the pump and it's really the lesser of many evils. A DDC was the only option for where it had to fit and de-coupling it fully isn't an option as it's rigidly linked to the radiator and hence all of the case, acrylic isn't the best material at mitigating this problem and consequently it is quite audible in a quiet room. A PWM DDC would have made a good substitute however with limited space and headers/PSU connectors it would have had complications that couldn't be resolved so neatly. On the basis that this is an aesthetic build which will nearly always be used in a noisy room while wearing headphones, it's not a big problem and I don't plan to change anything.
3DMark Fire Strike
Graphics Score - 11848
Physics Score - 6053
Score - 9039
Graphics Score OC - 13871 +17.1%
Physics Score OC - 6086 +0.5%
Score OC - 10063 +11.3%
Unigine Valley - ExtremeHD
FPS - 52.7
Score - 2205
FPS OC - 69.8 +32.5%
Score OC - 2922 +32.5%
Unigine Heaven - 1080p maximum settings
FPS - 54.8
Score - 1381
FPS OC - 63.5 +15.9%
Score OC - 1601 +15.9%
Mafia II - 1440p maximum settings
FPS - 91.5
FPS OC - 107.8 +17.8%
Hitman Absolution - 1440p maximum settings
FPS - 38.18
FPS OC - 43.35 +13.5%
Grid Autosport - 1440p maximum settings (8xMSAA)
FPS - 68.60
FPS OC - 74.35 +10.0%
Concluding thoughts
So as everything has panned out I really like the look of the L12 and the blocked card together, the juxtaposition of air and water cooling certainly works on an aesthetic level. I'm also now satisfied that it works on effectively on a thermal level providing more than sufficient cooling performance while remaining within the restrictions of the case. No drastic changes were made to accommodate the hardware and it has sufficient power delivery and cooling to keep the 290X happy. There is ample performance available for 1440p gaming and that's a milestone above where I was originally aiming.
JR
There were a few decisions that caused some controversy, most repetitively I got 'why didn't you watercool the CPU' but also others like why not have more radiator area, a lower TDP card or an exhaust fan. And the simple answer all along has been aesthetics and the constraints of the case, I also wanted to be a bit extreme with it, just to push the design envelope. But at the same time I was pretty confident all along that it would perform.
SSD's - Atto
I decided that I would run a 120GB OS drive and 240GB Game drive although was tempted to RAID0 two 120's. Atto shows Performance between the two sizes as being extremely similar which I was quite surprised by. Both fell short of the advertised 555/510 but came very close.
SSD's - CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3
CrystalDisk was slightly less optimistic as usual however showed significantly better read speeds for the larger drive which I had expected to observe in Atto.
BootRacer 4.7
Average Windows boot time - 5.33 secs
Average overall boot time - 20.91 secs
To demonstrate some real world benefits of the SSD's I ran BootRacer several times averaging the results. With the motherboards insanely fast POST, improvements made in W8.1 and insane speeds of the SSD's this rig is amazingly fast off the mark often making it to the desktop before the screen has turned on.
Overclocking
As the CPU has a locked multiplier I honestly didn't consider it really worth tinkering with, even in my bigger rigs I generally keep the CPU at stock clocks for daily use. I had considered it may be worth undervolting it at stock clocks however the motherboard manages to be extremely lean rarely letting it touch 1.00v
The graphics card on the other hand was a different story! With afterburner installed getting some extra poke out of this chap was easy, the first thing I did was let it have 150% power limit as the SFX Silverstone seems to dish it out just fine. I prefer to overclock using Unigine Heaven as I find it easiest to recognise instabilities and artefacts. I worked up the Memory Clock in 50MHz intervals and to my surprise made it as far as Afterburner would let me go yielding 1625MHz or an effective 6500MHz, quite an increase from 5000MHz. The core and voltage I brought up together after that until I hit 1200MHz and that was limited by thermals more so than stability leading me neatly into my next topic.
Temperatures
Now I know I just said that the GPU OC was temp limited however before jumping to any assumptions let me elaborate on that. For all of the testing the ambient temperature was left pretty warm at 22°C, the case was entirely assembled with the window in place and both fans were set to a static 1000RPM. That's because I wanted this to be a worst case scenario, with a little bump in fan speed I can open up plenty more headroom but consider this a balanced set up appropriate for daily use.
As can be seen above the CPU reached a peak temp of 57°C during OCCT loading, it's highly unlikely this rig will ever see 100% CPU load so i'm really pleased with this. I think it easily justifies my aesthetic decision to run the L12. Infact this rig has already attended two LAN's and been subjected to 8 hours of gaming with no CPU fan installed!
The GPU side of things is even better presenting monumental gains over the reference cooler. Load temps have dropped from 95°C to 55°C which is incredible considering how much quieter it is. This has opened up enough headroom for some serious overclocks which I never really expected, with a fan speed of 1000RPM I managed to get 1200/1625MHz with a peak core temp of 67°C.
Accoustics
Unfortunately I don't have any of the required equipment to give any evidence here however I will state my subjective impressions. With the pair of iPPC's at 1000RPM they are hardly noticeable, similarly the PSU does an excellent job considering it's size and during my entire session loading and unloading it this evening I really coudn't pick it out even when pushing overclocks pretty hard. The main disappointment comes from the pump and it's really the lesser of many evils. A DDC was the only option for where it had to fit and de-coupling it fully isn't an option as it's rigidly linked to the radiator and hence all of the case, acrylic isn't the best material at mitigating this problem and consequently it is quite audible in a quiet room. A PWM DDC would have made a good substitute however with limited space and headers/PSU connectors it would have had complications that couldn't be resolved so neatly. On the basis that this is an aesthetic build which will nearly always be used in a noisy room while wearing headphones, it's not a big problem and I don't plan to change anything.
3DMark Fire Strike
Graphics Score - 11848
Physics Score - 6053
Score - 9039
Graphics Score OC - 13871 +17.1%
Physics Score OC - 6086 +0.5%
Score OC - 10063 +11.3%
Unigine Valley - ExtremeHD
FPS - 52.7
Score - 2205
FPS OC - 69.8 +32.5%
Score OC - 2922 +32.5%
Unigine Heaven - 1080p maximum settings
FPS - 54.8
Score - 1381
FPS OC - 63.5 +15.9%
Score OC - 1601 +15.9%
Mafia II - 1440p maximum settings
FPS - 91.5
FPS OC - 107.8 +17.8%
Hitman Absolution - 1440p maximum settings
FPS - 38.18
FPS OC - 43.35 +13.5%
Grid Autosport - 1440p maximum settings (8xMSAA)
FPS - 68.60
FPS OC - 74.35 +10.0%
Concluding thoughts
So as everything has panned out I really like the look of the L12 and the blocked card together, the juxtaposition of air and water cooling certainly works on an aesthetic level. I'm also now satisfied that it works on effectively on a thermal level providing more than sufficient cooling performance while remaining within the restrictions of the case. No drastic changes were made to accommodate the hardware and it has sufficient power delivery and cooling to keep the 290X happy. There is ample performance available for 1440p gaming and that's a milestone above where I was originally aiming.
JR
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Associate
Fantastic roundup and great looking build. Congrats
Long time no update on this one
As with most projects I thought it was all neatly finished, I was very happy with the aesthetics of the build and for the most part the way it performed. One thing that always disappointed me was the pump noise from the 1T-Plus DDC. So over the past few months I collected a little nest of parts to add and when OCUK said they would like it on their stand at i55 now seemed like the right time to pop them all in.
The main change was of course the pump, changing from a DDC wasn't an option as the reservoir and top fitted so neatly into the case. I opted for an EK-DDC 3.2 PWM, integrating voltage control would have been difficult given the available space however simply plugging it in was a logistical challenge!
Previously the DDC had been plugged directly into the PSU with the sensor wire removed, obviously the sensor and PWM wire needed to stay this time and go into the one available PWM header on the motherboard. Previously that is where I had plugged in the LED strip. With no further connectors on the PSU or the motherboard displacing the LED strip somewhere else wasn't going to work.
So in the end this is what was created! A Silverstone peripheral to DDC to PWM fan header to LED strip adapter extension
Black being ground, brown +12v and grey sleeve carrying both the sensor and PWM wire for the pump. The LED was also swapped out for a clean white Darkside strip.
I also swapped in an i5-4690k from my S2.0 build which has now been decomissioned, some extra clock speed will be welcomed in the benchmarks.
Admittedly that did seem like enough upgrades for now, so I swapped in 2 8GB HyperX Fury sticks. Just to be sure I had enough memory for work, and GTA and stuff... I mean Senescentis wasn't using them anyways.
So that's everything for now.
After refilling the loop it immediately seemed much quieter, I couldn't hear it at work over Parvums CNC running in the background so it's definitely better than before. Annoyingly I broke one of the Noctua's when taking it apart so have yet to give it a thorough test but i'm sure it will be ready for insomnia!
JR