Rise of the triad, The 2014 Area 51

[ALXAndy]

Looks cool. It's what you might call neatly packed!
What was the idle temp on air? I know parts of my 980Ti were topping 55°C at idle when read with an IR thermometer. Too hot for my liking!

Around 40c. TBH mate the 980Ti is tame compared to this. Yesterday with the fan on 50% I hit 86c during a game. Mind you, to be fair that game does put the GPU under 100% load from the very beginning and never lets go, so it actually gets the GPU hotter than an hour of Valley (looped, 76c). Even with a massive overclock my Titan XM never hit 60c, and that was 1450mhz.



It's not even like the rad is tiny. Look at it with the rad cover on it, it's enormous compared to an AIO rad. Now you can understand why I decided to go with a water cooled back plate.

So yeah, temps are bad but acceptable I guess (got no other choice really) and the noise has gone (which is what I wanted to do here..) but I strongly suggest that any one thinking of water cooling a 1080Ti or Titan XP to go with at least a 240 rad just for the GPU. You can bring down temps by about 15c extra by doing that from what I have been reading. Bear in mind though the overclock was pretty major (an extra 240mhz) and the benchmark results matched. Oddly enough benchmarks only hit 70s overclocked. It's that Hellblade man, it just makes your rig cry lol. I just turned off the overclock and it levelled out at 75c (the game). From the moment you load it your GPU usage flies up to 99% and the lowest I saw it was 98%. Just utter madness.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK, time to upgrade the cooling.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK so I decided to do the strip out and drain before I leave. Apologies for the potato pics. There is no light at all today, so I had to use the dreaded flash.

The reason I spent nearly two weeks designing this system was to make it easy to service. And I was correct, it literally took ten minutes to complete. I taped a coffee filter into a jug and went to work.

Two molex discon, one hose and.



And part of the reason why the temps were not too good on a 120. Barely any coolant in the system even when it's full.



And then it was all put down in a safe place.



And put the coolant back. Not bad for oo, about six months?



Wish I hadn't ordered another one now but ho hum, what can you do?

 

[ALXAndy]

OK so under the orders of Gareth I have indeed ordered one of these.



Mostly because I don't like hot things. I also ordered a bunch of 3 pin extensions for the fans to the Poweradjust, as well as a nice black Molex extension.



I will be making some sort of board to mount them both on (the Poweradjust and Splitty).

 

[Cenedd]

...and it looks nicer than the stick-on label too!

 

[ALXAndy]

It sure does. Plus it will aid in me putting the right things into the right places.

 

[ALXAndy]

Well I have been thinking and I realised that whenever you see a heavily modded rig you usually never hear of it again. I don't strip mine I use them and keep them up to date, so hey, even if it's boring and the pics are crap it's something

I got home today and more stuff had arrived. Xbone receiver was here as were the two GLI I bought to stop hum on both of my sound cards/amps.



Ignore the Akasa thing, that is for another rig lol.

They are awesome ! Still lots of stuff to arrive but I think some is coming Weds.. Any way I decided to pretty much do a full teardown.



It's pretty filthy tbh. Thing is I had it all apart about 7 months back and cleaned the front end then. Plus I do look after it and keep it clean as best I can without tearing it down.

I bought this thing for £11. Hoping it's even semi decent. Not under any illusions though, most of this will need to be done by hand with a paint brush.



And what I have removed..



Now you would think after nearly two years that the PSU would be absolutely atrocious?



It's actually not that bad. There is no filter either, so gawd knows. Maybe it's me being a bit of a clean freak in general with housework.

 

[Cenedd]

Pah! You call those dust bunnies?! I shall mail you some proper ones!

 

[sreeve1993]

That case is awesome

 

[ALXAndy]

That case is awesome

It is, but it is a total sod to work in and water cool I will say that much !

Inside was rotten, but not as bad as I thought it would be.



Gave the two halves a bloody good clean.



Then removed the warranty void sticker and put it all back together. Much better.



G. be careful what you wish for. I will bring them all round your house and antique you with it once the hoover bag is full

Oh and the hoover thing was complete junk. Went in the bin and I got my Oreck canister out. Very annoyed, I may take it out of the bin and send it back tbh. Absolute garbage not even worth a fiver

 

[sreeve1993]

Omg I've never opened inside my PSU as I'm too scared too and i've had it for 6 years!

When I look inside it I can see the dust, but I don't want to void the warranty (might have expired now tbh)

They shouldn't void warranty when opening something up imo, especially when it needs a good clean.

 

[ALXAndy]

Just make sure you use proper verified anti static brushes man. Otherwise you might pop it.

 

[ALXAndy]

So I took apart the intake assembly a little while ago. I was going to remove the nose cone I spent days making because I glued it to the fan. However, I decided to very carefully remove it (because the fans I was using before were £20 each) and put it back to work. I'm sooo glad I did. The LEDs inside the fan all reflect off of the polished and lacquered surface and it looks saweeeeet.

 

[Cenedd]

Had a water-cooling PSU many years back...if you want to talk scary Before the days of larger fanned or semi-fanless PSUs.
Don't think I need antique'ing - between work and family the stress has me looking old enough that they don't even pretend they're interested in seeing ID when I buy the alcohol to ease said stress!
Do like the nose cone. It's almost certainly pointless from a technical point of view...but it just sort of 'feels' right.

 

[ALXAndy]

Yeah that was the nose cone I made on the ghetto lathe lol. It's nicer than the "air out" side of a fan I know that much. Why are they always so bloody fugly? heh, super mega fug !

Well today has been tiring. I've not stopped for nearly 9 hours. Trying to take apart, clean, and then put back together something you spent six months making is taxing. Plus all of the wires in the bottom box are blue, there are two switches and I'll be knacked if I can bloody remember how it all worked. I can only get one switch working. Now IIRC there was one switch for the nose cone, and one switch for the cathodes. Yet I can only get them switching on one. Very strange tbh. Ah well, it all lights up and doesn't look any different. Maybe one of the latching things in the switch has jammed? that would explain it tbh, I've never really touched them since building it.

I've got the PSU back in now, the intake fan (in the pic up there ^) fitted and have reconnected all of the cables to the PSU. Next up is putting the floor back, then tomorrow start making the board to host the Poweradjust and Splitty 9.

I also want to create a mirrored back plate for the sound card, so that you can see the good side of the GPU (the bit with all of the water running through it). However, there is no way you can just cut a sheet of plastic and plop it on there. There are loads of raised solder points etc. Now what I did before was simply grind into the inside so that it went over them, but you can't do that with mirrored acrylic as it will eat into the mirror bit. So I am going to have to do what I did to the GTX 950 in Dianoga, and completely cut a black surround edge and carve out all of the solder spots. Then plastic weld the mirrored layer to that. If you can plastic weld mirrored acrylic...

It's gonna be a sod one way or the other :S

 

[Cenedd]

Could you do it as a hollow spacer? ie black acrylic round the edge of the card but with the middle cut out - easier than working out which bits need carving to avoid solder points, chips etc - and then glue the mirrored acrylic (or actual mirror if you feel like it) to the top?

 

[ALXAndy]

Could you do it as a hollow spacer? ie black acrylic round the edge of the card but with the middle cut out - easier than working out which bits need carving to avoid solder points, chips etc - and then glue the mirrored acrylic (or actual mirror if you feel like it) to the top?

Sort of. You need to cut a frame with enough meat on it not to collapse but then at the same time there are solder points right up close to the edge, so the edges will look like the NY city skyline. I did it before, I just need to have my patient hat on when I do it.

I figured out the wiring. It took a while, but then the penny dropped. Why is one switch not switching power? because it isn't 12v. 12v passes through. The 12v line is switched on the 12v (hence why it was working) and the other switch is for the SSD deck, which uses 5v. So with that sorted out I just fitted the floor back in and swore. A lot.

 

[ALXAndy]

Morning update.

Last night turned into a bit of a nightmare. First I noticed that the shroud was sitting odd so I pushed on it. *CRACK*. Uh oh..... Took it out and sure enough I had cracked the cathode in two. However amazingly it still worked. Took it off and wrapped selotape around it and it's fine. Thankfully I didn't crack the actual cathode.

So I fitted it back together and the nose cone was dead FFS. So out it all came again. Realised the 12v-3v board I had used had gotten rather hot making the wires brittle. All four had snapped off. So I had to crack out the soldering iron at 1am (bear in mind I had been working since about 11am) and fix that.

So now it's mostly back together inside I figure I will drop in my Quadro and just use the rig until the water goes back in. Then I realised I had lost the M.2 screw. So I grabbed a NVME - PCIE sled I bought. Screw wouldn't fit the MSI spacer thing. I also dropped it, because it didn't fit, and lost it. So I grabbed a M.2 - SATA 2.5" chassis. Dropped that screw too, though did find it. It seems MSI use a different screw size to every one else. It is less than 1mm. In the end out of sheer desperation I remembered that I had a 1080Ti cooler. None of those would fit either, but I did finally have a stroke of luck. When I removed the spacer from the board I realised that one of the GPU screws fitted the back part of the hole. So I removed the spacer from the M.2 enclosure, put the screw through the drive and then the spacer, then taped it on with masking tape. Finally after about two hours it worked. I forgot there was no way for me to boot the rig without it fitted.

Then I started the rig and it was saying no OS found and shutting down after a few seconds. Turns out I needed to go into bios, dig deep in the menus and find the M.2.

IIRC it was 2 AM before I finally just walked into the bedroom and collapsed.

I am waiting for supplies now and deliveries. So won't be doing much of anything today. Plus my back is killing me from leaning over the rig for 13 hours.

Photos of cheevos. Gotta say, it looks like it's new.





Also, thank god for 100 ISO. Finally my pics don't look as drab as the day surrounding them.

 

[ALXAndy]

Oh I forgot to mention. On top of all of the PC issues last night I sat on my toilet seat and it snapped and pinched my bum. I was so annoyed

Rad cleaned, flushed, dried and assembled.



Like the proverbial glove.

 

[ALXAndy]

Right so pull fan on the bottom of the rad didn't fit.

Cut the bracket so it fits.



Then de-label the fan, cut a flat black one, fit that and then make a "horrid visible wire" cover later (oh and a gasket, too)



And it now looks how I originally intended it to.