9ine04

[Shawy]

Ever since I saw the In-Win 904 I knew I had to water cool it. The aluminium shell and glass sides make it the nicest looking PC case I've ever seen, and the complete lack of any air flow makes it quite a project.

I'm still not entirely sure how I'll be watercooling it, but I do have some ideas floating around. Once I've finished 3D modelling the case, I'll have more of an idea what will and what wont fit.

I should probably stress that I'm not going for ultra low temps with this build. Hell, I'll be happy if the whole thing doesn't melt into a sticky puddle.

Anyway, the case is bought:



and the hardware is coming straight out of my current rig:



i7 3820 @ 4.625GHz
16 GB Dominator Platinum @ 2000MHz
GTX 680 SLi
etc etc.

 

[Shawy]

This will be good

Fingers crossed.

 

[Shawy]

Can't wait to see this. I too loved the 904 when I first saw it; I just cringed at some of the awful usability choices they made.

I think if they made it about an inch taller, longer, and wider, it could have been the perfect case. But it still looks amazing and, considering the materials, it's a very good price.

 

[Shawy]

Is it copper on the outside or is that the reflection of your floor?

It's aluminium. It's a crappy photo I took on my phone using indoor lights - I'm quite limited for space atm to take photos, but I'll try to take some better ones as the build progresses.

 

[Shawy]

It's about time for an update I reckon!

I haven't really got anywhere in terms of modding/building, but the planning is pretty much complete.

The case itself is great to work with. The external aluminium frame detaches by a dozen or so screws, and then the internals have been stamped out of a large sheet of steel and folded into place.



The only major change will be removing the HDD bays, and then I'll have to cut some holes for the tubing and cables - and possible make some blanking plates to hide some precut holes.

Now onto the main update - the plan!
I've spent quite some time measuring everything and testing different layouts to find out what fits - and I'm not exaggerating here when I say that everything will fit exactly. There's not a millimetre of space left over in any direction around the radiators.










The rads and fittings will be touching the glass doors, as well as the front of the case. The fans between the rads will be touching the graphics cards. There is literally no room left over.

The colour scheme, if you hadn't noticed, is monochrome and pink. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I like it. The coolant and the cables will be bright pink, everything else will be different shades of grey. I think I'm gonna go with acrylic for the tubing due to all of the straight lines and only needing to bend 4 pieces - two of which might prove to be a bit difficult, but I think I'll give it a go.

 

[Shawy]

The pump will sit behind the reservoir, I'll upload a picture when I get home.

The rads will be alphacool, they have 6 ports in total, I could use straight tubing between the rads but want to make more of a feature of the tubing by using the 90°s.

 

[Shawy]

Here's the picture of the pump set up. Due to the direction the motor spins the inlet and outlet are on the wrong side for what I need, and the fitting is too wide to fit directly into the res so 2 45 fittings are needed.



And I used PTC ProDesktop for the modelling, it's pretty basic - it's what I used in school at GCSE level - but it's easy to use and does the job.

 

[Shawy]

shadowscotland - I'm struggling to understand why you think that the top rad will dump heat back into the loop. That's like saying a normal case with an intake rad and exhaust rad will cancel each other out.

The air will be taken in at the front, and exhausted through the back. And I've already said I'm not trying to get ice cold temperatures.

 

[Shawy]

So it's been a long time since an update, but I decided to sell my current build and start fresh with this one - it's been much harder to sell my old PC to fund my new one than I thought it would have been, but hopefully updates will be a little more frequent now.

The new specs will be pretty similar: GTX 770s to replace my 680s, a 3930K to replace my 3820, and keeping the same board and RAM.

As for this update, I received a nice little package from Nills:



But what's in the bag…?



A crimping tool!
and…



Crimps!

This time round I'm going all out and making my own custom cables. With the windowed side panels on both sides of the 904 case, I want everything to be perfect.

As for the sleeving.. well…



PINK!

And a nice little Ducky Shine III to match:



(Still awaiting arrival of some PBT side etched key caps.)

Hopefully I'll have some new hardware to play with next week so I can get started on the case mods.

 

[Shawy]

Update time!

I've got my hands on most of my components now - just waiting on my radiators, fittings and tubing. Fittings wont be here until at least the end of the month but hopefully I can get everything ready for then.

I haven't really started anything yet as I'm waiting for my rads so I can start modding my case.

So here's the parts I have up to now:


And I'm going to steal some photos from my old build log as these items are being carried forward - just pretend that's a 3930k and not a 3820.


Thankfully I don't have to polish those caps all over again..


And there was no way in hell I was selling my MIPs IceForce High Flow water block! Such a shame to see MIPs go out of business.


Also didn't want to sell these beauties as they run at 2000MHz 9-10-9-24 T1


Now onto the new parts:
Replacing my old 680s with pretty much the same cards - GTX 770s


My old budget sound card died so I had to go back to using on board and, man, have my ears been spoilt. Couldn't go back to on board sound again so thought I'd upgrade to a pretty tasty Creative Titanium card.


As much as I loved my old Gelid Wings, they weren't silient. These are.


Pump top and reservoir from Aquacomputer. Really nice build quality and aesthetics. Those plugs on top of the res are about 1mm too tall to fit in a drive bay, so I'm either going to have to find some lower profile plugs or shave the tops of the ones I have.


And of course, some pink.
The Pastel pink from Mayhems looks quite milky. I'm probably going to buy some red dye to try and turn it hot pink like my parachord.


As soon as my radiators land - hopefully next week - I'll be able to crack on with the case mods and installation.

 

[Shawy]

Can't really do anything until my rads get here - I need to make sure everything's going to fit properly before I start hacking apart my case and making custom cables. If I could have got my rads from OcUK I would have finished by now!

 

[Shawy]

Next lot of pictures might appear tomorrow - my rads have been dispatched and are on their way!

Go for it CAM - I love seeing how clean parallel loops can make a case.

 

[Shawy]

Next lot of pictures are indeed here. I can start to get to work on my build no that my rads have finally come!



I went with Alphacool because of the multi-port options:



Only problem is the plugs that come with the rads are copper - those will be getting sprayed black. Nice to see them ditching the ugly copper stickers too - last time I removed one it peeled half of the paint off with it.

I'm going to have to get some longer M3 screws before I can stack my rads.. The only screws I have the right length are M4.



I've said before that this build is going to be incredibly tight...



I can now confirm just how tight it will be:



Tight.

I had to remove the cooler to fit the card in, so those of you under 18 please cover your eyes for the next picture as it contains full frontal nudity.



Best get her covered up, back and front!




I have to say, those water blocks and backplates are what sold me the 770s. The fullest full cover blocks out there and they just look so clean. None of that circle crap EK tried to pull off in the past.

 

[Shawy]

Can't wait to see how the finished radiator stack looks. Probably my favourite thing about the build.

Same here - bought an extra 6 90° fittings for them purely for aesthetics lol. I haven't got any screws the right length to set up the rads yet, but they're in the post.

 

[Shawy]

And the case modding begins!

Case, meet Dremel. Dremel, meet case.


Due to the simplicity of the case, removing the HHD bays required drilling out these 2 rivets,


and cutting 2 little bends.


Also had to cut this bit out to get the rads to fit.


I had to keep this little bit to hold the door on, but the top of the HHD cadge was too low for the rads to fit.


So much room for activities!

I had to cut some more off the top though, I was hoping to use the HHD cage mount to secure the rads in place, but the stack is too tall.

Speaking of my rad stack..



And from the back:



Thinking of mounting my SSDs at the front here.. Not sure about cable management though.


And this is just about as cramped as it gets:

Only one card blocked up right now.

And, yep, it's tight.

Gonna move the fans/rads up slightly to prevent the cards sagging.

Oh, and I'm not looking forward to cable management in this case..

 

[Shawy]

Will there not be diminishing returns as you go through that many rads?

Yeah, probably. I'm gonna give it a try though and hope for the best.

Shawy is clearly a crazy man with this build!

Coming from a CrazyArsedMonky, I must be bat**** crazy lol.

It's all coming together nicely, your right cable management will be an interesting challenge.

Can't see the exact distance but by the looks of it I would plug in your Sata cables before mounting all those rads. It looks to me as if a right angle plug (when plugged in) will work fine however when you've got the excess that plugs into the port I'm not sure if your be able to plug it in.

Could be wrong, hard to see how much space is to the right of the motherboard.

Yeah I'll be making all of my own custom cables. I kind of shot myself in the foot buying 2 SSDs for RAID 0 - I didn't really think about needing the 2 power and 2 data cables for it..

 

[Shawy]

Never seen someone go through 4 120mm rads, wonder what the cooling perofrmance will be like!

Looks interesting

Probably not that great, but I'm giving it a go anyway.

id stick an extra fan on top so it would be push,push,push,push,pull

There's only about 45mm of clearance as it is - adding another fan would make that 20mm. Plus I have a nice little molex to 4x fan PCB I'll be using.

 

[Shawy]

It's been a while since my last update, and I'd love to say I've been really busy, but the truth is I've just been a bit lazy. I'm still waiting on the last of my fittings though, so I'm gonna use that excuse for the lack of progress.

Anyway, I've done some work on the fan stack - I don't have any progress shots unfortunately, but what I did was de-solder the original fan cables, cut some new ones to the right lengths and then re-soldered them on and sleeved them. I'm also using a molex to 4 3pin fan splitter PCB that I acquired from an old case - it's the perfect size for what I need.

So without further ado: the rad stack:


You can see the fan cables are all cut to length, the slack should be taken out once the PCB is in place.


Another angle showing how the cables will sit inside the case:


And the rads back inside the case:

(bonus points for guessing what books are propping it up )

From the back you wont be able to see much of the cables



And the PCB will sit behind the tab with the side panel screw. Lower down than in the picture, but it's such a tight fit, I wont be mounting it until the final assembly.


That's it for now. I'm hoping to get more of the cabling done later on next week, though if today's anything to go by; it's gonna take me quite a while..

 

[Shawy]

looks more like two of the harry potter books to me - phoenix & deathly hallows

10 points to Slytherin!

 

[Shawy]

This looks amazing because that case is just beautiful looks to be a tight squeeze, might have to get this case too if you can convince me looks amazing so far though! Goodluck subbed to thread!

If you want a case for aesthetics then there is no match for the 904. If you want something practical, then you'll have to settle for something else.