[Buildlog] GAME HARD, FOLD HARDER

Hukkel

Hukkel

Hukkel

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[Buildlog] GAME HARD, FOLD HARDER -TJ07 - Z77X-UP7

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The purpose:
Because once you start modifying PCs you need another shot time and time again I have decided to build something for myself this time. I have made previous builds for others. One modified but still held back due to money concerns. This time it is for me and no cutting corners. I did want it to serve a purpose. For this build I am completely removing two purposes of my regular family PC. Which is gaming and folding. Especially folding will be the big purpose. Most of the time it will be used for folding 24/7. The build title is an adaptation of a line one of my sponsors uses. KFA2 uses "Play hard, game harder", for this project I have adapted it to "Game hard, Fold harder". Which basically means this build can be used for heavy high resolution high FPS gaming, but for a larger portion of the day it will be used to aid (medical) research through folding using software of FOLDING@HOME and B.O.I.N.C. The high end hardware will serve both purposes very well.
At a later point I will explain more what folding is all about for those that are not completely up-to-date with the term folding. I hope to promote the cause that is folding to a large audience with this buildlog.

The plan:
The plan is to completely modify a Silverstone TJ07. The theme will be completely black with orange accents. The shape that will be used a lot is that of the hexagon. About every panel of the case will see some sort of modifying. But it won't be a screaming build. It will be tastefull and have a clean look. The build will be using a i7-3770k (at first at least), overclocked to what the custom watercooling loop can handle. So max overclock for a 24/7 working system. It will feature the famous Samsung low voltage overclocking ram (also OC'd to the max) and two or three Nvidia GTX670 cards again under water and max overclocked. All wiring will see full custom sleeving. There will be multiple windows (with engravings). The cooling hoses that will be in sight are going to be made of acryl / plexi tubing. That is if it won't hamper the cooling performance too much. I don't want to spoil everything yet since that takes away the fun for me. I will update the thread in a chronological way. I want to keep some stuff a secret to hopefully surprise a few members.

Execution:
I have started the build a few weeks / months back. I didn't want to start a buildlog untill I could keep the thread flowing for a while with updates. I am not done with this build/mod yet. It will take a good amount of weeks to finish it. Sadly I am not a millionaire to buy everything day 1 ;).

First things first. The cse itself. I bought it used (because it was cheap and because I was going to modify it anyway). So here are a few pictures of her. Look at what the previous owner did. :(

The complete front full of ugly stickers, a big touchscreen fancontroller and knobs. YUCK. An additional top fan for who knows what reason. Holes in the top mesh and glue to fix it :facepalm: he case was even missing one of it's casefeet. How can you lose one of those?

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Next update: cleaning this baby up. Looking at the damage done and fixing her up.

edit; what am I doing wrong with the pictures?
 
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Tattysnuc said:
It's a Folding related project, so Subbed!
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Thank you :)

Lets first show a few pieces I will be using I received at that time. I had more photos of stuff, but I decided not to use that and other hardware instead.

I got this in a trade, a nice, clean looking Scythe 12 fan controller. This should work great with my radiator(s). It should be able to power them and keep them quiet enough. I love the style of it, really fits my case in my opinion.



A brand new XSPC dual bay reservoir deisnged for a D5 pump.
This is going to look and work great for this build. And I sooo like the look of it. Not screamy with the faceplate on. Space saving yet powerfull.



I found a store in my 4k inhabitants town that does powdercoating. They overcharged me like crazy in my opinion asking 100 euros for powdercoating the internals of my build. But I didn't feel like travelling for it and I wanted to get it done.







But before I could bring the parts to the shop I had to strip her completely clean including drilling out almost all rivets.



The sun was shining, the parts were in. Time to do some assembling. To much loose parts, time to combine it.



Here are some pictures of her current state, I haven't fitted the sidepanels yet because I want to use thumbscrews for that but somehow the sidepanels have holes big enough to fit those wide fanscrews. So the thumbscrews I had didn't do the job very well. I have ordered other thumbscrews but now I have received (few weeks after these photos) a big pile of black 6-32 screws in different lengths with washers and nuts I might just go full screws and washers on the backside.







TUNNELVISION 8-)



What I didn't make pictures of is the two front bay covers I removed the stickers from. They look like new now and ready to use.

Parts that are on their way to me now:

- some Alphacool fitting, D5 pump, 16/10 hosing, black 6-32 screws;
- new stock top mesh and about 5 front bay covers (take a look at what that animal did to its poor top mesh :mad:

 
kthula666 said:
Looks like a nice planned build subbed.:)
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Thanks, I hope you will like it.

Tattysnuc said:
Is the date on the camera set correctly?
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Yes it is. I already bought the case this summer and slowly started gathering sponsors and parts for months. Starting the buildlog now means I can keep the log flowing without dieing for weeks before another update :)
 
Hukkel said:
Thanks, I hope you will like it.



Yes it is. I already bought the case this summer and slowly started gathering sponsors and parts for months. Starting the buildlog now means I can keep the log flowing without dieing for weeks before another update :)
Click to expand...

Ahhhhh! Time lapse modding!

Well, I'm thoroughly looking forward to seeing how this pans out. Subbed!
 
A small update this time. I received a package the other day from my good friends of..



Which contained some parts to restore my case to it's former glory. See mister TJ07 former owner / case demolisher, THIS is how a top mesh should ook like without holes drilled into it and glue all over it.
BTW At Silverstone Germany they have an amazing service. The front bay covers are 1.50 euros each and the top mesh 2.50 euros. I payed as much for shipping as I did for the items. Good stuff Silverstone :thumbsup:



I have a serious case of tunnel vision.





My new mesh installed. Looking like factory new.



The front bay covers testfitted. WOW how clean does this case look from the factory?
I might just buy a slim DVD burner + slim baycover at some point. But then again I really like this clean look. Silverstone did a great job designing this case. They should just update the case to a 2012 version with a black interior and a closed motherboardtray with cables holes. This case is a classic.



This is what I planning to do with it. Keep the outside original and turn around all the bay content. Close the rest with original bay covers. This way I get like a tunnel to put all the cabling through and a portion of the watercooling setup. It will house my fancontroller and my double bay XSPC reservoir and pump. Finally I wil make a custom bay cover side panel to make it all into one complete clean finish. At least I hope so :)



When daddy is working on his case and his youngest daughter isn't stealing his screws and other parts she is calmly making puzzles next to me :)



Even more tunnelvision



BTW I jammed out the stock front usb port thing that they use in multiple cases. It had 1 billion wires coming from it which gave me a headache. PLus I won't be using them anyway.
 
What do we have here.... a package. I like unpacking :eek:



This is how one should pack this stuff, quality.



All kinds of stuff; 2 new case feet, a mobo backplate with an extension part and combs. Beautiful combs :drool: Some screws, clips for cables and a huge bunch of bay covers. Oh almost forgot, a hexx PSU plate with dustfilter.







NUUUUU moar tunnelvision



Showing the difference between the standard one and the new hexx one.



A few more pictures of the motherbord. I think it truely is a work of art. Companies should give us such mobo plates standard in high end cases.











Everything installed. My case had one dented foot and one was missing so it was very unstable. Now it sits exactly right.



These aren't really flashy parts or updates. But I think in the end such parts make the difference between a nice mod and a great mod. The sleeved cables will be presented perfectly because of this.





Time to give those 3 heads and the mobo spacers a nice black coat. No one sees them...but I know they are black



 
spoffle said:
What is that motherboard tray that you've got there?
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Avathar77 said:
Seems like a coldzero
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Bingo! :)
I have a lot of contact with Ricardo. He makes amazing stuff. I designed some custom pieces he also cut out for me. So that is coming soon.

Ohlawll said:
Looking great so far. Glad that you managed to restore the case back to its former glory.

Will be keeping a close eye on this ;)
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Thank you very much :)

kthula666 said:
Yeah this build is coming along. The restored case looks great.

subbed
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Thanks. I hope you will enjoy the build.
 
Perhaps then time for a small explanation what folding is. I have copied a small piece of text from the Wiki page and will paste some links as well.

wikipedia said:
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is of significant academic interest with major implications for medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases. To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein's final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design. Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/HomePage

Folding@home is just one of multiple projects that uses this technique. Another big project is B.O.I.N.C. ( http://boinc.berkeley.edu/index.php ). Here you can specifically choose what projects you want to support.

Nxt to the "cause" part of it there is also the "fun" part of it. You get folding points for folding a package of data depending on the size of it, the source that folds (CPU, GPU) and the time in which you finish the package. Gamers and hardware enthousiasts all over the world try and build setups to make their build gather the best PointsPerDay amount (PPD). They're devided in classes (like in automitive sports). So people will try and get the fastest setup to get higher on rankings or just "measure who has the longest" ;)

So folding is something that is helping a good cause without donating money to shady organisations with directors that make a million a year from those donations. And every tiny bit helps. But if you are a hardware enthousiast it can also be great fun to make your system run the fastest. Choosing the correct packages paired with overclocking your system (cpu, ram and gpu) is a game in a way.

One doesn't need an i7 to matter, every bit helps. And you also don't need to do this 24/7. Even if a few hours a day when you're not using your computer. Because millions all over the world can add their small bit and together we make an enormous amount of data usable.

For example:
wikipedia said:
In 2012 Folding@Home played a part in the discovery of a form of IL-2 which is 300 times stronger than the untill then known IL-2 and gave far less side effects.
Click to expand...

IL-2 is something that is usable for the battle against cancer.
 
To add to Hukkel's comments, it's also a great community. Head over to the sub forum. I don't fold for OCUK, but when I get my finances back in order, I'll certainly be dedicating at least one rig to the guys over here.

There's some great tips to get the most out of your machine(s). I started using folding to stress test overclocks on machines I was building. Not quite as hard work as OCCP etc, but not far behind, and a far more productive use of the electricity as there's something "tangible" comes out of it...

head over... Some of the rigs these guys are dishearteningly big/fast!

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=39
 
Thanks for that addition Tattysnuc :thumbsup:

Worldwide there are many teams to fold with and for. Some more for big scores and some for having a fun community.

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I will leave these here. They're renders of the grills I designed to be used on this case. They will be lasercut from plexi. Each grill will have about 3 plexi layers and a layer of dustfilter. The top one will lose the most outside small pieces of hex so only full hexx will be there.

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