[Buildlog] GAME HARD, FOLD HARDER

[Hukkel]

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

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?

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

edit; what am I doing wrong with the pictures?

 

[Hukkel]

Working now?

 

[Hukkel]

It's a Folding related project, so Subbed!

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



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

 

[Hukkel]

Looks like a nice planned build subbed.

Thanks, I hope you will like it.

Is the date on the camera set correctly?

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]

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.

 

[Hukkel]

What do we have here.... a package. I like unpacking



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

 

[Hukkel]

What is that motherboard tray that you've got there?

Seems like a coldzero

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.

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

Thank you very much

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

subbed

Thanks. I hope you will enjoy the build.

 

[Hukkel]

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.

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

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:

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.

IL-2 is something that is usable for the battle against cancer.

 

[Hukkel]

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.

 

[Hukkel]

I have two very good Dutch friends, they are already fighting over me whos team I will join. Please don't make it even harder for me to choose

 

[Hukkel]

At the end of the day, OCUK win because of the excellent build log, and folding win due to the new contributions! Yay for all!

Thanks man, really thanks! It is exactly what I was aiming for with this build.

------------------

Time for an update. Actually my first actual sponsored update (more to come).

The very kind people of Coolermaster I had contact with and I explained my goal. They agreed I needed something powerfull but efficient. So they offered me a Silent Hybrid Pro 1050W. Now who in their right mind would say no to that? Not me anyway!

























I used to be all Corsair when it comes to PSUs, but I have come back from that. Recently I have been working on sleeving PSUs for others and I have seen quite a lot of different brands and I have really started to respect Cooler master for their PSUs a lot. I still don't understand why their Silent Pro Gold series has such a huge bundle of non modular cables. But their recent M2 line up is amazing value for money. And this Silent Hybrid Pro series is exactly what we want from them. Fully modular. No silly colours. Complete package. Strong single rail performance. That amazing brushes aluminum panel around the fan. 80+ Gold certified. And last but not least the 5,25 bay panel to have access to a fancontroller for both the main fan and the added fan power connections. I mean you get extra fan power connectors and a fancontroller with your PSU. A lot of builds can use them because there aren't enough fan power connectors on the mobo itself. I am very pleased with this amazing piece of tech.

Thank you very much Coolermaster! And thank you Marco for being so kind to sponsor this project with one. It is an amazing help.

I will post more pictures once I have fully sleeved the wiring to match the build.

 

[Hukkel]

Yeah the top Coolermaster PSUs are really a match for the big names out there. Especially now they upped their game and started selling this full modular version. It's always a mystery to me why producers don't get the full modular PSUs for years. I mean Seasonic does, Silverstone does, Corsair does. But lots of others didn't.

Thanks btw, I have sleeved many PSUs already. This should be my home turf
I just need to wait for my mobo to arrive. Because I will make the wiring the exact right length. Doing the same with fan cables.

 

[Hukkel]

One big update coming right up!

So I received the custom grills and they are :drool:

The package arrived from Portugal. Ricardo did an amazing job. Here is one assembled and one in pieces. Each grill is made up from 3 plexi pieces and a dustfilter. Plus a bunch of screws to keep it all together.













It is actually completely flush with the sidepanel. The round edges on the panel itself make it look like otherwise in the picture, but it is.

The fun thing with these grills is you see more orange the more diagonal you are looking at it. Looking at a 90 degree angle you hardly see any orange. I absolutely love them.

















Finally started on the top panel one. Again it consists of 3 plexi pieces with a dustfilter (and a spare dustfilter). The other plexi plate is for measuring the hole that needs to be bigger on top of the case as it originally house 2*120mm fans and I want it to house 3 and maybe a radiator. Not an easy feat since it is 4mm thick aluminum. One extra strong grinding wheel was completely gone after 4 cm. So I brought out the jigsaw again. Like a knife through butter. Spent about 1 hour filing the hole to the correct shape and fit. It is being fitted from the inside like the original. But with extra strong holding points near the 5,25 inch bays.















A few pictures of all 3 grills in. The top one NOW isn't flush with the top. It will be eventually. And that looks WAY better. At some point a rad might hang from the grill making the top sqeeze the dustfilter flat and making the grill lower into the case. I also have some washers to use if needed for an extra 1,5 mm. I am even more happy with the top grill than the side grills. In real life it looks absolutely amazing. Later on with better lighting I will get my neighbour with his SLR to make far better pictures. But for now you will have to do with this sadly. Sorry.

 

[Hukkel]

Impactful,especially when all said and done it's an air filter

To me it is what it is all about. I mean 99% of all TJ07 mods ahve used the standard grills. It is something people didn't think about using to modify. I think it can be a perfect modification and can impact your build a lot.

Thanks for the comment by the way

ive just been reading through this build log thinking "im sure ive seen this before...."

got to the last pictures with the custom gril and drooled again

Tim the Dutch Lion

Hahaha sup man. Thanks for your nice words.
Do you have a clue what you're doing with your mod by now?

 

[Hukkel]

Got me a nice package I was waiting for

Yep a package from Nils. Not just for me this time as I was also working on a PSU of a friend. But I finally got my crimping tool. AND some orange (in your face) sleeving and some nice shade 19. I already have black so now I think I have all the colours I will need.

I also received 12 of these. Yes 12. I love these fans and have always wanted to use them in a build for me. They will be used for the radiator(s) as well as general use.

 

[Hukkel]

Thank you

 

[Hukkel]

Haha cool. If you also invite a friend I bet we can get this topic to a 1000 pages xD

 

[Hukkel]

Later on I received a package from Samsung. They were so kind to send me a desktop kit of a series 830 64GB SSD. I have bought another one just like it to put into RAID. But I am also trying something different with one. More pictures of that later on.

These things are not only very fast and reliable, but also fit my build perfectly in colour. I love them (and bought one for my regular PC as well).









Thank you very much for arranging this SSD for the project Arafeh! :thumbsups

 

[Hukkel]

completely forgot about one package and I had to still make decent photos of another one. I will add them here both.

First off the package from Xilence. They have a lot to offer but I already had a lot at the moment in time. But Bastian hooked me up with one (well accidentally two) HDD coolers to fit in a 5,25 inch bay. They are really nice looking. Stealthy and clean. And he sent me a few 92 mm fans for the back of the case. I will spray them black probably or black with a touch of orange. Then I can tell more about how silent they are. They look like quality fans though. Especially the single fan with the complete red inside. Looks very well put together and has kind of a cool design to it. Here are the pictures. Something went wrong in the warehouse so I ended up with 3 packages. 3 fans and 2 HDD coolers :thumb:





















Thank you very much Bastian for your efforts to help this build out and with your great communication :thumbsups




I also received an amazing box from Logitech. I did not know what they would sponsor the project with. Gladly Ben, Loes and Gezinus recognised this PC needed parts to operate it and since the hardware will be strong enough to play some serious games on it they provided the project with some serious gaming gear. A G19 gaming keyboard, a G35 surround headset and a G9X laser mouse. Needless to say....I was stunned :drool:
The mouse comes with a changable cover which means I will probably mod the looks of it to suit the build even more. I also cannot wait to get the keyboard to show the CPU Mhz and other important information. I am still thinking about the headset. I think it is moddable...but ruining it is amongst the possibilities so I might just leave it alone.

They will work with the project very well as I also am planning to do a bit of benchmarking with games and in general to test this baby. Check out the pictures! (like I said I didn't have time to make decent pictures yet so I made a few today, there will be FAR better pictures made by a decent photographer later on in the end of the build).

























Thank you very much Ben, Loes and Gezinus for helping this project out!

 

[Hukkel]

Those headphones look beastly!

What's the story with Trim support in Raid 0 arrays nowadays? Is it now supported on new chipsets, ie Z77, X79 etc?

Yeah I like them as well. Can't wait to try them out.

I think P67 already had it, maybe even earlier chipsets
http://www.intel.nl/content/www/us/en/chipsets/mainstream-chipsets/p67-express-chipset.html

Very high end motherboards have added a chip for bigger arrays. The ASRock Extreme 11 X79 is super crazy in that area.