JayGee's Lian Li PC-V3000WX Dual Loop Build

Damn you and the temptations you put in front of me, I just had to walk over to the workshop to remind myself what I had in the way of wire strippers (beyond my trusty pen knife) and crimpers, it's not exactly an extensive array but they've served me well enough when called upon...
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And just for completeness, whilst we talk tool p0rn, here's my soldering iron...
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Ah, well the yellow side strippers are good but for different situations. If you want an accurate, repeatable length of strip on thin wire, useless. Of you want to strip thicker wire - you can just about get away with ramming 3-core flex in them - or you want to strip a piece out the middle of a wire so you can splice in another, brilliant.

Your automotive crimps, well like a lot of these things, I've seen some that do a far better job than those...but I've also seen the price tag!

Your pin crimps certainly look good. If they do the job without mashing the pin, the pin stays attached to the wire, fits the shell and you've not lost your mind getting to that point, then what more can you ask for?! If you're having trouble or working on tiny crimps - like those crimps for 2mm pitch pins (smaller than the normal 2.54mm pitch) then the PA's are a good bet.

I've not tried one but I suspect your iron is better than mine. I'm hung up on the gas powered variety having initially had a use for one in automotive applications. Not needing a cable when you're miles from power, standing on your head in a car's footwell swearing at anything in range, is a real bonus. Mine's good, but it's hardly what you'd call regulated temperature when the angle you hold it at can change the gas flow :D Kind of jealous of one of the YouTubers when he had a pop with his hot air SMD rework station and then put the PCB in his re-flow oven. That's when you realise how far behind you are!
Temptation it may be but a good tool is going to be with you a lot longer than a graphics card. Worth investing in the one's your going to get good use out of. I'll let you know where the nearest tooloholic anonymous meeting is when you get that bad! ;)
 
One of the hardest pieces of this build to date has been fabricating the "light floor" that separates the basement from the main section of the case. The two main components of that challenge have been to achieve uniform lighting and bend the three layers of acrylic to fit neatly together and fit within the constraints of the case. On my third attempt I've now achieved something that I'm rather pleased with...
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Some additional notes on how I achieved this and what I learnt along the way:
  • The final implementation is made up of three layers, a sandwich if you will.
    • The bottom layer is 3mm mirror acrylic (to reflect as much light as possible upwards), this is cut to fit snugly within the case.
    • The middle layer is 4mm clear acrylic. The uppermost surface was sanded with 80 grit sandpaper across it's entire surface, and after rounding off the corners the edges were polished. This piece was cut with ~5mm gap all the way round relative to the two other pieces. The edges are wrapped with a 4mm wide LED strip (120 LEDs per meter) which is held in place by a few layers of white insulation tape to reduce the "spotting" of the LEDs around the edges, this was trimmed back to create a uniform edge.
    • The top layer is 3mm opal white acrylic and, like the mirror acrylic it is cut to fit snugly within the case.
  • In this implementation I've not attempted to bond any of the pieces together as my previous attempts to do so were problematic, e.g.:
    • Bonding before bending made it difficult to bend due to the amount of material to heat up, resulting in obvious deformation of the layer closest to the heating element.
    • Bonding after bending was challenging because anything less than perfect bends on all pieces meant that the acrylic welding liquid can't be applied uniformally which resulted in "shadows" being visible at the surface.
    • With the insulation tape used to wrap the LED strip it rules out the possibility to make a bond at the edges.
  • Some other random learnings/thoughts:
    • The mirrow base layer is marginly better than having white acrylic at the base for creating a uniform light at the surface but it also has the advantage that it has an opaque bottom to it so light doesn't spill into the basement.
    • Along the way I experimented quite a lot with sanding different surfaces, e.g. both sides of the clear acrylic, one/both sides of the white acrylic top layer. Ultimately what I found out was that I achieved the best result with this final implementation - i.e. only sanding the upper layer of the clear acrylic.
    • Keeping the three layers separate makes fitting the light floor into the case easier as individually they're easier to flex than one combind piece.
    • Keeping the three layers separate will make it easier in the event that I have to replace the LED strip at any point as bonded acrylic is effectively a permanent bond.
And finally, for now, I'm now contemplating in lining the entire main chamber in white as I like the effect that the light floor has on the rough white background that I've used to mark out cuts and holes. The original plan was to have a piece of black acrylic as the back plate and to leave the sides untouched.
- What do you reckon: all in on a white interior or stick to the original plan?
 
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Definitely looks nice and even now. Where does the bending come in? I can see flexing to get it in but you're suggesting heat bending and it looks flat from here.

I think go either just the white floor and leave the rest black or a white motherboard tray and leave the adjacent sides (rear panel and front panel) black. Either will look good, just a matter of style. Worth noting that the 'leave it black' option is less work and less expense! Largely I think the choice will come down to how your motherboard looks against either a white or black background.
 
Cenedd said:
Where does the bending come in?
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Yeah, that's difficult to see with it lit up, so here's one with the light off and another where I've added some lines to make it more obvious...
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Edit: the reason that the bend is necessary is because without it the level of the floor would be above the upper limit of the basement section.
 
Good that you're here @Jay85 as I've just implemented an idea that I first read about in your EK Quantum Kinetic FLT Rebuild build log, which is to mount a RAM block on the backplate of my full cover GPU block on my 3090...
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I'll tidy up the mounting screws with some dome head nuts, but otherwise I'm very happy with how it came together.
 
Interesting, novel, aesthetically pleasing. Silly question for you: how hot does that backplate actually get? Is it a functional thing or is it like RAM coolers (no irony intended) where they really aren't any sort of necessary and may actually make the RAM hotter*?
Incidentally, "It's totally unnecessary but I could and I wanted to!" is a totally acceptable answer :D

*silly RAM clocks and voltages excepted, of course.
 
Good questions, for which the short answer is: it just seemed like a neat idea, so I gave it a go.

The slightly longer answer is that I've absolutely no first hand experience of how hot the backplate shall get without this addition (or even with it just yet) as this is a brand new build and, beyond a cursary test of the card with it's stock cooler, it's not be run up in anger yet. I guess in theory I could have plumbed it all together using soft tubing to get some base line figures before committing to this mod but once committed it's not all that practical to back out of after holes are drilled (okay, it is doable to back out but at the cost of a bit more faffing). So, I just took a leap of faith and I hope that it has at least a neutral impact, anything beyond that is all for the good.
 
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Ah, the old "I'll put the loop together and not have to take it apart" delusion.... we've all been there! ;-D

"Because it's neat" is a perfectly fine reason. If you wanted something easily justifiable (aka boring) you'd have been buying off-the-shelf.
Sometimes it's useful though to have an idea of whether it's worth the hassle of doing again. I'm particularly thinking of some RAM coolers back in the day when I had to split a 10/8mm loop, run it in parallel through two blocks that only took something silly like 6mm hose and then recombine. Once I'd checked the temps, that got dropped from all future iterations :-D
You can drive yourself similarly crazy with guides that tell you how you must hit a gallon a minute (around 270 l/h) flow to work. I run mine around 120l/h and to be honest I only run them that fast so the silly fountain effect in my res is balanced - it makes very little difference to temps so you may as well have it quiet.
 
Cenedd said:
Ah, the old "I'll put the loop together and not have to take it apart" delusion.... we've all been there! ;-D
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Not exactly. It's more that I'm really aiming for a very clean look which shall be achieved, in part, with a back panel made up with holes placed where they're needed for various cables and some pass-through fittings for the loops. The inclusion of this additional block (or not) will have an impact on how I run that loop and that ripples through to where the pass-throughs on the back panel will need to be. Ergo, if I built the loop up without the extra block and then determine to add it later it would result in quite a bit of additional work and expense as it would require replacing the back panel as well as a number of tube runs.

But yeah, I get what you're saying with things that you've done in the past that you wouldn't bother with again. I've never bothered with RAM coolers, but there are certainly things that I don't think I'd do again, such as SLI (I still think it looks very cool, but it really is pointless for pretty much anything that I do).
 
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This is the first time that I've used metal tubes for a build so having fitted the RAM block on the backplate of the GPU block I took the opportunity to find out how they are to work with by cutting, fitting and pressure testing the run between the two blocks...
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... and I have to say that I found working with them a fair bit easier than acrylic, which very frankly is mostly to do with the fact that they're all prebent, but I also think that it's much easier to get a good, square, accurate cut with this material. I was also very pleased that the pressure test checked out too as I had some concerns that the fittings wouldn't grip quite as tightly on the shiny surface of the metal tubes.
 
Nice. The interesting bit will be when you have an angle that isn't a nice simple 90. Like that block to the CPU. Oh, hang on, you're going to 'cheat' by going dual loop, I forgot. Otherwise, I foresee some double 45's, triple snakes and/or 90° tube-to-tube connections in you imminent future!
 
Yeah, I'm cheating :) : dual loop and pretty much every other run besides this one makes it's way between components via the back plate and for all the out of sight runs I'll use acrylic so I'll have more freedom on how to route things.
 
If it's out of sight, you could always use soft tube....I did :D Partly mine was driven by the requirement to twist and move as the rear panel was opened but definitely easier than acrylic.
 
I've been put off by soft tube used in that way because I once used some in an out of sight section of a build where it ended up getting a kink in it that restricted flow. Once spotted it was easy to resolve, but hey ho, it was out of sight for a while.
 
Some hose is better than others....is what the pimp told me! A decent brand will be more kink resistant (ditto for thicker walled stuff) and it comes down to how tight you try to bend it - too tight and you probably ought to rethink it. Perhaps add some fittings. Too many fittings chained together and .....you get an invite to one of my anonymous meetings ;) Acrylic sections can crack, PETG can absorb coolant; there's always a way for things to go wrong. I know, I've tried most of them! :D
 
Slow progress over the last few days but one small step worth a picture is the test fit of the reservoirs, now pimped up with some new badges to cover over the mounting holes which are exposed by choosing to mount them with the inlet and outlet passing straight through the back panel...
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Edit: and yes, I've decided to go with an all white interior. :)
 
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