My first WC build (with pics!)

GoogalyMoogaly

GoogalyMoogaly

GoogalyMoogaly

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Hi all.

Well I'm nearing the end of my first water cooled PC (hopefully).
It started out as my intention to water cool an existing PC. This then turned into a PC upgrade and water cooling (since the old pc as it stand doesn't really need water cooling). In the end I actually just built a new system.

The basic specs are:
CM 690 II Advanced (Lite's weren't in stock)
OcUK OC Bundle (containing Phenom II X6 1055T, 880GM-UD2H, 4GB Corsair XMS3 and Titan Fenrir)
1TB Samsung F3
Corsair TX750 PSU
LiteOn SATA DVD Drive
2GB 4870x2 with XSPC waterblock (second hand)

Water-Cooling Parts:
XSPC X20 750 Water cooling kit
EK 120.1 Rad
TFC Compression fittings
TFC Green tubing
Anti-kink coils
Silver coil
Bi-Distilled water
Feser Base Corrosion blocker (probably don't need, but better safe than sorry)
3 x 120mm Apache Black fans.

All in I'd estimate this cost me about £1000. Which seems like a lot for the spec I got...

OK, now this is my first water cooled build and the first time I've bothered to take photos of a build. So apologies for being useless on both fronts.

I didn't take any photos of the unboxing, cuz, well I didn't think about it and anyway it's fairly standard stuff the company website will probably give better pictures of them than me.

I hadn't figured out how to turn the flash on yet, so it's a bit dark. I've taken the plastic bracket off the CPU as it's not needed.
2h4x0d2.jpg


A close-up of the CPU, because, well I thought I'd best take pictures of something and this seems like a fairly important part!
26379ew.jpg


Skipping ahead slightly, here a picture of a lot of the bits in place. I also wanted to show the size of the Titan Fenrir as it's the largest heatsink I've seen first hand. If you're wondering why I've got the Titan Fenrir in there, I decided to boot the PC and check it all worked before I had a loop full of water. At this point I unoverclocked it (as it was running hot, plus I'd been advised to when...) and installed Win7 Ultimate.
sg0pzp.jpg


Slight close up of the Titan Fenrir.
ofz90.jpg


Slight close up of, uh, a bit down and to the right of the Fenrir...
21cypp1.jpg


OK, Titan Fenrir out, XSPC Delta V3 waterblock on and a tube connecting it to the Res/Pump.
e00emo.jpg


4870x2 inserted and all tubes connected.
20sao0x.jpg


Now need to leak test it. Bit worried I've not got thing tight enough.
Also not sure if I have the Delta V3 screwed down tight enough. How much am I supposed to compress the springs?

Also, 2 of the tubes (the 2 on the graphics card) didn't really bend the way I wanted so I've sort of twisted them 180 degrees to fit. I've tried not to make them sharp twists.
Is this going to cause a problem?

I really did intended to try to make the cabling tidy and I did try to, but things conspired against me a bit (and I got bored).

A few things I've learnt that I'll remember if there is a next time and thought I'd share for other first timers...
The CM 690 II is a bit small to fit everything in when trying to WC 2 components. Get a bigger case, even if it costs a lot more.
Get a Modular PSU.
Get a few 90 degree (or 45 degree) fittings. Better to have them and not need them...
If there's an option between a good-ish cheap-ish thing and a very good expensive thing, go for the expensive thing if you can, there's probably a reason it costs more...

Sorry if this bored everyone, it wasn't as exciting as a lot of build logs I know.
 
Thanks guys, nice to know that it wasn't too bad an attempt for a first try.
If the only issues are that the antikink coils and other cables don't look good then I'm quite pleased. Since my CM 690 II doesn't have a side window the look of it isn't so important, I'm looking mostly for functional.

I'd be interested to know what other people do with the cables in this case as I can't really see what I can do with them. I have put some behind the panel that the motherboard attaches to but found that with too many they bunched up in areas and I couldn't get the back panel on. There doesn't seem to be a lot of space behind there.

I've had to use a splitter cable to connect the 3 Apache's and it has a connector to connect to the cpu fan header on the motherboard. If I didn't connect that I could probably put that behind the motherboard tray, is it best to have that connected?
 
Quick update.

Turned on, booted into Windows.
Decided to check temps. CPU was a bit higher than I hoped, but not scary.
Ran Prime95... and that's when the brown stuff hit the fan (not literally, that've would've been even worse!).
After about 1 minute of Prime95 the PC turned off.
I thought maybe it was a thermal shutoff (even though the temps weren't that high), so I left it to cool.
Upon turning it back on again...
A case fan sparked, stopped spinning and started to make a really bad smell.
Then the motherboard sparked and CAUGHT FIRE near the CPU. I kid you not there was a flame, very tiny but a definite flame. Like an idiot I started blowing at the flame like it was one of the three little pigs houses! When I managed to think clearly again I switched the PC off at the PSU.

I mean seriously, how unlucky do you have to be to have a water-cooled PC catch fire!!?

OcUK were brilliant and RMA'd the motherboard no problems and with a decent turn-around time.
Since the case fan was plugged directly into the PSU though I was concerned that maybe the PSU had an issue. So I contacted Corsair via their forums and RAM_GUY suggested I RMA the PSU, just to be sure.
I contacted the etailer (not OcUK) to see what they would do. They wanted to test it and charge me £35 if found not faulty. Now I don't know but i always imagine retailers like OcUK and their competitors to do really basic tests on returned items. So I wasn't happy with this course of action. So I returned it to Corsair (in Holland, for £20 postage) as they said they would send me a replacement as RAM_GUY had suggested it.
So 2 weeks after they received my PSU (according to DHL) Corsair sent a replacement (remember they weren't testing for a fault, it just took 2 weeks for them to locate my returned PSU). Disappointed at Corsair's turn around time considering I hear such wonderful things about their RMA process. OcUK left them standing here.

So, hopefully this weekend I'll be putting it back together. Lets see what goes wrong this time...
 
Well, this PC now appears to be up and running!
I guess the question now is how long for!

It wasn't completely smooth sailing though. The new motherboard came with an Overclock profile, but it wouldn't boot using this profile! (It would boot with defaults).
Looks like possibly it just needed a few more notches on the old Vcore setting. However I contacted OcUK and rjkoneill was very helpful. Apparently they've discussed it with gigabyte and the solution is to downgrade the BIOS to version F4 (I had F5) and up the Vcore. But rjkoneill was helpful and sent me a new OC Profile for the F4 BIOS, so there may have been other tweaks as well.

So now it boots with the overclock in place!

As you can probably imagine, I nervously decided to start up Prime95 again.
I ran a blend test for about 1 hour (it wasn't a stability test (assuming OcUK had done this) it was to check temperatures.

So, running a Phenom II X6 1055T @ 3.8GHz, after an hour in a Prime95 blend test HWMonitor was giving me these values...

TMPIN0 = 40C
TMPIN1 = 46C
TMPIN2 = 61C

Do they look OK?
Does anyone know what TMPIN0, TMPIN1 & TMPIN2 are on a GA-880GM-UD2H motherboard?
I'm guessing TMPIN1 is the CPU temp? Or at least I'm hoping so as TMPIN2 was getting close to the 62C limit that I believe Phenom IIs have!
 
Since I had to remove the motherboard and the PSU I took the opportunity to try to neaten up my cables.

I think it might be a slight improvement, but not as good as a lot of peoples. I think a modular PSU would've helped out a bit here.

2vkm5fk.jpg


Sorry to keep on about this, but does anyone know, or know how to find out what TMPIN0, TMPIN1 & TMPIN2 (in HWMonitor) are on a GA-880GM-UD2H motherboard?
I've checked in AMD Overdrive (although it doesn't support the 880 chipset) but that uses the same labels as HWMonitor.:confused:

Could make the difference between
TMPIN0 = 40C
TMPIN1 = 46C
TMPIN2 = 61C
being good temps or being very high temps. :(
 
I notice you have the modular PSU, which means you don't have to have all the cables plugged in. also the modular cables look flatter, which I imagine helps fitting them behind the motherboard tray.
Also your motherboard is bigger so you don't need to expose as much of the cables.

Yours does look very neat though.
Would be interested to see the other side of the motherboard tray.
 
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dazzerd said:
The delta v3 is a pain to get sat correctly. I have it sat on an i7 on if you overtighten it the board won't boot but if you under tighten it the temps can be poo.

Eventually I just tightened it so that the thumb screws are 1cm from the top of the screw on each side. It's also a good idea if you can fabricate some kind of backplate but that's personal preference.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I had the same problem. not sure if I've under-tightened it or overtightened it. Guess I'll see how it goes.

Didn't fashion a backplate, did see if I could re-use the stock one. Should probably have checked the one that came with the Titan Fenrir to see if that would've worked.
 
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Well, as with any good PC enthusiast I can't just leave it go for too long without trying to improve it in some way.

My current plan is:
  1. To replace the 4870x2 with a 5870 with EK waterblock. the idea here being to reduce the amount of heat being pumped into the loop.
  2. Then I was going to swap the bottom 120mm rad for an EK 240mm rad. The plan being to add more radiator area.
  3. Fit a fan controller. Hopefully with more radiator space and a single GPU graphics card I can turn the fans down (at least some of the time) as it's fairly noisy!
  4. Also, I was going to replace the Apaches with Vipers. Since I now have a fan controller I can run them slow and quiet when I want to, but fast and louder when/if i need to.
  5. I was also thinking about moving the 120mm rad that I'm replacing up to the rear exhaust fan location (using a fan in pull config to keep it far enough away from the case so that it would fit, else the section where the tube attaches wouldn't fit).

Do these things seem like a good idea?
Am I actually likely to notice any difference or will this just be an exercise in wasting time and money?
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
Well, as with any good PC enthusiast I can't just leave it go for too long without trying to improve it in some way.

My current plan is:
  1. To replace the 4870x2 with a 5870 with EK waterblock. the idea here being to reduce the amount of heat being pumped into the loop.
  2. Then I was going to swap the bottom 120mm rad for an EK 240mm rad. The plan being to add more radiator area.
  3. Fit a fan controller. Hopefully with more radiator space and a single GPU graphics card I can turn the fans down (at least some of the time) as it's fairly noisy!
  4. Also, I was going to replace the Apaches with Vipers. Since I now have a fan controller I can run them slow and quiet when I want to, but fast and louder when/if i need to.
  5. I was also thinking about moving the 120mm rad that I'm replacing up to the rear exhaust fan location (using a fan in pull config to keep it far enough away from the case so that it would fit, else the section where the tube attaches wouldn't fit).

Do these things seem like a good idea?
Am I actually likely to notice any difference or will this just be an exercise in wasting time and money?
Click to expand...

Now done all of this, except I broke the 5870 fitting the waterblock. Also didn't keep the 120mm rad in the loop.
Did change the CPU block though.

I think it looks a bit neater now too...

2a6a8p4.jpg
 
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