Ok so, yesterday was quite an experience... nothing ever goes easy.
so i started by stripping out the case, out came everything, i then began to prepare the case for the 200mm rad up front, taking note of the bother stueng had fitting this particular rad i made the necessary cuts to allow for clearance, with this done, i went to go fetch the drill to make the holes on the mounting plate only to find the drill gone... sister borrowed it for her place along with all of the drill bits
oh well about an hour of faffing around trying to find something suitable to make holes with and i decided to just try mount it best i could with the existing holes, i managed to get 2 nuts all the way through but the rad is pretty secure, at this point i had spent almost 2 hours on this one part, i thought enough is enough, its secure for now i'll just revisit this at a later date.
so with all the modification work done(so i thought), i started to put the basic parts back into the case and out of harms way.
with this done it was time to fit the blocks to the GPU's, this was never going to be as simple as it should have been.
took the TF3 cooler off cleaned up the gpu core, fitted the mounting bolts/standoffs only to find the lip of the ram heatsink fouls the block causing it to not sit flush on the core, so off with the heatsink out with the dremel again, cut just enough clearance for the block to sit comfortably, mounted the heatsink again mounted the block
i then repeated this procedure for the 2nd card.
now i mounted the cards and the CPU block, so that all the parts are now in the case, i can now measure up tubing and cut to length. i didnt go to much effort to keep things tidy as hopefully soon i will be getting a different reservoir and will have to change the position of the pump etc, so will tidy things up a bit and remove excess tubing. Leak testing time, so i proceeded to fill the loop, which took around a bottle and a quarter to fill, mainly due to the MASSIVE reservoir. but all is well, ran all evening without issue, but will keep a very close eye for the next few days and wont leave running unsupervised
after some cable managment tidying as much as i can, done for the night!
Temps have been impressive, especially the GPU's i was shocked to see the difference fromt he stock air cooler, especially on load, not stress tested yet but a good couple of hours in battlefield 3.
CPU - min 21 - max 47
GPU - card 1 - min 30 - max 36
card 2 - min 32 - max 37
thats about 5-6 degrees off idle, but almost 20 degrees off load temps.
once i've done a proper stress test i'll get the results up.
on top of that the system is just so quiet now, without the stock coolers on.
build wasnt without issues but all has gone well in the end, i'm very happy.
still work to be done though in the up coming weeks/months.
- Niether pump or res are mounted properly, the res will be swapped out in the near future so i seen no need to permanantly fix it, and i plan on suspending the pump from the new res, so this is just a temporary setup.
- the 200mm res up front need to be mounted correctly, this will be corrected next time the loop is drained.
- the pull fan on the 200mm rad is not mounted properly, the mounting plates supplyed with the res only allowed for 1 200mm fan to be fitted, will have to purchase a 2nd plate to fit to the other side, so for the mean time that fan is bodged.
- intend to change the fluid to mayhems pastel blueberry blue, and possibly add blue dye to make it darker, but we will see how it looks first then experiment if i'm not entirely happy. May even contemplate changing colour scheme altogether i've found orange has been growing on me a lot recently, it would only requite a change of fluid and fans, hmmm something to think about.
all in all i'm extremely happy with the build now, once the niggly little issues have been worked out i think it will be left alone for a while, let my bank balance recover.
if there are any specific details anyone wants to know feel free to ask
would you recommend it?
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