Project: Desk Rad

[JohnTedd]

Project: "Desk Rad"

Description

This project combines a desk and Antec P180 case to bring watercooling to an Intel i7 processor with dual Nvidia GTX480 on a GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard. It didn't start out quite that way...

Here's the CURRENT state of the radiators behind the desk:

Background

Two years ago I ventured into the watercooled computers with a Zalman Reserator XT, cooling a Intel Core 2 Extreme (Quad) CPU and a Nvidia 8800GTS. The kit was easy to install and the result was pleasingly quiet.

I also have a media PC that was 5 years old and in need of an upgrade. It ran XP on a Pentium M in a MicroATX HTPC box. It only had a small fan on the processor. The noisiest thing was the hard drive (and I've been waiting for decent sized SSDs to come down in price to address that aspect). Processing video on this setup is not realistic e.g. transcoding DVDs. Consequentially I ended up shipping the videos to the faster PC and processing them there.

Initial Plan

The initial idea was to upgrade the media PC only, but the case is small and the wife's style requirements needed to be adhered to for the room the media PC is in, plus it still had to be quiet. This led me to consider watercooling. After my experience with Zalman stuff I initially chose the Reserator 2 (a passive tower radiator come reservoir). It is a very quiet system, but there are question marks over its ability to cool today's processors.
I thought it might cool my existing Quad processor and that led me to moving the processor from my existing "fast" PC to the media PC and using the CPU block provided with the Reserator 2 in my fast PC, with the existing CPU and block moving to the media pc. This was a working plan for quite a while until I realised that the Reserator 2 was separately powered from the mains, rather than from the PC's power (as in the Reserator XT). Given that the media PC is in standby for most of the time, turning itself on and off as recordings dictate, plus leaving the Reserator 2 on all the time wasn't acceptable.

Plan 2
The second idea was to use the existing Reserator XT for the media PC (which still meets the wife's approval) and to move to a completely new setup for the fast PC.

I always seemed sensible to me to have the radiator external to the computer case, so somehow fixing the radiator to the desk formed an early part of my thinking. I also wanted to use as many of the components I already had, including the Antec P180 case, which is far too small the house a decent sized radiator. That decision has cost me a lot of hours of work, but it's been fun.

I considered some other Reserator style products, but decided to design my own this time. I liked the look of the EK range of products and generally speaking I have bought their products. The initial shopping run included:

• Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 v2.0 Motherboard
• Intel Core i7 980X 3.33G 12MB
• Corsair 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 1600 DOM DHX
• EK CoolStream Radiator XTC 420mm (fits 3x 140mm fans).
• EK-Supreme HF Nickel CPU block
• EK-DCP 4.0 12V DC Pump
• OcUK Watercooled GTX 480, which comprises ASUS Nvidia GTX 480, EK full cover (Ni/Plx), Nickel backplate, single slot bracket (this product is no longer available).
• 3x Scythe Slip Stream 140mm 1200 RPM
• Corsair AX 1200W PSU

I also opted for 10/13mm tubing and compression fittings. I thought that the main restrictions to flow would be the all the blocks and connections rather than the size of the pipe. Some people seemed to have trouble with compression fittings being too close together to easily work with and there seemed to be little difference in the bend radii of the larger and smaller tubes. However the main reason was that I decided to try out the watercooling block that came with the motherboard and this recommended 7mm ID tubing, so I thought the 10 mm ID might be OK with a good clamp. I knew that 8mm ID tubing (Zalmans was OK, so I might be able to use that at a pinch for some of the loop. As it turns out the 10mm ID tubing is fine with the Gigabyte block and I've had no leaks so far, so I am happy with that aspect.

I bought clearflex tubing, but I am not 100% happy with it. The walls aren't as rigid as the Zalman tubing, which means you have to be careful when bending it or it will easily fold over and stop the flow.

• 6m ClearFlex60 tubing 12,7/9,5mm (3/8"ID) clear
• 10x 13/10mm (10x1,5mm) compression fitting outer thread 1/4 - knurl
• 2x coupling Koolance 13/10mm (3/8") male - black nickel
• 2x coupling Koolance 13/10mm (3/8") female - black nickel
• EK Water Blocks EK-Reservoir for Phobya DC12-400 / EK DCP 4.0
• 2x 13/10mm (10x1,5mm) compression fitting 45° revolvable outer thr
• 13/10mm (10x1,5mm) compression fitting 90° revolvable outer thr
• 3x Enermax T.B.Silence UCTB14 ( 140x140x25mm )

Unfortunately the Scythe Slipstream fans I bought for the radiator had to be returned because their holes were for 120mm fan housings rather than the 140mm I needed for the radiator. I went for the Enermax T.B.Silence fans instead, which are very quiet.

I installed the radiator behind the desk and used the Koolance couplings to allow the desk and computer to be separated. The Reserator has the same sort of couplings, which gave me the idea for this project.
I subsequently bought another ASUS GTX 480, EK full cover block and back plate and EK-FC links and bridge (although I bought the wrong bridge first time...). The new bridge arrives tomorrow, so I will hopefully be installing it then.
I made a few mistakes during the preparation and installation of the radiator behind the desk...

Mistake #1

I followed the radiator cleaning guide on the stickies on this site, which call for the radiator to be filled with vinegar and left for 6-8 hours. The result was very blue/green cloudy water:

It also appeared to discolour the blanking plugs:

No actual harm was done, but I think it was over aggressive.

Mistake #2

I was a big careless when installing the fans onto the radiator and used the wrong length M3 bolt. I didn't think I had tightened them too much but during my leak testing I discovered that I had punctured the radiator with one of the screws....

So that meant a second radiator, which at least meant I could clean it differently! I also opted to use some rubber washers between the fans and radiator to make sure the bolts didn't get anywhere near the actual radiator.

Reservoir

My original plan was to have only the radiator (and fans) attached to the desk, with the pump and reservoir inside the case. This dictated the size of the reservoir and to be honest I regret getting such a small reservoir. It takes at least 3 fills of the reservoir to get water into a drained system, which is tedious at best. And if you are careless and leave the reservoir on the floor when you open the top to fill it, the water rushes out of the system and into the reservoir and from there over the floor! I only did this once, but that was enough.

Plan 3:

So I revised the plan and placed the pump and reservoir (which are effectively a single unit) behind the desk alongside the radiator. I managed to pick up a 15cm radiator shelf from Wickes for £3 which was a perfect fit behind the desk.

I could place the pump on the desk for filling, but I needed to move the desk to get at the pump and reservoir, so I have hatched yet another plan which is yet to be put in place.

Plan 4:

The third idea for the reservoir is to place the pump and reservoir at the side of the desk, where there is already access and to extend the size of the reservoir to reduce the need for repeat fillings. I have bought a EK Link and EK reservoir extension to add over 140 mm to the length of the reservoir. The reservoir will now extend above the desk height and will therefore be the highest point in the system.

Case mods

The Antec P180 has a separate section at the bottom of the case housing the PSU and a drive caddy, holding up to four 3.5 inch drives. Between the PSU and the drives is a fan (see the photo above of the original system). Unfortunately the 1.2 kW PSU is a lot larger than the previous PSU and this meant the central fan had to go. The PSU does have its own fan, but I was concerned that it might get a bit hot so I decided to place a fan at the front of the case blowing air over the drives towards the PSU. There is almost enough room for a fan to be placed right up against the steel grill at the front of the case. Unfortunately the drive caddy wouldn't quite fit, even when I shaved off a bit of the fan with my Dremel.

So I had to move the drive caddy about 1cm towards the PSU to give sufficient room for a normal 120mm fan. I did this by moving the plastic runner 1cm to the front of the caddy. This involved making 16 M3 tapped holes for the M3 bolts holding the plastic to screw into. Once I formulated this plan it actually went very smoothly, even though the steel of the caddy is quite thin, leaving the distinct possibility of striping the thread.

I also found that the fan made a nasty noise when attached directly to the steel grill at the front of the case, so I made my own brackets to provide holes in the right places for the fan and to move it slight further from the grill.

I found that I could use the rubber fan holders with this arrangement, hopefully providing some soundproofing from vibration.

I did also remove the second drive caddy to provide space for the pump and reservoir (although I have now moved them onto the desk). That caddy could be replaced if I ever get more drives now that the pump is elsewhere, but for now the extra air space is good.

Pump control

Having heard the pump while testing out the radiator, I decided that I needed to be able to control it. I saw mCubed's bigNG as something powerful enough (my pump uses 18 W) and flexible enough for my needs. The bigNG does indeed seem powerful and flexible but the accompanying software leaves a lot to be desired. I am still getting to grips with it, so you will see some more postings on that subject later. It is very early days for this set up, but at the moment it is controlling my pump and radiator fans and it has decided to turn both OFF twice, leading to the water temperature recorded on leaving the case rising to 29 deg C! I need to fully understand why that might be.

To follow

There will be more to follow:
1. New location for the reservoir
2. Installing the second GTX.
3. Configuring and using the bigNG.

 

[JohnTedd]

Hi mate can you set up your trust which is the button on the bottom right of your post. Iv got a question for you. Cheers.

Hmmm clicked on the trust button on my post but not sure if it worked or not so I've sent you a message.

Cheers
John

 

[JohnTedd]

Ouch on the mistake with the rad ... This look tho I can't w8 to see it.. More pic plz

I was totally gutted about the rad and my wife wasn't very pleased. However I bought the rad with Amex and so I managed to get the money back via their purchase protection. I'm not sure they really understood what I was talking about but they just refunded me ere and then - no forms to fill out....

Phew

 

[JohnTedd]

might be reading it wrong but you saying you punctured the rad, and then got a refund because you broke it?

Amex do 100 days purchase protection which means if you accidentally damage something then you can get a replacement. Leastways that's what I thought it meant and managed to convince them by drawing an analogy to dropping a vase...

I wouldn't like to rely on this working all the time but it did the week before Xmas..

 

[JohnTedd]

As requested, here are a few more photos of the computer innards..

Note the Gigabyte waterblock on the Northbridge. It has narrow barbs, but big enough to get a watertight fit with my 10/13 tubing plus some Zalman tube clamps.

You may also notice a lack of cables from the power supply. One of the things that attracted me to the Corsair PSU was its cable management. That and its efficiency - 92% I believe. I'll see if I can find the review that convinced me to go with it and post it.

Tomorrow I get the correct EK bridge so I will be able to install the second GTX 480. I'll also be moving the pump and reservoir. I'll post some pictures next year with the results....

 

[JohnTedd]

I have the same pump/res, i find it really really hard to screw the top on fully, bruised my hand up bad ... will be keeping an eye on this.

When I first got the reservoir I found the top so hard to undo I wondered wheher it should come off, so I asked EK support. I think I used rubber gloves to get it off the first time.

Later I noticed a small amount of leakage from the top. That really put me off installing the res in the case. That, and the fact that filling/bleeding the system was such a pain led me to move the pump and res to the desk... And then to the corner of the desk, where it is now, along with the EK LINK and reservoir extension I received on Friday. They are both now installed and bleeding the system is sooooo much easier... I wish I'd done it that way the first time!

With the extension I can afford to leave some air in the top of the reservoir, so there's no chance of a leak from the top.

I have taken more photos, but I need to get the computer booting again now that I've installed the second graphics card and bridge.

John

 

[JohnTedd]

Looks good.... How far away is the rad going to be from it all?, just an idea but I don't know the lay out of your room but what about having the rad near or under a window as it will cool the rad even more.

The desk is up against an external wall of the house. Putting the desk by a window isn't really an option in this house as all the windows have a central heating radiator immediately below them. I will post a photo of the room once everything is in position.

I did toy with the idea of putting the radiator outside but I think the wife might have objected to that idea!

 

[JohnTedd]

The new reservoir is now in place and I am very pleased with it. It is so much easier to bleed the system and you can see at a glance whether there is any pump activity.

I got the EK tube clamp at the same time as the tube extension and the EK LINK adaptor. I screwed the clamp to the side of the desk, which was great for holding the reservoir, but as it is attached to the pump I found that the pump vibrations were being amplified through the clamp to the desk. I rectified this by using some rubber washers - one for the screw and another two on either end of the clamp base and two on each clamp arm.

One thing I did NOT get was some G1/4 plugs to stop up the 2 extra holes created by installing the EK-LINK piece. Luckily, as I had the "spare" radiator I also had 2 spare plugs. So that's something to be bear in mind and seems anomolous to EK's other offerings, which in general appear to be come with everything required.

So the back of the radiator now looks as follows:

I then went on to install my EK bridge to make two GTX 480s twinned via SLI.

To make this installation as easy as possible, I temporarily removed the bigNG, but I now have it back in position. I now need to do some cable management.

John

 

[JohnTedd]

Here's the room in its "finished" state (as if anything ever is!):

And here's the inside of the finished case (apart, perhaps from some more cable tidying):

And one more close up:

 

[JohnTedd]

Too many cables!!

I think I have the minimum number of cables for this set up, which includes 4 hard disks + one blu-ray burner (5 SATA cables), 6 temperature sensors, 4 fans, one pump and radiator fans, 4 PCI power cables, CPU cables (two), power cable for disks + power cable for bigNG, fans + blu-ray burner.

However I do agree that they could be routed a lot more neatly, although that's never been my strong point. In fact my wife says that "Mess" is my middle name...

 

[JohnTedd]

Looking good so far, I like how you point out your mistakes. Hopefully I won't make the same ones when I eventually move over to water cooling. I like the idea of having the rad behind the desk, it could be a good way for me to go as I only have a mid tower.

It seems to be working out quite well now but I am in the process of looking at the overclocking and the configuration of the bigNG. I have decided that the radiator fans have to be run at 100% all the time. They are very low speed anyway (750 RPM) and are virtually silent, especially behind the desk and dropping the speed down too much does appear to make the water temperature rise and never fall. At this stage I don't really know how far the water temperature would go (nor how disastrous that would be) so they are fixed at 100% for now. I have a few spare 12cm fans that I might additionally point at the radiator to see if they give extra cooling. That would just be an experiment rather than rushing out and buying higher RPM fans, but the aim would be to decide whether or not it's worth buying higher RPM fans. Also, I may experiment with making the fans push instead of pull.

Hours of fun ahead

 

[JohnTedd]

Thought about making a little backing for the desk that goes all the way down to the floor with holes to route cables? Would cover up the mass of cables under your desk and you could remove it to get to what's there if you need to.

That is certainly a possibility I hadn't considered although I am not sure if I would bang my feet on it. I certainly agree that the cables don't look great - I hadn't really noticed them until I looked at the photo of the final room.

My current idea for the cables is to staple some cable ties to the wooden desk back panel (which I have already done to some extent) and route the cables more tidily along there. Although it would have been neater to do this on the other side of the wooden back panel, I decided to keep water routing and cable routing on separate sides. Of course there shouldn't be a problem with them being together (they are inside the case), but I felt it was safer.

Anyway thanks for the option, which I will certainly consider.

John

 

[JohnTedd]

So I spent the last few days doing a bit of bigNG configuration and overclocking. I will post the results later. However I did finally get round to looking into an issue that I'd rather ignored up until now... Like a number of people on various forums I had an issue with the BIOS seeing all 3 of my DDR3 RAM. The BIOS could detect that 3 sticks were installed, but only "Enabled" 2 of them. I had originally thought this was a BIOS issue and that I'd have to wait for Gigabyte to resume their support (yesterday) before getting it resolved. However I decided to do some googling and I discovered that:

1. It could be voltages set by the BIOS for the RAM and the vtt core (so try a new BIOS or manual settings).
2. It could be duff RAM (so inspect it and the slot and move the sticks around).
3. It could be that the processor/socket has bent pins or needs re-seating (so take a look and re-seat it).

I approached these options in the order above. I'm not an expert on voltages and so I only tinkered with this a bit. I had previously tried all the BIOSes available on the Gigabyte website, but I gave them another go. The newer BIOSes recognised that not all of the memory had been found and attempted to adjust itself, showing the message:

"Recovering lost DRAM size..."

and then rebooting. It did this a number of times before giving up... Made the boot time very long, so during the initial build I went back to the original BIOS that didn't do this. That's what made me think it was a BIOS issue. Anyway this time I tried the new BIOSes and fiddled with the voltages, but no luck.

I then tried all the sticks in all of the slots. This made no difference either, so I was left with the CPU. Frankly I was dubious that the only thing affected could be the number of DRAM slots enabled, but this had been the eventual cure for some people (including on this forum) so I gave it a go. Imagine my surprise when it immediately detected all 3 sticks. I was chuffed, but that soon turned to dismay when the dreaded blue-screen hit... I am not precisely sure whether the RAM was implicated in this, or whether the various other changes (e.g. to the BIOS) caused the blue-screen, but the upshot was the disk was bad and windows couldn't recover it for some reason....

My OS disks are in a Mirrored RAID configuration, but that didn't seem to help me get out of this situation. In fact I think it might be partially responsible for it, as one time doing the BIOS flashing I forgot to set the Intel controller to RAID configuration. So the long and the short of it is that I had to restore an older backup, and I am still getting things back to where they were before. The good news is that I managed to retrieve my bigNG settings from the corrupted disk before wiping it. They are in a database stored in:

\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\mCubed\T-Balancer Network Server (alpha)\Navigator 2.12

Anyway more to follow in overclocking and bigNG configuration....

 

[JohnTedd]

I've finally got round to taking some more photos. However the thing you really notice when you look at the photos is that I need to do some cable management and/or get a more modern case that provides a) more space and b) a motherboard tray behind which cables may be routed.

I've also done some overclocking and have a stable system operating at 4.29 GHz with FSB 165 MHz. None of the temps (of both GPUs and CPU + NB) gets to 60 deg C doing benchmarking or baking (3D/PCMark Vantage, Hot CPU or converting lots of videos). Turns out that the sternest test is converting videos and the conversion speed of this new PC is 4-5 times faster than my old one, which is great as this is why I built it

 

[JohnTedd]

Here's a general photo of the main case:

 

[JohnTedd]

And here are some close ups.

CPU

Northbridge

Both...

Looking along the GTX480s with their shiny Nickel backs:

My case mods for the tubing to get in... The holes are closer to square, but the grommets make them look somewhat circular...

RAM + CPU + NB

OK, so I went a bit mad there...

Finally the bigNG (OK you can hardly see it)...

 

[JohnTedd]

Overclocking

I have overclocked the FSB from its factory default of 133 MHz to 170 MHz. This gives a processor lift from 3.33 GHz to 4.29 GHz. I did find that I could go to 180 MHz (4.5GHz) and it worked fine under load. However I've had a few strange blue screens on system boot so I decided to wind it back down for now. I did also try changing the CPU multiplier from 25 upwards but didn't get any better results.

As a result of this the CPU idle temp has risen from 23-24 to 33-35 deg C. Under load they can reach ~60 deg C (I think once some of the cores may have been near 70).

I have also overclocked the ASUS GTX 480s from 700 MHz to 804 MHz (and DDR from 3696 to 4004). This increases their idle temps from 30-31 to 42-45 deg C. Under load they get to 55-60 deg C.

 

[JohnTedd]

T-Balancer BigNG


All of the above overclocking was done with the pump being controlled by the T-Balancer BigNG and operating at around 50% (at the moment 54% for water temp of 28.5). Also the case fans are controlled by the BigNG and are also at 50%. The pump and rad fans are inaudible and the system itself is not noisy although you can hear the fans. The main culprit is the Dominator RAM Airflow fan which I plan to replace with the EK-RAM waterblock when it comes out.

I am currently using all of the temperature sensors in my BigNG setup rather than trying to interface it to the information available from the various temperature sensors in the system itself, such as the CPU core temps. I have the digital sensors set to measure the difference in water temp between the input to the CPU WB and the output of the graphics cards. I have the analogue sensors measuring HD temp, RAM temp, NB temp and case temp.

I would like to use the temp difference in the water but the BigNG doesn't seem to support that - it only appears to work on absolute temps. I therefore run the pump according to the water temp.

I run the case fans according to the case temp and I try to run the Airflow fans according to the RAM temp, but it seems to ignore my settings.

I also run the bottom bay fan from the HD temp (although that now seems to be mis-measuring and I have not yet investigated why).

I have not finished tinkering with this yet. Not by a long way, but it does seem to largely be operating as I want, making the system quiet without manual intervention.

I did upgrade to the 2.34 firmware which seemed to help some of my issues (although initially it kept beeping at me which was very annoying) and the alpha 2.12 Navigator. I have yet to get on with the "server" version that allows networked access and, it claims, a cleaner API.

 

[JohnTedd]

Broken radiator update

As you may have seen I started another thread off about fixing my leaking radiator. In the end I used Plastic Padding's Leak-Fix and it seems to have worked like a charm. So I am planning on adding this as a second radiator, also behind the desk to add some more cooling. Hopefully I'll be able to get the water temps down to, say, 25 deg C.

 

[JohnTedd]

Final update for now... Having seen everyone else's project I have been inspired to do some braiding and have purchased a variety of sizes. They should come tomorrow and I hope to be able to have a go at the weekend.