Project: Hush! - updated 26/12/23

randal said:
Sorry to be the bearer of very sad news for you matey. :(

forums.bit-tech.net

R.I.P. Waynio

Hi guys, this is Wayne’s brother, Mark. Wayne regrettable passed away surrounded by his family on the 2nd of Feb from a rare, aggressive and...
forums.bit-tech.net forums.bit-tech.net
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Thanks for letting me know - that's terrible news, and I wish he were here to see the project get finished as he was really enthusiastic when it was started many years ago and wanted to see it completed! Whenever I spoke to him he came across as a really decent guy - helpful, friendly and passionate about modding (and very talented to boot!). Very sad to hear that, he passed far too soon.
 
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I loved Wayne. It was him who inspired me to mod. Because we thought alike. Coming up with stuff people wouldn't even dream of trying because it was crazy. But he had skill that I can only dream of, and patience I was never awarded. And yes, he was just the nicest, man. Will never forget him.

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Was a tribute I did. My first serious mod, inspired heavily by Wayne's love of acrylic and edge polishing. A masochistic hobby.

Always missed, never forgotten.
 
Vault-Tec said:
Glorious. Can't wait to see it get stuffed like a turkey !
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Brrrrraaakkkk! Turkey getting stuffed, and merry Christmas!

Been a bit snowed under with flu and family things.

Gave the walnut-veneered wall 2 coats of the finishing oil (tung/polyurethane mix mainly). Got an EK FLT80 reservoir and gold-plated D5 bottom. Probably going to live like in the video below as gives a super short loop. Very shiny! Replaced some of the countersunk black screws with GR5 titanium ones. Made a temporary polystyrene block to hold up to pump (need to make a vibration-dampened bracket). Soft tubing doesn't like any bend radius with an unsecured pump, hence the pump being at a funny angle in the vid.

Hammered in the 14mm pipe bender pivot pin (it was misaligned by about 2mm for the two halves with the pipe grooves. I hammered through by perhaps 2mm with a centre punch chisel, and inserted two external 8mm circlips as spacers for tge pivot pin. Seems to be about right from eyeballing. The polished and lacquered copper hard-tubing with the golden corsair (bitspower) fittings will be added later.

Something of a temporary loop atm - need to check the GTX 4090 works fine aircooled before putting the block on and redoing the loop, so just the CPU in the loop currently. Doesn't leak!

Got a Bitspower vertical GPU bracket.

https://shop.bitspower.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=7012

It can have two cards vertical, and it's modular so you can remove half when one one card is in use. It's CNCed and looks very nice, though it's black (I think anodised rather than powder-coated). May well be fine as the motherboard is black and looks pretty good installed, but need to see what it's like when the cards in place.

Anyhow, here's a vid. Will post more photos for the bits I described, but it's 10:51pm and I wanted to make the xmas turkey pun and fighting against the cluck a bit here. Merry Christmas all!

YouCut_20221225_222010169 by Tom ., on Flickr
 
Yay Christmas nerd pron.

That GPU mount is even more pronographic. I love BP stuff. Oozes quality!

BTW if it's anno? Oven cleaner then polish dude. Do it on my BMX restos all the time.
 
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Yeah dude. I did a complete replica (only ten times better) than a bike I rode in 1996.

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And I could only get parts that worked in the wrong colours. It uses a very oddball 1" threadless steerer, so the only stem I could find was red.

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Mmmm, caustic stew !

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Bust out the fine grade steel wool....

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You may find that your caustic soda has been nerfed. Laws in the UK have made it so that it's pee weak. That said, you don't have much to lose giving it a try.

I tried several from my local hardware store, including an apparently pretty evil drain cleaner (the strongest one they had) but it did nada.

Also. Where it has been screen printed white (with BP Touchaqua) that should remain. The caustic only goes after the anno. Well, so long as you don't get too heavy with the steel wool like. You also want to give it a serious degrease before you start. I use Gunk, which is strong stuff. Good dish soap will do. But make sure you do that, because if there is any oil or grease left from machining or coating it will go all patchy.
 
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Hopefully not too much grease on it as have been handling bar one occasion wearing nitrile gloves but will give it a good degrease regardless. The caustic soda I have is the max strength solid powder from b&q

https://www.diy.com/departments/max-strength-caustic-soda-1l-bottle/5020042003178_BQ.prd

The safety data sheet gives it as pH>14 for a concentrated solution, so should be ok hopefully. Losing the bitspower print is preferable!
 
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Here's the Bitspower vertical GPU conversion bracket (disassembled). As with most Bitspower stuff it's very nice, CNCed aluminium, though anodised black which doesn't fit the walnut and shiny aluminium of the rest of the case.

20230102_224607_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

Thanks Andy (Vault-Tec) for the advice on stripping the anodising with sodium hydroxide - from a bit of reading chromic/phosphoric acid is cleaner at just removing the aluminium oxide/dye of the anodised layer and leaving the underlying aluminium and surface finish intact if anyone needs dimension-critical de-anodisation or wants to strip the reanodise. I'm going to sand down to mirror surface, and have caustic soda granules already and no want to get phosphoric or chromic acid and the hazard and difficulty that poses, so caustic soda it is!

I used 12 teaspoons (~60mls) of caustic soda granules in 3l of water at around 45C. Very quick reaction! Stripped the anodising layer in around 90 seconds. Slower would probabIy be better (less chance of pitting from localised rapid reaction with a faster overall stripping apparently, though I saw no issues). I put screws in all the threads with medium strength loctite 243 threadlocker in to seal to preserve the anodising on the screwthreads to keep them anodised and hopefully prevent galling in future.

Here's the vertical GPU bracket after and assembled - here with both 'struts' for 2 vertical cards - it'll be with just the left-hand gpu strut used. The odd smudge there is just a bit of dye and smut that's stubborn to get out of the material-blasted aluminium with an old toothbrush - will go with sanding and polishing.

20230105_154119_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230105_154148_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

A little bit of lapping of the flat faces of the pci-bracket plate with 600 grit sandpaper. It's quite delicate with chamfered edges... I'll only be using the left-strut to vertically mount the GPU (the other one is unneeded restriction to passive upwards airflow). I'll end up mirror-polishing it all, bar maybe bits that only will be seen from the back of the case. I'm leaving the other bits unsanded for the moment, as I have some plans for that solid block of aluminium at the end and need to keep the faces dimensionally accurate/true until that's done...

20230105_200749_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230105_200727_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr
 
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Sorry for delay in updating - life got in the way. Right then. System in, ghetto-rigged.
Photos below

That big fat heatsink on the 4090 goes well past the PCI bracket and made fitting thumbscrews to attach the 4090 to the pci bracket very, very annoying

That is a block of polystyrene and some neoprene mat temporarily supporting the D5 pump/reservoir until I fit the gpu block and bracket and know what height to attach a pump bracket to the case. That is a bottle of Copydex glue helping support the 4090. PSU is sat external in a coolermaster vertical frame waiting for screwholes to attach to the back of the case, wires everywhere. Tubing and compression fittings are temporary - needed to check everything works before positioning and fitting the lovely Alphacool Eisblock Aurora waterblock and Bitspower vertical GPU bracket, hard polished copper piping and shiny gold corsair compression fittings used.

Lighting on the TechN CPU block, EK FLT 80 D5 reservoir and G skill trident z5 neo RAM all synced to a low whitish light. Inno3D ichill card RGB lighting decided not to play ball with their own ITune overclocking/RGB control software, and so cycles through the rainbow...

Just the CPU in the loop atm, with the GTX4090 aircooled sat it in spewing most of the hot air into the case to warm the top of the passive radiator! 7950x at it's stock, auto-voltage, which seems very high around 1.43 + Vcore ish at times. Absolutely ragging all cores in linpack in a hot room yesterday and I saw it get to 89C max with cpu drawing 205w in hardware monitoring software, with 42C at largely idle on desktop web-browsing. Need to get to grips with the dynamic clocking - seems a little tricky to know how the CPU is doing and will need to tinker around with power curves etc. From HWMonitor logs it's boosted up to 6510mhz max on core0 during gaming. No idea if that's decent! Today in normal ambient room (maybe 19C) and the 7950x seems to sit at around 60C using around 90w for the CPU (at 4k with 4090 gpu) after an hour or so - presume the game is GPU limited. Corsair AX1600i PSU doesn't spin up - gives a brief spin up at boot then just runs passive (think it starts spinning at above 600w or so wattage draw).

Here's a few pics

20230213_232438_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230213_215105_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230213_232417_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230213_215048_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr
 
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Nice. LOVE the Copydex support... it's the little things ;D
Gotta love it when they design the heatsink to obstruct the screw to fit the thing! What you need is a tool that's gone out of fashion. I give you, the screw starter . Holds a screw on the tip even if it's not magnetic. Once you've got it started it unlocks and you can use a normal screwdriver to finish it.
Not sure on the temps but given that it's a worst-case (albeit CPU only) and entirely passive, I'd say it's a win! What temp your coolant got to is also relevant as a number of components in a loop have quite low max temp limits: tubing and pump for a start.
Are you planning any glass/acrylic sides? If so, you might find that you get a chimney effect with them on that will draw cool air in from the bottom.
Worst case you could hide some quiet fans under the bottom and kick them in when the coolant temp gets to a threshold. If the motherboard won't do that, an Aquaero certainly will. Would think a Quadro or Octo would too but I've not got either to check.
 
Cenedd said:
Nice. LOVE the Copydex support... it's the little things ;D
Gotta love it when they design the heatsink to obstruct the screw to fit the thing! What you need is a tool that's gone out of fashion. I give you, the screw starter . Holds a screw on the tip even if it's not magnetic. Once you've got it started it unlocks and you can use a normal screwdriver to finish it.
Not sure on the temps but given that it's a worst-case (albeit CPU only) and entirely passive, I'd say it's a win! What temp your coolant got to is also relevant as a number of components in a loop have quite low max temp limits: tubing and pump for a start.
Are you planning any glass/acrylic sides? If so, you might find that you get a chimney effect with them on that will draw cool air in from the bottom.
Worst case you could hide some quiet fans under the bottom and kick them in when the coolant temp gets to a threshold. If the motherboard won't do that, an Aquaero certainly will. Would think a Quadro or Octo would too but I've not got either to check.
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Haha, thanks for the tip - my fault for adding a dangling pump/red and big polystyrene block and trying to line up the 4090 blind with PCI bracket screwholes, with a screw socket bit in the thumbscrew phillips cross! Ended up putting the case on its side to install the 4090 with gravity on my side rather than waggling around a 2kg gpu in the pcie slot!

I was contemplating some acrylic sides if needed - will have a play blocking off the sides with some panels at some stage and see the effect. Also have a 9 x 120mm (3 x 3) aluminium fan sheet/bracket with 9 Scythe gentle typhoons attached that I can have a play with and put below or above the case for a bit of fun, and an aquaero 5XT sat unused for many years. Hopefully won't be needed for normal use. Will need to see what the water temperature gets to but seems there's a fairly high CPU to water delta as tubing and radiator don't get particularly warm during prolonged stress-testing - may try repasting the cpu (used kryonaut extreme which was thick and difficult to apply, so likely has way too much).

Temps seem fine - the CPU is at stock which is using crazy power - around 228w max running linpack so I'll probably reduce the power draw since the performance loss is minimal. Adding a 4090 will undoubtedly be a massive heat dump into the loop.
 
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Few photos of PCI bracket and the lovely Alphacool Eisblock Aurora GTX4090 water block Alphacool generously sponsored the project with (vielen dank!).

Bit of work done; heated 14mm OD/12mm ID copper tubing to anneal, straightened with an inner 12mm solid soft silicone tube, outer spring steel pipe straightener spring, and a flat surface (10mm thick aluminium plate). Still very frustrating to get 100% straight. Deoxidised with vinegar and salt soak, deburred ends, polished tubes.

Got some shorter tubes that are straight but semi-hard, so will have to see if they bend okay in the 14mm tube bender...

Polished the Bitspower vertical GP bracket as black and material blasted didn't match the build's shiny aluminium colour scheme. Realised the sponsored Alphacool Eisblock 4090 waterblock PCI I/O plate is black...

20230326_123800 by Tom ., on Flickr

Whatever it is coating it, paint or plasticoat, you can buy Alphacool's GPU waterblock and rest assured it is very durable! That nitromors didn't touch it. Neither did paint thinner soak/scrub. Needed physical abrasion in the end!

Next up over Easter is disassembling loop, dremeling the PCI I/O bracket to attach the bitspower vertical GPU bracket, fitting GPU block, bending cutting and fitting copper hard tubing.

Here's some shiny pictures in the meantime (excuse the condensation!)...

Before:

20230102_224607_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230105_154148_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

After:

PSX_20230407_182333 by Tom ., on Flickr

20230407_173335~2 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230407_182857 by Tom ., on Flickr

High res camera photo (with too little depth of field!):

DSC07468 by Tom ., on Flickr
 
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nitro-mors is next to useless now. the orignal mix they used was very potent but also hazardous. what they sell now will only make the worst/weakest waterbased type coating to bubble useually the stuff you buy in cans from b&q and art stores.

thats very impressive finish, you arms must be aching now
 
not looked in for a bit, but wow this is some very nice work.

the pump/res you just picked up i just got the 120 model and ever nut was lose so check them lol
what model card is the block for?
 
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Wing-Man said:
not looked in for a bit, but wow this is some very nice work.

the pump/res you just picked up i just got the 120 model and ever nut was lose so check them lol
what model card is the block for?
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Thanks!

They were all nice and tight on the EK FLT 120 I received. I know because I removed all the countersunk screws on the top and replaced them with pretty grade5 titanium screws and the G1/4 silver plugs with shiny golden ones!

The block is the Alphacool Eisblock Aurora for the Inno3d ichill 4090. It's very pretty and the lighting looks good (it's got an rgb strip that runs along the bottom). Performance wise it looks like it's much of a muchness (within ~1c on the core between them) with the alphacool cheaper than the others and performing a little better than the EK single sided 4090 blocks, at least from the testing for the 4090 FE blocks for alphacool, EK, corsair and heatkiller that Igorslab did, which should be comparable for the ichill 4090 https://www.igorslab.de/en/watercoo...comparison-with-three-other-gpu-watercoolers/
 
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