Project: ケイ - Watercooled Threadripper

Got the problem sorted after a lot of trouble shooting. Turns out that windows 10 and intel VT-d don't like each other. Turned VT-d off and all was good again and has been now since the middle of april. I put the 780 back under water and restored the skyn3t bios and both the cpu and gpu overclocks and it has been great.


Other changes include a ducky shine 5 keyboard along with a smaller ducky desk mat. Swapped the iiyama 4:3 panel out for another 16:10 24" panel. (HP LP2475W AH-IPS) Not a perfect colour match to the dell VA but not far out, certainly no worse than the iiyama. It has substantially less input lag than the dell so it's become the primary display. I'm planning on replacing the desktop with some nicely oiled full stave ash which is a tad longer so the monitors fit on properly and the JBL control ones behind the monitors have more room to breathe.


Only problem now is that I'm super tempted to replace it all for an X399 & 1920X threadripper system. It's one heck of a cost though. The annoyance would be having to replace the sound card which is an original xonar essence ST which uses PCI not PCI-e. Thankfully the AJA kona capture card is PCI-e as that would be very expensive to replace.

Potential spec is looking like:

AMD ryzen 1920X
Asus Prime X399-A
EK supremacy evo TR4 acetal
32GB 8 pack dark pro 3200 ram (4x8GB)

Bit's I'd stick with for now:

GTX780 3GB (will replace in next gen)
Corsair TX650 psu (hopefully still sufficient)
Crucial M500 240GB + 4 other random disks + Bluray writer (nvme ssd to come in future)
 
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The deed is done. Spec changed slightly:

Gigabyte aorus x399 gaming 7 instead of the asus prime. Always used gigabyte before so felt more comfortable particularly with the asus being suspiciously cheap.
Ryzen threadripper 1920x
32GB 8 pack DDR4 3200 C14
EK supremacy EVO TR4 acetal+nickel (prefer straight copper but not available)
 
This is definitely going to look awesome once built. I can't wait to get it all assembled in the case.

8 Pack 3200C14 ram


Ryzen 1920X


All together in the Aorus
 
Add in cards removed. Sadly the sound card won't be going back in as it's pci. PCB colour on the AJA capture card is a little annoying as it stands out like a sore thumb.


Block fitted and the motherboard is now housed inside the case. Just got to give everything a clean off and fit some new tubing and get leak testing.
 
Nope, don't like rigid tubing as it's too unforgiving to work with. Past experience with acrylic is that it crazes over time so I never have any in my loop hence the plain acetal blocks. PETG isn't compatible with my coolant either, as I use ethelyne glycol.

The plan down the line is to move to coloured 1/2" ID silicone hose.
 
Cable chaos kept under some semblance of control.


Built and running. Can't seem to change the lighting colour in zones like they suggest, but I'm only trying in the bios as I'd prefer not to have to install superfluous software.


Bios on it was F1, which seems to run the 8 pack ram just fine at XMP settings (3200C14) without needing to tweak anything else. netwtw04.sys bluescreen issue showed up due to the intel wifi driver, so I just disabled it completely as I don't use wifi. Cinebench scores seem to be inline with expectations for running at stock speeds, a smidge faster than my overclocked 4820K on single core (168 vs 164) and 3x faster on multi core. (2447 vs 826) Temperatures seem excellent, idles at 31 degrees and max load on prime for half hour got it up to 68 degrees. I'm guessing that the VRMs get quite warm though as TMPIN4 shows the highest temperature of 78 degrees.
 
A few minor headaches so far getting the memory to run at rated speed. (3200C14) Seems to need a little tweaking. Raising memory voltage to 1.45V and SOC voltage to 1.125V along with a ProcODT of 60 ohms seems to have improved things significantly but I'm not counting my chickens yet. Needs more testing to be sure. In any case, I'm pretty certain windows 10 needs reinstalling, whilst it works ok, this install dates back to the phenom II system at the start of this thread which was upgraded from 7 to 10 around october last year.

In other news, I tested running my hifi off the analogue connection using my Yellowtec puc balanced I/O interface and finally got a perfect noise free signal using the DAC up usb ports which makes a nice change. The last two systems have both suffered from terrible ground loop issues with any form of direct copper link to my hifi introducing a ton of switching noise meaning I've always had to use optical only.
 
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Finally reinstalled and gone through the hell of putting things back as they were. Seems to perform a lot better which makes it worthwhile.

Sadly the LED in the base of the reservoir managed to break off the cable. Need to find the spare white one in the loft.
 
Gave overclocking a quick test. Seems my chip is pretty is pretty average. Requires north of 1.45V to get 4.05GHZ stable enough to run cinebench, not stable enough for one run at 4.1GHz. Tried out P states which sort of worked, however the voltage didn't drop at idle even though the clock speed did.
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I've since dropped back to stock as I think it's the more optimum place to sit. I've also added a negative voltage offset (-0.1825V) as normal voltage with XFR functioning normally seems to hover around the 1.4V mark a little too often, peaking a hair over 1.5V. This has dropped the peak voltage to 1.308V and the running voltage is 1.2V.
 
Added a firewire card so I can capture DV directly from the camera. Bit annoying that it uses an old floppy power connector rather than a molex, but it hides under the gpu well enough that it's virtually impossible to see from normal angles. More air has slowly been bleeding its way back to the reservoir so the level has dropped a tad. I've also dropped the memory voltage to 1.4V and all is still stable.

 

512GB 850 Pro & 256GB polaris NVME ssds.
Hopefully, the crucial M500 will become a complete games partition, the 850 pro another games and programs partition and the 961 will become the OS. I'm hoping to strip out the old 750GB seagate constellation ES so that I can pull a whole 3.5" drive cage out to allow more airflow through the bottom.
 
After many hours of shifting games around, cloning disks, deleting partitions, recreating partitions and restoring data, I finally finished. Who the hell has 4 steam libraries across 4 different disks and 5 partitions all dedicated to games? ...Me.

Cable management took a few hours too, but it was worth it. I can definitely see the huge advantage to M.2 now. The removal of a whole drive bay along with 3 hard disks has removed 2.5Kg of weight, improved airflow through from the front and best of all, it's stopped the vibrations from the hard disks transmitting through to the case.


I finally found my spare LED for the reservoir whilst hunting for a molex to sata power adaptor. (that's fantastically hidden behind the samsung ssd so you'd never know it was there) It does look like a chaotic light-fest in there

 
Aneskimo said:
That looks stunning, I don’t know if your a great photographer and capture the light well or you have a kick ass camera or both lol, but it looks sweet. I had a crappie digital camera when I did my parvum build so pictures were not great what camera are you using out of interest mate
Click to expand...
Cheers. Photography is one of my hobbies. These are all shot with a nikon D810.
 
Finally remembered to top up the reservoir after the level dropped from air bleeding through.




Starting to get that itchy finger around upgrading the GPU. I've had this GTX 780 just over 4 years and it's been pretty good all told. Sadly some of the more modern releases particularly those involving vulkan or DX12 are definitely showing just how far behind it has fallen. It still looks great and does the job for the most part as I game at 1200p60. I've been looking long and hard at the vega series as I see them as more future proof than pascal. Plus I seriously don't like what nvidia chose to do with GP104, considering the price and the castrated memory bus. That said, I don't particularly like the price of vega either, especially as I have to fork out £100 for a water block. I also need to replace my ageing corsair TX650 power supply. It's just past 6 years old but still works brilliantly well, dates back to a time when corsair used seasonic as their oem. Unfortunately, it lacks the second EPS power cable which newer systems benefit from and when I sleeved the cables, I actually removed the 2 pins from one of the pcie power cables to make the sleeving neater instead of using an extension.

I've been looking at a vega 56 + EK block and a seasonic prime platinum 750w psu for the last week, but haven't been able to make up my mind.
 
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All arrived this morning. Work got in the way of making any significant progress on it.




Only problem I've run into so far is being able to test the vega card prior to fitting the waterblock as I really dont want to have to drain the loop to take the 780 out. Then refill it with just the cpu and test the gpu then drain again and rebuild adding the gpu in. First idea was to use the second x16 slot but it turns out that the reservoir bracket in the enthoo primo prevents fitting a long gpu in those lower slots.

I've decided to try and test it using the 8x slot underneath the 780, leaving the 780 in the loop for now. If that doesn't work, i'll have to dump the vega card into the older FX8320 system.
 
PSU works well, less coil noise with the 780 too. Vega 56 worked ok in the 8x slot so I've dismantled it and fitted the water block. Just need to drain the loop tomorrow and rebuild it and go through the usual bleeding chaos.

Nude Vega 56.


Finished. Nice that EK now include a single I/O bracket. Standard cooler is actually remarkably nice and is pretty quiet too. That is when I compare it to the old Toxic HD6950 I had with the same basic design. Against water cooling, it's bloody noisy.
 
I've left it folding all day today so that the small amount of air left in the loop can slowly bleed it's way out. Seems to be doing quite well too.

Put the two cards side by side yesterday and apart from the slight change to the terminal bridge design, they are very similar to look at once the waterblock is fitted.
 
All back together and running. It's a pretty decent gain over the GTX 780 but certainly a bit fiddly with the overclocking/undervolting. Dare I say it, it seems to be a more efficient card as it runs a fair bit cooler than the 780. Highest I've seen so far is 40, where the 780 used to run at around 48.
 
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