TL;DR: A Devils's Canyon/780 water cooled build in a white Phanteks Enthoo case with the objective of producing a really quiet PC.
Beyond a graphics card refresh a couple of years ago I haven't upgraded my PC in several years. It's used for gaming and photoshop/lightroom, and I haven't felt like I needed to change it. The new generation of consoles and the possibility of more demanding games (at last!) prompted me to rebuild from scratch. I've been saving up, so some of the stuff I've bought is overkill - I'm hoping this case will last a couple of hardware refreshes.
My computer desk is in the main living area of the house, and when the GPU gets hot the fan noise can be really annoying. I decided to go with water cooling, with the aim of producing a quiet PC. Once I've got it built, I may try overclocking a little if it's still quiet enough.
The first choice was: what case? After looking at a lot of build logs and reviews, I placed an order and this behemoth arrived a couple of weeks ago.
It's huuuge. I thought my old Lian Li case was big, but this is enormous.
Mmm, shiny white goodness. At first sight, there will be plenty of room in there for everything.
The PSU is a white SuperFlower 1000W. More power than I need at the moment, but I'm buying these trousers long in the hope that I'll grow into them (you'll notice that again when I get to the rads).
The fans and radiators arrived a week later. Mmm, Haribo.
After much indecision, I went with 1900rpm NB eLoops. Fan noise is such a subjective issue, that reading other people's opinions on the web doesn't really help. I hope I made the right choice.
With a white case, the only choice for radiators was the XSPC white AX radiators. I got an AX480 and an AX240 (more overkill, I know). They're really nicely packaged, with a piece of cardboard under the fittings to stop them damaging the fins.
The next job was to flush the rads. This is my first time watercooling, so I didn't know what to expect. As it was, nothing visible came out of them but I gave them a good flushing anyway.
I mounted the 4 fan rad in the top, with the fans just below the filter on the top of the case. This meant that the rad was below the top of the case. It was a little fiddly getting it in and mounted, so I used several screws to hold it in place while I mounted the fans. It's one of those jobs where you carefully mount the rubber grommets on the fan, push the bolt through, line it up to the case, move too fast and ping grommets all over the shop.
All done. Both rads have the fans mounted to push, drawing air from outside the case. At the moment I'm leaving three Phanteks fans in the case (two on the front, one on the rear).
The bottom rad was a lot easier to fix as the bottom rad panel comes out of the case.
Everything else went pretty smoothly, apart from a problem with the top fans. The rad fittings have chunky heads on the bolts. At the end fan, these stop the holeson the case filter from engaging in the lugs in the case, and you can't get the filter back on. The case comes with lower profile heads on its fitting bolts, but they're the wrong thread for the rads. I'm trying to source some lower profile 6/32 bolts.
Another delivery of bits arrives this morning, when I'll have pretty much everything apart from some fittings and the reservoir (who's been buying all the water cooling stock from OcUK recently, damn you?).
I plan to assemble everything air cooled first to check it all works. That way when I brick the GTX780 fitting the cooling block I'll know it's my fault.
Beyond a graphics card refresh a couple of years ago I haven't upgraded my PC in several years. It's used for gaming and photoshop/lightroom, and I haven't felt like I needed to change it. The new generation of consoles and the possibility of more demanding games (at last!) prompted me to rebuild from scratch. I've been saving up, so some of the stuff I've bought is overkill - I'm hoping this case will last a couple of hardware refreshes.
My computer desk is in the main living area of the house, and when the GPU gets hot the fan noise can be really annoying. I decided to go with water cooling, with the aim of producing a quiet PC. Once I've got it built, I may try overclocking a little if it's still quiet enough.
The first choice was: what case? After looking at a lot of build logs and reviews, I placed an order and this behemoth arrived a couple of weeks ago.
It's huuuge. I thought my old Lian Li case was big, but this is enormous.
Mmm, shiny white goodness. At first sight, there will be plenty of room in there for everything.
The PSU is a white SuperFlower 1000W. More power than I need at the moment, but I'm buying these trousers long in the hope that I'll grow into them (you'll notice that again when I get to the rads).
The fans and radiators arrived a week later. Mmm, Haribo.
After much indecision, I went with 1900rpm NB eLoops. Fan noise is such a subjective issue, that reading other people's opinions on the web doesn't really help. I hope I made the right choice.
With a white case, the only choice for radiators was the XSPC white AX radiators. I got an AX480 and an AX240 (more overkill, I know). They're really nicely packaged, with a piece of cardboard under the fittings to stop them damaging the fins.
The next job was to flush the rads. This is my first time watercooling, so I didn't know what to expect. As it was, nothing visible came out of them but I gave them a good flushing anyway.
I mounted the 4 fan rad in the top, with the fans just below the filter on the top of the case. This meant that the rad was below the top of the case. It was a little fiddly getting it in and mounted, so I used several screws to hold it in place while I mounted the fans. It's one of those jobs where you carefully mount the rubber grommets on the fan, push the bolt through, line it up to the case, move too fast and ping grommets all over the shop.
All done. Both rads have the fans mounted to push, drawing air from outside the case. At the moment I'm leaving three Phanteks fans in the case (two on the front, one on the rear).
The bottom rad was a lot easier to fix as the bottom rad panel comes out of the case.
Everything else went pretty smoothly, apart from a problem with the top fans. The rad fittings have chunky heads on the bolts. At the end fan, these stop the holeson the case filter from engaging in the lugs in the case, and you can't get the filter back on. The case comes with lower profile heads on its fitting bolts, but they're the wrong thread for the rads. I'm trying to source some lower profile 6/32 bolts.
Another delivery of bits arrives this morning, when I'll have pretty much everything apart from some fittings and the reservoir (who's been buying all the water cooling stock from OcUK recently, damn you?).
I plan to assemble everything air cooled first to check it all works. That way when I brick the GTX780 fitting the cooling block I'll know it's my fault.
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