Project: Self-Inflicted

Cenedd

Cenedd

Cenedd

Soldato
Joined
4 Jun 2007
Posts
2,704
Location
Watford, UK
Well, I've just about got the latest round of changes to Silent Overkill done, tidied up and regained some sanity.....not much, mind! So, the sane thing to do now is launch into a project for/with my son :eek:
He's getting into gaming and currently he's on the cobbled-together cast-offs that served as my wife's work PC. The motherboard is older than pictured and the PSU is different but you get the gist:





It's functional but it's not what you'd call pretty! For Christmas he got a Corsair 5000D case so the intention is to make this something a lot nicer without breaking the bank.

Motherboard will be that Gigabyte Z170 G1 Gaming with a de-lidded i7-6700K under a monoblock - actually the one that's pictured above.
GPU will be a 980Ti also pictured above.
Disks will be a pair of 256MB Samung 980 Pro M.2 drives with custom heatsinks stuck on and running in RAID0. Any additional storage (and backup) can be supplied via iSCSI from my home server. Hmmm, I wonder if it's worth planning a 10Gbe card for this build. That definitely speeds up an iSCSI connection provided you increase the MTU to 9k

The case was a Black Friday special and actually quite a bit bigger when it arrived than I'd realised. That should just mean more room for rads and building etc.





Lots of options for layout and it's all going to go nicely.....oh, the rad doesn't fit in the top (too long and too thick at 39mm), only if you mount it inside and the fans outside in a pull setup. Well, that's got to be the least efficient way of doing it. Also, the rad interferes with the removable side plate (that hides the cables) so you'd have to remove that....which isn't particularly easy, or desirable.

Remove the plate and mount it on the side....the front-to-back airflow is gone, all your motherboard cables are going to be on show and you can't mount a rad on the front too as the two will interfere.

Mount it on the front....the plate is set up for 3x140mm fans so there's a lot of gapping for 3x120. But, if you mount 140s only two fit and the third is out of line. The side plate to hide the cables is also positioned so that it's impossible to get ATX or USB headers through the gap, round and up without kinking the wires horribly. Really odd design choices here by a company that's been around long enough to know better. Ah well, too late to change that so on we go.

Measuring up, I think that an

EK SE 360 slim will fit in the top section and still allow the top grill to be fitted. Although I wasn't planning to buy another rad, I'm thinking this might be the best option as it will allow top-vented heat with fans mounted internally in push. Open to opinions I've not thought of though - nothing's ordered yet! I could also go 140s and I would if 3x140 fitted...but it doesn't and I think that 3x120 is going to be more rad than 2x140.

The other 360 rad can then go in the front and we should get some some sort of front to back/top flow then.

Next issue that I'm over-thinking - you'll get accustomed to that before the end of this! On this board, all the ATX and USB3 headers are pointing straight up. That means they're going to look ugly if just plugged in. I've ordered some USB3 ribbon cable header extensions which should sort that easily.
The ATX cable is more of an issue. There isn't enough room to install the nice low-profile 90° adaptor I found and the bend all the way back on itself and then 90° to go under the panel is just too much for a stiff cable like the pre-sleeved extensions I have. I was thinking of just making up a custom cable using silicone-insulated wire that's really flexible and sleeved in 550 paracord. Trouble is, the SuperFlower Leadex Gold that's available uses really oddball connector shells that I can't (easily) find and also uses a bunch of sense wires to make life difficult in that department. It's also white - it was cheaper at the time by a significant amount and going in a case without a window. So my theory at the moment is a

BeQuiet Straight Power 11 650W Gold as it seems - as far as I can tell - to be a standard ATX connector and hopefully straight-through wiring. This part, it would be very helpful if people can share any experience they have or suggestions of better choices of PSU (without a silly pricetag though).

The plan at the moment is for RGB lighting. There are 5mm holes drilled in the monoblock for individual RGB LEDs that I can make up. The 980Ti either has the same or can do quite easily - have drill, will cause trouble! :eek: There might be a Farbwerk being donated to this build so that'll control the lighting as the motherboard doesn't have any. Should be able to hide that away in the bottom of the case easily enough. I may also pull the Aquaero off the old case and maybe mount that in something 3D printed as there aren't any 5.25" bays in this case.
 
Received your email, swamped with work atm so hopefully reply to it (or here) over the weekend.

The only PSU manufacturer I know of these days that still (kinda) does 1:1 ATX modular cables is Silverstone, but I think now even they've started added additional sense wires into a supplementary 4-pin connector or some such.
 
Cheers. I was looking at Silverstone ET700 and that's the closest I could find. Only thing I could see of concern was that the sense pin header is now on a 6-pin but it's not compatible with the 6-pin shells I can find....although they may be optional/recommended rather than required; I'm not sure.
Their Strider series seem to have gone for the 20+10 layout that SuperFlower, Corsair, BeQuiet and others have gone for - not necessarily all pin-compatible, of course.
 
Those 6 pin shells are 6-pin AUX, not 6-pin PCIe. Corsair use them for their SATA/peripheral cables. Which means *drumroll* I have some for my SF600.

I think I grabbed them from Farnell, but I think Komodo Electronics on eBay also have them because I've purchased more recently. I'll dig out my purchase history and let you know if the ET700 is still on your list.
 
Cool, cheers. That's about the only reason I'd ruled out the Silverstone to be honest. I picked up a 6-pin PSU previously but I think it turned out to be the same as 6-pin PCI-E and the two were compatible (they fit) but not identical - pattern was different though rounded pins fit into square slots but not vice versa.
 
Don't let the thought of sleeving sense wires limit your psu buying choices, they're really not that difficult to deal with, just make the join between the 2 wires closer to the psu end of the cable so it can be hidden behind the motherboard tray. Lutr0 did a video on this on YouTube.

I've just finished making a full set of psu cables for my build using a seasonic focus gx with 4 sense wires. Not going to lie it was laborious to say the least, but not particularly difficult.

Also, when it comes to "proprietary" or difficult to find connector housings, you can always remove the ones that came attached to the stock cables and reuse them for your own custom cables. I did exactly that for the molex cable powering my D5 and Octo, simply because I forgot to order an extra housing for the psu side and didn't want to wait for delivery.
 
I concur with BudgetMODz. Sense wires can be a pain, but with some forward planning (that horrible P word there Cenedd :D ) it's not too much of an issue. As said above, you can do the wire split close to the PSU so you can hide them. I've even seen people do "jumper" wires looping the sense wire into a double crimp on the power wire so there's only on wire coming out for the ATX. It depends on how much you want to retain the accuracy of the voltage drop detection.

For me, my ATX wires are only about 25cm long tops, so the voltage drop on that short a length of 17AWG wire is negligible, and therefore don't need accurate drop detection by having the sense wire on the motherboard pin, but my SF600 Platinum requires the sense wires to even switch on (the Gold versions don't) so I did the Y split about 6cm from the PSU so it can be tucked away.

You may recall this
double-wire_sleeve.jpg


I didn't go down this route in the end, but it was a viable concept. That's Paracord 550 so plenty of space to fit my 17AWG power wire and 20AWG sense wire into the same sleeve (the picture shows 24AWG sense wire) if you want to go down that route. It does make an oval cross section so won't play nice with cable combs, but on sufficiently long cable lengths it should be indistinguishable from the other wires once bundled up.

Oh, and I crimped my Y splits rather then t-splice. I couldn't get a small and tidy enough solder job wrapping 17AWG and 20AWG together so I chopped the pins off some ATX crimps, removed some insulation from the 17AWG and slapped on the 20AWG as with any double wire crimp. Bit of 45 degree cutting of the paracord where the double wire sits to get it flush, paracord over the crimp and some heatshrink covering the 3 points and job done. Handles a fair bit of tugging too.
 
Looking at builds on Google with this case, I don't think you'd have as much of an issue routing the power cables under the cover as you think. Thats what, 30-40mm from the edge of the motherboard to the cover? If you flow the wires in an "R" shape you can be fairly loose but still stay tidy; motherboard up and over the top of the "R" could easily have a 25-30mm inner diameter which comes back on itself half that distance to then flow 90 degrees under the cover and into the grommet. Especially if you train them to do so (I have a similar shape to train but a bit tighter, so have some 3D printed training guides going on).

Plus, if you're going to hassle yourself with custom cables, there's nowt wrong with showing them.
 
Cheers guys, appreciate the input. Basically I'm overthinking it and its less of an issue than it is in my head....so situation normal then!
Planning? Yeah, I rarely do that because it involves so much overthinking that nothing actually gets done!

If there's no load on the sense wire, can they be as small as the nice spool of 26AWG that I've got from LEDs and fans?

@BudgetMODz I'd thought of removing existing shells but was trying to have the option as I've been bitten before there when my current PSU seems to have the pins glued in or something) and it's just not possible to remove them without trashing both. I can get the pins out of normal shells but not those.

@LePhuronn Have you tried 3D printed combs with an allowance for the extra wire?
 
Cenedd said:
If there's no load on the sense wire, can they be as small as the nice spool of 26AWG that I've got from LEDs and fans?
Click to expand...
Doubtful you could crimp an ATX pin onto 26AWG. That's why I'm using my thin wall 22AWG, it's the smallest I have that can still have a decent crimp.

Cenedd said:
Have you tried 3D printed combs with an allowance for the extra wire?
Click to expand...
I didn't in the end, no. But my electric blue wires are slightly thicker than the black ones because of the different paracord weave. Doesn't matter on the main power cables because I'm not going to use ultra tight combs, but I did have to compensate for this with the combs and plug caps for the front panel and fan hub cables.

Calipers and very fine and slow print with a tiny nozzle required for me because my printer is horrendously out of whack atm.
 
LePhuronn said:
Doubtful you could crimp an ATX pin onto 26AWG.
Click to expand...

Challenge accepted! :p:D
I was actually thinking for the double wire in one pin but now I think a little more there's a PSU end with just the one. A dab of solder ought to make sure it doesn't come back out though. I've got some 24 and 22 in a nice flexible silicone in a selection of colours....but it's very thick. The 26 I've got is mPPE and only 1mm OD...which is great for 4-wire RGB LEDs down one piece of paracord.
 
Cenedd said:
I was actually thinking for the double wire in one pin but now I think a little more there's a PSU end with just the one.
Click to expand...
Don't forget the double wires are on the ATX end, all the sense wires are single connectors at the PSU end. So that's the crimp issue you need to sort, regardless of how you hook the sense wire into the mix.
 
Yeah, I'd missed that initially but as I was typing it dawned on me. I suspect a spot of solder either before or after crimping ought to handle it though - worth a play.

So if the sense wiring isn't as much of an issue, any reason I shouldn't go with the best bang for buck (ruling out the brands that catch fire!) and get the Corsair that's on offer? ie are you aware of any painful complications with their wiring that I'm not. It seems to be the previous gen so shouldn't have inline capacitor complications that im aware of:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cors...lar-power-supply-cp-9020195-uk-ca-24s-cs.html

Was looking at 650W but an extra 100W for a fiver seems daft to turn down. SuperFlower would probably have been my go-to but seem to be out of stock everywhere.
 
That RM750 uses Type 4 cables, so the same ones as my SF600. No capacitors involved. The only "painful complication" would be the 18+10 arrangement of the 24-pin ATX as that's 4 sense wires and nothing connected to -12V (so 27 wires into 23 pins), and the wires are a bit all over the place with how they cross over each other.

My SF600 stock cable for reference
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/35094405/

As that post says, it's a nightmare for me because I only have a short cable length, awkward PSU orientation and little clearance to cover the twists. You have a lot more space to work with so I doubt it'll be anywhere as much of an issue. As long as you get some combs a good distance away from the ATX end you can tidy up all the visible lengths and hide the twists and crossing over behind a cover or the bottom shroud.
 
Ok, I think I might roll the dice on the Silverstone then. As far as I can tell, similar models have a 1 to 1 connection plus the 4 sense. I could probably hide the crossovers after traversing the bottom chamber (mesh, so visible) where it then wraps round the edge to ascend....but I'd prefer an easy life if it's an option! :D
Paracord is out for delivery with a really helpful 09:00 to 22:00 delivery window. I already have a selection of colours...but obviously the wrong colours! It's like I regularly say about cables: they only come in two lengths.....too long or too short!
 
Ok, we have a rad and a PSU in the post :D I might have gone for the Alphacool all-copper rad as it's clearly going to be more efficient I clearly fell for the marketing schpiel.
So as part of rad selection, I've mocked some of it up to make sure things will fit. I know that a poor workman blames his tools but the more I work with the case, the more I'm disliking it. Had to find a smaller 360 rad to fit in the cavity in the roof. That'll take some chopping of the case to pass-through the inlet and outlet but it should fit quite nicely. Fans then on the inside blowing outwards and not hitting the motherboard. I wanted the other 360 in the front and I wanted the fittings at the top so the run from rad to rad could be at the top and then from the front rad drop down into the res. Nothing unusual there....except the front rad didn't fit. First the front panel cables (right in the top right corner above the top of the rad) were in the way and when I moved them, the fittings on the rad were occluded by the roof fans. I've managed to drop the front rad down by moving it down one screw hole (the very top won't be screwed in) and the holes suited for 140mm fans as they sort of are, should take up the slack. A very poorly thought-out case as far as I can see....or perhaps you're intended only to build in it they way they intended. I've stuck a some green paracord in the piece of hardline just to make it stand out in the pic:



We've also settled on a colour scheme now too:



Thanks again for the pointers guys, very much appreciated :D
 
Rad ans PSU have arrived. Ordered from OCUK on Saturday, was pleasantly surprised to see it shipped half an hour later and stunned to have DPD deliver it on Sunday. Looks like the lockdown blues are over then up in Staffordshire...which is good to hear.
Checked the rad fits! Then washed it out with white vinegar and rinsed with deionised. Looks great but I'm thinking about giving it (just the fins) a quick spray with a black rattle can. From one direction, the fins are perfectly coated but look from the other and a lot are not....and of course, this is the direction you'll see. There will be a grill over the top but I'm mainly thinking about corrosion prevention to be honest.





I'll need to cut some partial circles for the fittings to pass through. At the moment I'm waiting for a reply on whether a hole punch would work for an incomplete circle. I reckon it probably will and will do a much neater job than a carbide burr in a Dremel....as well as leave 100% fewer bits of swarf lying about.

Parts are ordered for the PSU cables. There's one wire absent from the ATX cable. I'm wondering whether I might get away with running all four three sense wires down a single paracord sleeve in that slot. That sleeve could be anchored to a pin in the hole with no wire crimped into it. It would mean trying to run them neatly across the top of the ATX plug but I reckon it might be possible and also solve the issue of ovalised (it's a word now!) cables not fitting combs. There may, however, be lots of swearing ahead....we shall see :D
 
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I am pretty sure Ross sent me that EK radiator aaaaages ago. Someone here did. Was back when I did the build tribute to my modding buddy who passed away. It's battered but it's done well tbh.

BTW tell the wee heathen he needs to put the GPU in vertically to cover as much of that red as possible. I would then paint the white parts silver.
 
Nope. Checked with Ross (just for comedy) a while back and he said it didn't come from him. :D Few flattened fins but it pressure tests just fine.
I've got the mounts in the case for vertical mounting but it's at the end of the normal PCIE slots and the board only has x16 on the very top slot - so it would need the longer extension cable than I have. To be honest, nice though it would be, I don't think I'm going to throw £50-odd quid at it.
I was originally thinking of painting the white as it was going to clash...and then the colour scheme changed so it has white in it. So I might just paint the writing purple where it's currently red. It's all embossed so shouldn't be too hard to do.
The one thing I have just discovered is that all the silver fans light up green. Will have to see how much that clashes (my money's on "Horribly"!) when we get a bit further down the line. Only ones that I have as much as a set of three identicals in though. It irks to buy a set when I have a literal box full though :-/
 
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