Riff Tamson (here we go again !)

Cenedd said:
Looks like that's a T-Balancer mining and is supposed to support up to 100W. You could always connect your pump to one channel and the VGA fans to the other channel.
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Yeah just doing some reading now. I got it free from a Bit-tech user, so no idea how it all works yet.

One problem - no temp sensors. However, I want those fans by the short and curlies so I need to figure out how it connects to the PC. It may be serial? gawd knows, all of the videos are in bloody German :D

I think I have the parts to make a fan splitter.. I know I made a Molex - 6 fan outlets to test my air pennies when I fitted them. I also have a molex - 6 fan splitter (NZXT) so I can always run the pump from that. I think I will need to run it full pelt dude because of the poor flow on the rad? dunno man.

I've also ordered a hose clamp btw.

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19mm straight alu. The reason? well, the pump connects to the res on its side. The outlet then pokes straight up, so I used this as an opportunity to fit one of those T pieces that turns the hose 90' and allows me to connect my temp probe. It looks really lovely. Any way, when I fitted the return from the CPU block to this lovely piece proudly sticking up all covered in Chainguns the hose from the CPU has pulled it over and it looks stupid. The pipe into the CPU block is lower down, so if I clamp the return to the inlet pipe it will push the sticky up bit back straight and all will be happy in the world again.

I spent about 30 mins last night during Corrie growling and huffing trying to get a zip tie through a piece of the case and then gave up. God bless my lady, who had the patience of a saint last night :D
 
Looks like it's not controllable unless you have a T-Balancer bigNG to connect it to. Otherwise, it can run standalone but jumper controlled - seems to do target temp and curve though so might work well enough. Emailed you a manual I found for it - can't link it as it's at a competitor.
 
Thanks man will check that out in a minute. Sadly it doesn't have the probes, so I will just set them to barely audible (the fans in push pull) using the pots.

The rad fans are 600 RPM. They hardly move tbh, let alone make any noise. I did this because the Xeon is 65w *max*. As such a H50 can cool it with a delta of about 4c over ambient lmao.

Total waste of money this water cooling, but, I enjoy it. And hey, maybe next month I will buy a block for the Fury X and WC it (£120 ! ouch !). That would deffo be worth doing..

TBH I fully plan to stick a 2670 Xeon in. They are mad for the cash, you just need the board tbh. It clocks to over 3ghz and puts out a Cinebench R15 spot onto my 3970x (hex core Sandy) which was OCed to 4.9ghz. So yeah, lots of chip for not many pennies (about £60 ish).

Edit. I also don't know exactly what T balancer he sent. I have asked him to clarify :)
 
You could always chuck in one of those 18 core Xeon's we found....only £3,000 a pop! ;)
Emailed you manual for bigNG too. It seems to take analogue thermistors and also digital high-precision sensors too.
 
They are awesome apparently. Don't look much but very clever. No reply yet but it will be here tomorrow any ways and I am too tired to do anything at all today. Well, I may design the IO cover and SATA port/cable cover but that will be where it ends.

Hoping the front panel turns out well now. I certainly shouldn't use the Dremel like this. I feel drunk lol.
 
Nope, you'll only have it slip and ruin the panel you've spent ages cutting. You'll probably be almost as annoyed if it just scuffs the back and you're not going to see it....like by the hole through an outside panel for a rad pass-through :D
 
Postman came :)

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Red LED for res, fan controller, hose clamp, EK badges. I've also been busy designing and cutting cut templates and the final decals :)

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Still no volt meter though.
 
And the T-balancer doesn't have its acrylic case :eek: Oh no, what will you do?! ;)

Full size one is good news though. Conveniently it has external and internal USB headers so you can play with it outside the case and then install it internally afterwards. Have spare internal USB cables if you're short.

Flow meter is a bonus. Good job you'd not got the loop all sorted already! ;) :D
 
I'm not going to use the flow meter. It will look poo for a start but the holes in it are tiny. I don't think the pump is up to it tbh.

So today I cut and made the IO cover and the SATA port cover. Both cut from 3mm acryl, then covered in brushed black before adding a brushed silver decal.

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As you can see the sun is playing silly buggers today. I also made the front panel

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Just need to cut/weld some small braces, then cut in the devices once the sodding volt meter turns up. Seller is giving me the runaround, I think it's because he's in Hong Kong hiding under a British addy. Either way I have started a dispute and he will be getting bad feedback. I paid extra because I wanted it here, not for a two week+ wait.
 
Wait, hang on, was that actually the sun I just saw? I will never recover from the flash burn !

Joking aside though I did manage to get a pic. It's not quite a potato, more a perfectly cooked jacket potato. No cheese though.

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OK so what's been done since the last time I posted a pic? The EK badge is fitted. The IO cover is fitted. The hose clamp has been put in. You can now actually see the brushed black pump housing in all its glory, and, my now perfectly straight sticky uppy hose thing.

Oh yeah, the panel fits like a glove too.

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So I didn't fit the SATA cover because the trunking is not straight. I am going to have to make a platform that sticks to the SATA ports, then sticks to the cover similar to how I did it with ROTT.

It's getting there though. Very slowly, but yeah, getting there.
 
Yeah I removed all of the other branding from the board so I figured something subtle would be cool :) I'm not sponsored so yeah, don't need to stick logos everywhere :D

Got the volt meter in today so I could finally start doing some wiring. First I braided and tested the temp sensor and volt meter, both work OK.

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Then I braided some more (red) and added in the LEDs that will go in the back of the res.

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I've got the volt meter to keep an eye on my 12v line. It does something pretty cool when you shut down the PSU, so I recorded it :D


Now I can begin putting them into the panel I made :)
 
OK so the next thing to do now that all of the connectors and wiring are done was to map out the holes for the two meters. I drew it up in Photoshop, then took it to the plotter.

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I then cut the holes and put on some brushed vinyl.

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EK badge.

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And finally, what it actually looks like. This never, ever happens when I take pics of LEDs etc.

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I will get that in tomorrow, then I start on the T balancer.
 
Nice. The slow voltage drop when you power off is probably just that there's not enough load on the PSU to drain the capacitors quickly. I suspect once you've got a full PC on it, it'll just go off when you power down.
 
Update. So basically I was doing really well with the build until yesterday morning. That's when everything started to go wrong.

I fitted the GPU (and had to completely remove the pump stand because it hit the radiator) but thankfully the pump seems to like where it is and wants to stay there under the pressure of the two hoses so that's cool. It was also vibrating on the pump stand so I spent ages sorting that out, only to have to remove it.

Then it all went wrong. Now when I rebuilt the rig before for my wife (from broken to working) I wasn't sure about the front panel header wires. So I spent ages buzzing them with a battery to find the LEDs and so on and it all worked. However, when I reconnected them for some unknown reason (even now, ten hours of labour later) the power button ceased working. So I ended up having to remove the entire HDD cover panel (15 screws) roof (12 screws) front panel (8 screws) and finally the entire switch housing assembly. I then removed the power button PCB and traced all of the correct wires using the PCB itself. OK, so now the power button was working (with a complete rewire also, I did not trust the wires now, talk about paranoid !) and ten hours later (it's still in bits) the power button worked and the rig switched on. Any one else would have just fitted a new power button somewhere else and had done, but no, I wanted the correct one working.

OK so I fired up the rig and it did what it does if you remove all of the hardware and put it all back in again (says the bios is corrupt and is restoring from position 2) so I figure I will let it do that then go into bios and set it up. Nope ! every time I tried to enter bios it hard locked at the Gigabyte logo. No matter how long I waited or what I tried I could not get into bios.

So I removed most of the hardware, then all of a sudden like a ray of light it hit me (right around midnight) that in order to enter the bios with this Xeon you must remove the GPU, remove the board battery, boot it, do what you gotta do then save out and boot the rig. If you don't do it in that order you can not enter bios at all. I don't know what causes that but I would probably hedge my bets toward the ES Xeon.

So at around 12:30 the rig is booted, udpated and I finally got to actually do some stuff on it. Then I press the alien head and the nightmares continue :(

The face panel goes up, gets right to the very end then makes a clicking sound and goes back down again. Now this shouldn't happen because I tested it immediately after fitting the res (because it has stick out bolt heads) and it was fine. Yet, for some reason known only to it it now decided it wanted to jam every time it went up, refuse to stay there and then wind itself back down.

So I had to unbolt the res and the display panel, drill new holes and then put it all back together again. Only it is still refusing to work. Another hour of sodding around and it now does what it should (though again, no reason or rhyme). I finally got to try Doom in Vulkan around 2am, but by 2:30 I was absolutely knackered. I also managed to upset my wife, so had to do some grovelling (as you can imagine I wasn't in the best of moods).

There's no point in any pics now, the rig looks less built than the last time I took any pics of it. However, instead of repeating yesterday's events today I am going to take some time out. Yesterday I ended up annoyed and when that happens I pretty much drop everything. That makes me even more angry and I end up exploding.

So yeah, everything is functioning apart from the Tbalancer (well it is, it just isn't connected up as I need to make a cable*) so for today I am just going to leave it.

* I bought a USB3-USB2 internal but it is not long enough. Gareth sent me a lovely USB 2 internal cable which is far too long. So instead of just connecting them together I am going to cut Gareth's one, solder it to mine and then braid it with some red stuff I have that I removed from a red SATA cable. It's nice braid too and I would rather it look right.
 
haha yeah I needed a cable for my PC in the USA. They did a lovely job ! :D

Sun decided to grace me with its presence so I responded in kind and took some photos. Firstly my nice tidy desk.

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Some one has some tidying to do... Note : PC is very messy inside having been built and rebuilt about ten times last night.

Roof back on.

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In this pic you can see lots of hard drives. However, look around them. There is a black/transparent piece that covers the entire side. It clips in, has lots of wires hidden under it (including the front panel ones I was trying to get to !) and is a complete sod to get off and back on again.

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The pump, finally behaving itself ( I had to literally fill the res up to the limit to stop it spitting and bubbling, though that's the res's fault really)

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The front. You will notice the chrome res bolts are gone and I replaced with black button hex bolts instead.

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And a quick side profile shot, though again everything is about as messy as it can be right now. I got a refund on an Ebay con so when it hits the account I think I am going to order some 16 hole combs and fit them. IIRC the pins come out of the Bitfenix Alchemy quite well?

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BTW FAO Gareth. I looked into the LEDs and it seems they are buried in the roof panel itself. For some reason I thought they were a static part of the actual inner shell? Any way, they seem to like red (the dead one doesn't spazz) and they are tiny surface mounters so I think I am going to leave well alone. I like the rig red any way because the RADEON logo looks frikkin awesome (and the status LEDs).
 
Cool. Only thing I would say is that if you have the res filled to the limit, you have no expansion space. How much that is a problem depends on how much the temp of the coolant changes but it can cause the pressure to rise to the point that cheap nasty acrylic flow indicators crack and leak all over your carpet. You can get an Aqua Computer Pressure Relief Membrane or a Barrow Pressure Equalizer Stop Plug to allow it to vent without letting the coolant out...but even then you'd need a small amount of air to allow out - the membrane allows gas to pass but not liquid.
 
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