Rise of the triad, The 2014 Area 51

[ALXAndy]

That case is awesome

It is, but it is a total sod to work in and water cool I will say that much !

Inside was rotten, but not as bad as I thought it would be.



Gave the two halves a bloody good clean.



Then removed the warranty void sticker and put it all back together. Much better.



G. be careful what you wish for. I will bring them all round your house and antique you with it once the hoover bag is full

Oh and the hoover thing was complete junk. Went in the bin and I got my Oreck canister out. Very annoyed, I may take it out of the bin and send it back tbh. Absolute garbage not even worth a fiver

 

[ALXAndy]

Just make sure you use proper verified anti static brushes man. Otherwise you might pop it.

 

[ALXAndy]

So I took apart the intake assembly a little while ago. I was going to remove the nose cone I spent days making because I glued it to the fan. However, I decided to very carefully remove it (because the fans I was using before were £20 each) and put it back to work. I'm sooo glad I did. The LEDs inside the fan all reflect off of the polished and lacquered surface and it looks saweeeeet.

 

[ALXAndy]

Yeah that was the nose cone I made on the ghetto lathe lol. It's nicer than the "air out" side of a fan I know that much. Why are they always so bloody fugly? heh, super mega fug !

Well today has been tiring. I've not stopped for nearly 9 hours. Trying to take apart, clean, and then put back together something you spent six months making is taxing. Plus all of the wires in the bottom box are blue, there are two switches and I'll be knacked if I can bloody remember how it all worked. I can only get one switch working. Now IIRC there was one switch for the nose cone, and one switch for the cathodes. Yet I can only get them switching on one. Very strange tbh. Ah well, it all lights up and doesn't look any different. Maybe one of the latching things in the switch has jammed? that would explain it tbh, I've never really touched them since building it.

I've got the PSU back in now, the intake fan (in the pic up there ^) fitted and have reconnected all of the cables to the PSU. Next up is putting the floor back, then tomorrow start making the board to host the Poweradjust and Splitty 9.

I also want to create a mirrored back plate for the sound card, so that you can see the good side of the GPU (the bit with all of the water running through it). However, there is no way you can just cut a sheet of plastic and plop it on there. There are loads of raised solder points etc. Now what I did before was simply grind into the inside so that it went over them, but you can't do that with mirrored acrylic as it will eat into the mirror bit. So I am going to have to do what I did to the GTX 950 in Dianoga, and completely cut a black surround edge and carve out all of the solder spots. Then plastic weld the mirrored layer to that. If you can plastic weld mirrored acrylic...

It's gonna be a sod one way or the other :S

 

[ALXAndy]

Could you do it as a hollow spacer? ie black acrylic round the edge of the card but with the middle cut out - easier than working out which bits need carving to avoid solder points, chips etc - and then glue the mirrored acrylic (or actual mirror if you feel like it) to the top?

Sort of. You need to cut a frame with enough meat on it not to collapse but then at the same time there are solder points right up close to the edge, so the edges will look like the NY city skyline. I did it before, I just need to have my patient hat on when I do it.

I figured out the wiring. It took a while, but then the penny dropped. Why is one switch not switching power? because it isn't 12v. 12v passes through. The 12v line is switched on the 12v (hence why it was working) and the other switch is for the SSD deck, which uses 5v. So with that sorted out I just fitted the floor back in and swore. A lot.

 

[ALXAndy]

Morning update.

Last night turned into a bit of a nightmare. First I noticed that the shroud was sitting odd so I pushed on it. *CRACK*. Uh oh..... Took it out and sure enough I had cracked the cathode in two. However amazingly it still worked. Took it off and wrapped selotape around it and it's fine. Thankfully I didn't crack the actual cathode.

So I fitted it back together and the nose cone was dead FFS. So out it all came again. Realised the 12v-3v board I had used had gotten rather hot making the wires brittle. All four had snapped off. So I had to crack out the soldering iron at 1am (bear in mind I had been working since about 11am) and fix that.

So now it's mostly back together inside I figure I will drop in my Quadro and just use the rig until the water goes back in. Then I realised I had lost the M.2 screw. So I grabbed a NVME - PCIE sled I bought. Screw wouldn't fit the MSI spacer thing. I also dropped it, because it didn't fit, and lost it. So I grabbed a M.2 - SATA 2.5" chassis. Dropped that screw too, though did find it. It seems MSI use a different screw size to every one else. It is less than 1mm. In the end out of sheer desperation I remembered that I had a 1080Ti cooler. None of those would fit either, but I did finally have a stroke of luck. When I removed the spacer from the board I realised that one of the GPU screws fitted the back part of the hole. So I removed the spacer from the M.2 enclosure, put the screw through the drive and then the spacer, then taped it on with masking tape. Finally after about two hours it worked. I forgot there was no way for me to boot the rig without it fitted.

Then I started the rig and it was saying no OS found and shutting down after a few seconds. Turns out I needed to go into bios, dig deep in the menus and find the M.2.

IIRC it was 2 AM before I finally just walked into the bedroom and collapsed.

I am waiting for supplies now and deliveries. So won't be doing much of anything today. Plus my back is killing me from leaning over the rig for 13 hours.

Photos of cheevos. Gotta say, it looks like it's new.





Also, thank god for 100 ISO. Finally my pics don't look as drab as the day surrounding them.

 

[ALXAndy]

Oh I forgot to mention. On top of all of the PC issues last night I sat on my toilet seat and it snapped and pinched my bum. I was so annoyed

Rad cleaned, flushed, dried and assembled.



Like the proverbial glove.

 

[ALXAndy]

Right so pull fan on the bottom of the rad didn't fit.

Cut the bracket so it fits.



Then de-label the fan, cut a flat black one, fit that and then make a "horrid visible wire" cover later (oh and a gasket, too)



And it now looks how I originally intended it to.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK so it was time to start thinking about the mirrored back plate for the sound card.

If you remember how I did Dianoga (a build I did a couple of years back now) you will remember how I created a proper back plate for the GTX 950. What I mean by proper is perfectly fitted, covering everything. IE - not just cutting out a rectangle of plastic and putting it on the back of the card.

So first I needed to scan the sound card in. You will see why shortly.



And I need to create templates to send to the plotter. So first we have a full cover plate.



Which is perfect in size. OK, this is where it gets a little more complicated. What we then do is take that perfect template and lay it over the sound card (or GPU). Then change the colour to green (very bright) and blend the layer to 50% opacity so you can see through it. Then you basically remove any offending material to clear screws, solder points and so on and you end up with this, basically.



I then cut both as templates, lay them on some acrylic sheet and cut. As it happens the cutting is all finished and I am just letting the frame dry (believe me it is fragile. Even touch it wrong and it will snap it is .5mm in places !) and then I will sandwich it to the mirrored top.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK so here is the almost finished fan/pump etc controller. I've made a host board and shortened the connector cable from 70cm down to 4cm.



Work continues on the back plate today

 

[ALXAndy]

The back plate is going well. Here it is here, and please, don't be too jealous of my meerkat PJs.



And the polished edge. Not the best, but then I don't have the sandpaper to polish it out properly.



However, I have learned a trick I picked up when doing the nose cone for this build. If your polishing isn't good enough or you have marks that show up when it's dry (but not wet) then a decent clear coat/ lacquer is what you want.

Here is my new secret weapon.



Et Voila.



I have also scanned it for producing the graphics etc. Obviously as it has been sanded quite thoroughly it now isn't exactly the same size it was before..



That's about it for now

 

[ALXAndy]

Finished.



I think that ought to do it. I should be able to see my GPU WB now



I like how the frame goes 3D when viewed from certain angles. I wasn't expecting that tbh.

Just to show how much aggro the bottom frame was to make.

 

[ALXAndy]

Very nice. $6M question.....does it fit?!

haha it indeed does, like the proverbial hand covering cloth.

Tomorrow I will start looking at mounting the AC. I need to create a 5mm mount that fixes to the case properly. Last thing I want is it coming off after a few days and dangling there full of wires.

 

[ALXAndy]

It's quite heavy tbh. Surprising really. I guess it's the heat sink thing. Going to connect all of the extenders later.

 

[ALXAndy]

Today I hooked up everything on the desk to test, running from an external PSU (not the pump obs)







And then started the very slow and tedious task of creating my own AS page.



Still need to learn that, but thankfully it is very similar to AIDA 64 and a emulator I used to work with.

The PA is now fitted after I made a bracket for it.

 

[ALXAndy]

"Spot the AC"



It's pretty neato how the whole fan frame lights up, too. That's saved me about £40.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK my best attempt at a "daylight" pic. Unfortunately there is pretty much none today.



And a better pic of the AC



Still lots to do (get some lighting for the back plate, make a USB cable etc) but it's getting there

 

[ALXAndy]

As per Skype I do have a flow meter.. Problem is it's kinda big. It would look terrible if I could even fit it tbh. I also gave away the last two spare fittings (doh) and finding them would be impossible now (11/8 BP). I could pillage The Old Skool build but I would rather not.

I thought about it last night, and as I said to you I could not believe that the enormous pile of stuff I had sat on my desk at one point all actually fits in there. It has to be on the same sort of level 'o' frustration with my ITX air build I did a couple of years back.

But end of the day? in for a penny. The water cooling loop with blocks etc in there has cost me a lot of money now. And that is taking into account the £25 res on sale for about 1/3 of the original RRP and the fittings at £2.99 each rather than around £14. Plus just the BP fittings to turn a couple of corners would cost you about £45. So I've done well. Oh yeah forgot to tell you dude, I *can* just about get to the release catch. So I could get it out push come to shove hehe.

And temps? ah yes, a subject I forgot all about. Now as I explained when I first WC the Titan XP I was not very happy with it. I was seeing max temps of 88c when mining (just to see how hot it would get) and around 86c looped in Valley or Heaven. Both do the same thing really. Any way, I was beginning to think that I had forgotten to peel off the protective crap on the block. It really was *that* bad. Instead I lowered the power limit and temp limit (temp limit was set at 64c so the pump didn't die) and applied a 200mhz OC to the boost. Was getting between 1800 and 2000mhz depending on scene, temps etc.

Now? idle is 21c and the highest temp I have seen after five runs of Firestrike was 41c. Something was really badly wrong with it before, I just don't know what. The only thing I can really think of was that the rad I bought (Koolance) was very old , and was not designed for modern WC. It was big enough, but the fin density etc.. I showed how much coolant came out of the system before. Practically nothing. Now? it took over twice that much and then settled with the res 2/3 full so I still need to top it up.

Now what I would like to do next is get one of those BP hex res. And add it in there somewhere. Oh back to the subject of overclocking? I can now get 2000 solid and 2100. Obviously I am no longer temp bound.

 

[ALXAndy]

Yeah something wasn't right before. I also noticed last night that the pump would not prime because it was running at 12v (literally so fast it refuses to swallow coolant) so I had to tip the rig backward. But yeah, that paltry amount of coolant just wasn't right tbh. I would guess there was some sort of air lock preventing the rad from completely filling up. You sent me some fittings before but I chucked them out. What a dill hole. I guess I always have a reason for things and that is usually "Abstain, get rid, then no temptation". It never works lmao.

 

[ALXAndy]

So I finally found something to light up the GPU with so that you can see it in the mirror.





It's LED, not a cathode (so no big lump to hide) and it has a milky shell. So you can't see the LEDs. Perfect really. Will need to be altered and so on but it's mainly the shell I was after.