- Joined
- Mar 1, 2006
I have never done a water cooled rig before but I decided to jump in with both feet and doing one up in one of those Sunbeam clear acrylic cube cases (the UFO).
The parts I'm going to stuff into this small cube are as follows:
Asus P5E-VM HDMI
Q6600
2 x Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800
2 x Raptor 150s (configured as a small "enter the Matrix" raid0 boot partition, and a larger raid0 data partition)
LG Hd-DVD/Blu-Ray drive
Corsair 520HX
The cooling system is as follows (also all stuffed inside the cube except for the radiator):
MCP655 Pump
MCRES-MICRO reservoir
Apogee GTX
MCR220
2 x Yate Loon D12SH
I'm expecting the Asus tomorrow (it just got released last week), but while I wait, I went ahead and mounted the radiator and loosley fitted the other items:
Side angle (here you can see the reservoir in the front upper left corner):
Top (MC655 visible on the "lower level" and of course the CPU block on the "upper level"):
Front (here you can clearly see the "upper level" where the mobo goes, as well as the lower level containing the drives, PS and pump):
Radiator:
The fans are about 1.5" away from the back of the case. There is no hole into the case since the PS takes up about 3/4 of that area anyway. I'm a little concerned that the Yate Loon's are going to be restricted a little, but perhaps not?
I need to pick up a 3/4" hole saw to drill the 2 holes for the 1/2" I.D. tubing to enter the case from the radiator. Since the Asus is a Micro-ATX, there are enough vent holes to allow me to run the rest of the tubing with no additional drilling. So the flow will be as follows:
Lower reservoir exit -> pump inlet
pump outlet -> lower radiator inlet
upper radiator outlet -> cpu block
cpu block -> upper reservoir inlet
I only expect to end up using like 3 feet of tubing being how compact everything is. I'll likely also go through the pain of cutting all the electrical wires to exact length and solder and heat shrink them. The Corsair is modular, so I won't kill it by doing so.
I plan to run the 2 chassis fans on the upper level from the "chassis fan" header on the mobo. Likewise, I was planning on running the 2 Yate loons from the "cpu fan" header on the chassis. This way the chassis fans will only speed up enough to maintain a certain temp on the upper level, and the radiator fans will likewise only run fast enough to keep the cpu cool.
I do have the "slackr" stepping, so I'm hoping to at least get 3.6 out of it. This machine will mostly be for playing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but will also do a fair amount of ripping and transcoding. No gaming.
Anyway, like I said, this is my first attempt at water cooling, so please speak up if you see me already doing something obviously wrong!
I'll post more pics as the assembly progesss continues.
The parts I'm going to stuff into this small cube are as follows:
Asus P5E-VM HDMI
Q6600
2 x Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800
2 x Raptor 150s (configured as a small "enter the Matrix" raid0 boot partition, and a larger raid0 data partition)
LG Hd-DVD/Blu-Ray drive
Corsair 520HX
The cooling system is as follows (also all stuffed inside the cube except for the radiator):
MCP655 Pump
MCRES-MICRO reservoir
Apogee GTX
MCR220
2 x Yate Loon D12SH
I'm expecting the Asus tomorrow (it just got released last week), but while I wait, I went ahead and mounted the radiator and loosley fitted the other items:
Side angle (here you can see the reservoir in the front upper left corner):
Top (MC655 visible on the "lower level" and of course the CPU block on the "upper level"):
Front (here you can clearly see the "upper level" where the mobo goes, as well as the lower level containing the drives, PS and pump):
Radiator:
The fans are about 1.5" away from the back of the case. There is no hole into the case since the PS takes up about 3/4 of that area anyway. I'm a little concerned that the Yate Loon's are going to be restricted a little, but perhaps not?
I need to pick up a 3/4" hole saw to drill the 2 holes for the 1/2" I.D. tubing to enter the case from the radiator. Since the Asus is a Micro-ATX, there are enough vent holes to allow me to run the rest of the tubing with no additional drilling. So the flow will be as follows:
Lower reservoir exit -> pump inlet
pump outlet -> lower radiator inlet
upper radiator outlet -> cpu block
cpu block -> upper reservoir inlet
I only expect to end up using like 3 feet of tubing being how compact everything is. I'll likely also go through the pain of cutting all the electrical wires to exact length and solder and heat shrink them. The Corsair is modular, so I won't kill it by doing so.
I plan to run the 2 chassis fans on the upper level from the "chassis fan" header on the mobo. Likewise, I was planning on running the 2 Yate loons from the "cpu fan" header on the chassis. This way the chassis fans will only speed up enough to maintain a certain temp on the upper level, and the radiator fans will likewise only run fast enough to keep the cpu cool.
I do have the "slackr" stepping, so I'm hoping to at least get 3.6 out of it. This machine will mostly be for playing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but will also do a fair amount of ripping and transcoding. No gaming.
Anyway, like I said, this is my first attempt at water cooling, so please speak up if you see me already doing something obviously wrong!
I'll post more pics as the assembly progesss continues.
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