PROJECT LOG Project Thief - Dual Watercooled Rigs - 3930K, 990x, 5 gpus, 8 ssds

Project Thief -Completed 11-2014 -2 CPUs,8 GPUs,4 Loops,6 Pumps,50 Fans, 2TB SSD

Alright LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, TROLLS, HATERS AND PEASANTS!

Project Thief is COMPLETE. Cue Drums..... Cue trumpet fanfare....



Project thief is based around the enormous, nay monstrous, CaseLabs TX10-D case, and if that wasn't enough, there's a pedestal to make it even bigger.

The build features two full size gaming computers in one case along with custom wood panelling and powder coating. The name thief comes from the this build stealing an awful lot of my disposable income. The Thief symbology is integrated through the use of Skyrim Thief's guild symbols as well as two different themes representing the duality of the thief's life. The "light" side of the case represents the Thief's role by day as an ordinary hard working member of society and features my workstation. The "dark" side of the case represent's the Thief's role by night and features my gaming rig. The ability to fit so many radiators and fans means that the fans can be turned down to be almost silent while still being able to perform at the top of their game.

The idea was really to build a no hold's barred setup with the best of the best that was not only hardcore but easy to maintain. One computer would be my linux based workstation that I use for my day to day work. The other would be my windows based entertainment/gaming battlestation.

Light side:
- Rampage IV Extreme + 4930K + 32GB Corsair Dominator GT 2133 + 2x 7990s + 1TB SSD
- Fully watercooled with 2 loops: cpu, memory, motherboard, gpus

Dark side:
- EVGA X79 Dark + 4820K + 16GB Corsair Dominator GT 2133 + 4xR9-290s + 1TB SSD
- Fully watercooled with 2 loops: cpu, memory, motherboard, gpus

Final Pics here

And so it begins

The project name is not finalized so suggestions are welcome - I thought of thief because it dual wields and it steals all my money!

I am working on a huge monster build that will showcase CaseLabs newest case - the monster TX10. This monster case can fit two SR-2 (HPTX) systems with full water cooling. As shown it could fit multiple Mo-Ra 140x9 raditors, or 6 140.4 radiators. It can even fit front mounted 140.5 radiators.

The main feature will be two giant custom waterfall reservoirs that will occupy the front bays.

Here is the current hardware that I have to go in:



Unboxing Videos and Pics

I picked up the case directly from Jim - so the packing was reduced in order to fit in my car. If you buy one of these it will come in two boxes as it's packed a lot more securely.




Lots of Parts



Building the case

As Jim knew the case was going to be powder coated by FTWPC he saved FTW the hassle of sandblasting it by skipping the CaseLabs normal black/white powder coat. Because of this the case is not only in it's raw bare aluminum state, but it also is less assembled than normal in order to save on time taking everything apart.


The Pedestal frame consist of top, bottom, front and back that are screwed together with countersunk screws


Screwing the casters in


These are the spring clips that hold the panels on - they hold the panels tight, while still be pretty easy to remove for changing your loop up


Pedestal frame with one of the clipped side panel and the back plate screwed on


Pedestal with all panels attached except the top/bottom cover


Main case frame coming together, this is the view from the back showing the holes for the dual vertical motherboard trays


Case + Pedestal with XXL window fitted on one side

Here's a quick video of the partially assembled case


Choosing colors for the powder coat

To make sure I was making the right choice on the color I decided to get some card and tape it to the frame. I removed the acrylic window and used a grey piece of card to model the motherboard:


Metallic Charcoal Grey and Metallic Crimson Red




Metallic Charcoal Grey, Pearl White and Crimson Red


Metallic Charcoal Grey with Metallic Pearl White



These are the colors I think I've decided on:

Outside:


Inside:


That's it for now!

Samples finally came in:



I'm thinking the galaxy grey 2 (#5) and the silver/white (#2)

2nd AX1200 also arrived - time for a group shot:



Picked up another D5 and a bitspower dual d5 top, they should be shipped on friday

Thought you guys might want to see some pics of the existing hardware that will be *partly* reused as well as some of the new pieces. Apologies that the photos aren't that great, my wife took the camera with her tonight so I had to use my phone.

Here's my modded Antec 300 that contains my gaming rig (i7-920, Rampage III Extreme, 3xGTX480, Xonar STX, AX1200). When the workstation gets SB-E this will get the 990x. Note that one gentle typhoon is stopped - I unsoldered the power wire because it's out of balance so the noise is annoying.



Here's the front of the case with the space efficient but bubbly Koolance dual D5 reservoir as well as the dual 24V controller. I'll be using this reservoir until the 18 bay FTW reservoirs come in. No dvd drive, I removed it after installing windows and a couple of games. Most other games I have are on origin/steam.



Here's the interior - cable routing isn't perfect because I knew I was moving to the TX10 soon. I'll also be replacing all the blue LEDs with reds to match the ROG theme a bit better:





Here's the workstation in it's current temporary incarnation in a DD torture rack. i7-990x on an asus p6t. LSI raid card, 3 ssds and 3 hard drives and a 8800gt to drive the monitors. It has the H100 cooler temporarily and as you can see it needs some sleeving work:



Here's a front shot showing the push/pull AP15's on the H100, they perform about as well as the stock 2600rpm corsair fans at max, but with a *lot* less noise



Trident + turbulence memory - back in the day this was sweet stuff 3x4gb @ 2000-8-9-8, now of course you can get better for a lot less money haha such is progress!

And now for some parts waiting to be installed - vintage EK gpu block:



My old rasa block - I'm hoping to not use this and instead get a second raystorm soon - note the o-rings on the barbs seem to be dying:



EK 250 res and DDC-1 for the worksation gpu and motherboard loop that will be self contained on the motherboard tray.



That's about all the fun stuff I can show for now!

My testpack of monsoon fittings arrived today, these are the 3/8 ID 5/8 OD





With primochill tube:

Seeing as my boss gave me the week off (why not a raise?) for having to work like crazy the last month I decided to test out some of the components that came in on my workstation. for the last few months it's been running the H100 cooler, now it's time to switch it to partial watercooling.

In the end the workstation will have two loops:
1 - CPU (raystorm) - mora 140.9 - dual D5 varios
2- GPU (8800gt) - GPU (9800gt) - motherboard - DDC-1 - RX360

The GPU's only do 2D, so there's very little heat on loop2. Both loops will eventually run with low speed yates and I'm hoping it should be close to silent while giving excellent overclocking performance on the cpu.

As I don't have 4 D5's yet (still one short) I'll be temporarily running this loop with a DDC. I picked up one of the NOS ones from bmaverick, they're not that powerful but this won't be driving a critical loop. I picked up an xspc acrylic top (later I'll run some dye for the money shots):





However the XSPC screws don't fit the old DDC's so I had to drill out the holes a bit larger



Done:



Then with the EK 250 res fitted. I used a bitspower shining silver male to male rotary fitting to attach them:



Also remember that talk about the acyrylic vs delrin 8800gt blocks, well I ordered the acrylics and they arrived the other day:



They do look sexier!





Taking apart the 8800gt:



Then I realized I didn't have any non-conductive TIM left, so I put it to the side and put the 9800gt in for now. Built up the temporary cpu loop in the torture rack





Kind of a funky radiator setup - the torture rack only supports 240 rads, so I ran 2 fans in push and 2 fans in pull. I have 12 more gentle typhoons coming from the ocn group buy:



Then more stuff came:



Fan adapters for the gtx 560, plus rubber fan isolators. Not sure if they'll do much but they were cheap if I bought the adapters, so I picked some up:

So I'd been suffering wrist pain after pulling 20 hour days working on CAD stuff. This isn't unusual when I'm forced to use a bad mouse or a bad setup, but my trusty G5 on a bare desk wasn't cutting it. I decided to try a "gaming" mousepad and thought I'd check out a razer deathadder while I was doing it. After a few weeks of it I actually prefer the feel of it despite the construction feeling less sturdy and having less features than my trusty G5. The G5 now gets relegated to the gaming rig as I game less than I work





Also parts for my lightsabre came in



Seeing as we're all a bit bored waiting for the case to come home, here's some more hardware (also waiting for the group buy gentle typhoons to come in for this bad boy)

Tease mode activated

A box arrived



You said flap



The largest usb flash drives known to man and some awesome sauce:



Sometimes the front view is better than the back:



Opening a door:



Socket 2011 is bigger than I thought:



Inside the box is two more boxes:



- Curiously only a 2x CFX cable, but yet 2/3/4x SLI cables
- The sata 6gbps cables are black with partly white connectors as opposed to full black for the rest of the cables.
- The OC key that plugs inline with your monitor doesn't support high res monitors - bit of a fail there Asus. Shouldn't affect me as I can use the USB cable from my other rig anyway
- It would be nice if the back of the backplate was also black rather than the shiny tin foil like other boards






And the last tease for the night:

Had some time for another photo session seeing as the cpu doesn't get here for a few days:

Took the board out:





Took the ram out, seems to be the fastest I've seen at 1.5V with 4GB sticks.



Installed the ram, note that the polarity is reversed on each side, which makes sense if they flipped the pinout on the chip.



The paint job on the fins wasn't that even - some sticks definitely got more coverage:



Time to take off the heatsink in preperation for the EK full cover block:



Only the VRM area had thermal pads on the back and front of the heatsink:



Looks like Asus have moved away from that horrible yellow TIM they had on the R3E:



The VRM area with heatsink removed:

Chip arrived, motherboard and ram blocks don't come until tomorrow though.

SSD is actually for my wife's rig. I don't have an ssd on my gaming rig. I only use it for games so I wouldn't see that much benefit from a boot drive. I use my workstation for web browsing etc as it's on all the time. I'd need a 512gb drive or so to cover my games, so I'm waiting for prices to come down more



Batch on the 3930K is 3152B448, we'll see how it clocks soon


Suddenly a wild EK party! On a different table this time cause you're all hating on my patio table.



Nickel plexi because I want to run some red dye (on special occasions only for all you dye haters out there)



Finished cleaning the TIM off the south bridge only to find a piece of tin foil with more TIM underneath. Weird.



Pretty easy to install when the block is in two parts, the single piece blocks are much harder:



VRM area:



Full board:



and one more:



That's all for now

With ram blocks, the fittings aren't the final ones, just more for planning. I'm working with Monsoon free to see if something special will make the tube routing super clean





the ram blocks remind me of battersea power station:



Now adding in the gpu makes it look ugly and busy The copper and green pcb really don't match. I called a nickel plating company to get a quote on plating both copper GPU blocks and it was $175 for both! So that's not going to happen. I may switch to the other acetal/copper block and paint the edge of the copper silver. I have another idea for the PCB



Much better with the gpu off again

Soo like I mentioned before I really didn't like the green/copper look clashing with the black/red R4E theme:



So I started to paint the GPU with liquid tape - first coat:



So here's how it looks now after two coats on both sides:



You can see some of the texture here, liquid tape is hard to work with - either annoyingly thick, or very thin and see through:



From this angle the texture isn't as bad:



However it would look a lot better with a backplate, I'm thinking something like this, smoked acrylic with an etch and a couple of LEDs to light it from the side:



What do you guys think? Feel free to photoshop up your own suggestions

The temporary parts came in to see if I could get some clean routing for the motherboard/ram/gpu loop:



However it didn't quite work as expected- I couldn't get the 40mm extensions to work with the 5 way rotary snake, however a SLI connector did fit.



Now I'm not sure whether to:
- get two more sli connectors (I need this one)
- use two compression fittings instead
- get two of the bitspower crystal sli links to match better

What do you guys think?

I should probably go with the cheapest as I'm hoping monsoon free's new design will solve the problem for me.

Thanks

Got some more parts today:



3 ssds and a bunch of fittings:



This meant I could do some leak testing with the gpu/motherboard/ram loop. Still missing the other gpu for now though, but the important thing was to see if the ram block connections were good:



You can see water on the bottom right of the board. The GPU didnt' have it's spare ports sealed tightened down properly. Didnt' see that leak for a few minutes as it was dripping down the back of the block and was mainly hidden by the card and the block. You can see it coming out and filling up the pci-e socket:



The bitspower crystal linke sli fittings were part of the order too. The closest one in this photo leaked initially as it had fallen out of the o-ring. They're not that sturdy so it's a bit concerning that they might fall out. We'll have to see how it goes.



The top view is much nicer now though:



With red dye the crystal links won't look so out of place.

That's all for now. Case should be back from powder coating with another 14 gentle typhoons on tuesday, so expect a big update then Until then the board can dry out a bit

I'd also like to welcome my newest sponsor - DT Waterblocks. I'll be using and reviewing their new cpu waterblock the "5Noz".



This is the lowest restriction block out there - from Martin's Preview:



It'll be interesting to see how it does vs the raystorm

Unboxing pics:









2 motherboard trays are better than one:



Some accessories:



These are only the frame parts - the exterior skin is still at smasher's place:



"Super Mounts" - From top: 120x4, 140x4, 180x3 and 5 way hard drive flex bay mount (120x5)



Pedestal front and back:



Frame top and bottoms for case and pedestal:

I have a video that I'm trying to put together of building the case. Here's a shot of assembling the pedestal pieces:



- Unfortunately no more photos of the pedestal, but essentially there's a front and back and a top and bottom, each of the four joins look like the pic above.
- They get screwed together with 7 screws along the top and one on each corner (side).
- Screw the top and bottom to the front, and then add the back on.
- Then start work on the main case. Start with the center and work outward. Here's the motherboard compartment - the two inner vertical sheets and the top and bottom sheets.



- Assemble the two vertical sheets to the top sheet (8 screws):



- Then add the other bottom sheet (8 screws):



- Then put the case down on it's front and add the back (34 screws)



- Then put the case back on it's side so you're ready to easily add the front panel:



- Screw in the front panel to all the other pieces (36 screws) and put the case on top of the pedestal.
- Screw the case to the pedestal (4 screws) and it should look like this:
- Screw in any flex bay mounts and accessories



- Add the motherboard trays to the motherboard back plates and attach the handles (6 screws total)
- Add the hinges for the doors
- Rearrange any back panels
- test your super mounts fit
- Clip on the exterior frame panels
- start building or clip on the frame

Here's mine without the exterior panels, don't worry the black plate covers will dissapear by the end of the build (18 bay waterfall reservoir to come)

So I got the opportunity to tour this new workshop close to downtown that just opened. It has all the workshop tools you could never afford to buy yourself, and you can buy day passes or month passes depending on how long you need. So this resolves all my issues with manufacturing the waterfall reservoirs myself, as well as opening up possibilities like custom waterblocks...

It was the launch weekend so there was a free bbq (there were plenty more people later on)



Wood shop room, saw stop tablesaw, planer, chop saw etc. bunch of other stuff that isn't shown:



Large CNC Mill for wood:



Sand Blaster:



Vinyl cutter so you can print your own stickers:



Forgot to take a photo of the 3D printer, but here's an 150W laser that cut through some hefty steel plate:



There's two other lasers good enough for acrylic/wood, and a third one is apparently on the way:



Spray paint booth, they have an oven for powder coating, but not all the rest of the powder coating tools yet:



Metal press and folding machiens:



Other metal machines, bandsaw, grinders and a lathe:



Metal lathe:



Old school mills:



CNC mill - can you say custom waterblocks!



Electronics room - not much here, bunch of soldering irons, power supplies and scopes:



So what do you all think I should do with this opportunity?

I definitely want to:
- make the custom metal backplates for GPUs
- make the waterfall reservoir
- make some custom waterblocks for parts that aren't ultra high performance e.g. raid card, memory blocks etc.

Alright here's an update. Can you say gentle typhoooooooooooooooooooons?



Don't worry they're not all for me. I only have 14 of those plus the 10 I already own.

My waterblocks also came in, thanks again to DT Waterblocks, here they are next to my spare rasa (both my raystorms are still in systems)



You can see there's plenty of room for fittings. On the back you can see the copper base plate is pretty chunky - this should mean it should distribute heat better laterally through the plate but worse directly through it. Not sure the right trade off, but this copper block is the largest I've seen both in terms of area and thickness.



Here's some results from Martin's testing:

Temps in comparison to the raystorm:



Restriction:

Performance is about as good as it gets, but there is some refinement in the mounting system needed. Considering this is their first block produced and it’s not only keeping up but lower in restriction than the other blocks says a lot! Overall, I see it as a block with a ton of work and emphasis put into the design and quality of the block itself. That 5Noz is something very special and it’s very refreshing to see a design done very differently from the norm that also performs extremely well.

Click to expand...

It should be noted that the mounting mechanism now has thumb screws. Next update I'll show you a pic of it mounted.

Anyway the other big news on this update is the exterior panels. Here's some close up shots of the color, it's a dark metallic grey flake with a smooth finish to the touch:



Even closer:



And as much as I can loosely hang on the case without it being clipped on. You can see one motherboard has also been mounted. The TX10 makes EATX look like a MITX lol. The switch plate is the wrong color - but that will be fixed.



Working with Smasher and Jim on this has been a delight and I highly recommend them