PROJECT LOG Lian Li PC-O9 - Maximus Leader in a glass house

That sleeving and the whole build is looking awesome.

Nice to see someone else go with the Monsoon Hardlok fittings. Was a bit of a pain to get perfect bends (check double check and then check again before gluing the collars on), and then wait for a sunny day when it cold and wet outside for the glue to cure. I'v read about people using those UV nail polish dryer (? is that the right term) to cure the glue.I think it makes taking your loop apart and reassembly for cleaning super easy. They say replace the rubber O-rings each time to disassemble, but I've taken my loop apart several times and only looked at the O-rings to see if they had been crushed and looked like they wouldn't seal anymore then replaced as needed.

Messing up the tube collars is what I'm most afraid off..
I have 4 x 90cm of tubes, so I can probably do each bend four times, but there's only one collar for each fitting.. lol

I went through a few collars myself, but they aren't too pricey to get more if you can find them. Don't forget to put the threaded lock collars on and in the correct orientation prior to getting the tubing all glued up, yes I made that mistake once. I also noticed you don't have to tighten the fittings down really tight, they seal super awesome. Also (I learned this the hard way) try to get your bends as close as possible, while they will have a little give to them, the tubing over time will develop stress cracks large enough to leak, I found one such leak, but it was so slow that nothing dripped, it would evaporate before it could go anywhere. Just mistakes I've made and don't want others to make. Look forward to seeing more of your system when you get around to finishing it up.

Meet my backplate for the raid controller


And the "pimped" soundcard





I have yet to figure out a proper way of attaching the plates though

Sharangir said:

I have yet to figure out a proper way of attaching the plates though

Click to expand...

Have you considered thermal tape?

Considering it now

I haz done some work..


Received my new pump and installed it with a 45° fitting to get the tube to the port in the wall.




It's hanging off the reservoir and sitting on a foam cushion (Phobya)



and this time (last build I forgot it..) I included the drain
I really like how this looks and works..


Even more so, I really hope that this will seal neatly with all those connections..



Also got some more sleeve, so I could finish my SATA sleeves and the i/o Panel cables.. and ordered more Shade-19 and Atomic Green for my HTPC build.. (however far out this one still is )



Sleeving (CPU, ATX and PCI-Ex only)




The ATX only



Too bad you can see the blue from the USB connector..


Cables on the GPU look amazing, imo




I chose shade 19 for most cables on purpose. This way they won't disturb the looks of the hardware too much

Still waiting for the thermal pads to fix the backplates to my cards, the glue for the monsoon tubes, the 45° fitting for the top rad and the uv reactive water additive..
2 weeks ago, I received an e-mail that they would send my stuff right away.. no news since.

Without the 45° fitting in the top left corner, I cannot start assembling any more, because that part there will require some space to work with.
Without the glue, I cannot install any tubes. Without leak testing first, I won't install any cables..

Looks like I'm stuck..

sorry for the crappy smartphone pics that follow, but besides being stuck with my project, I also caught a nasty flu and feel like ****.

I installed the WD Gold hard drives in the cage. Oh, Lian Li, how I would like to punch the guy who designed this cage!





Also, I experimented with the bending tool yesterday and damaged it already.
Didn't realise that you can take your time after heating the tubing and so I held the tool over the heat gun.. now it's molten in some place and leaves a mark in the tube..




However, even though I do have the Monsoon insert, the tubes don't really bend evenly.. loads of deformation in my first tries..





the front connection will be done with a tube after all. The second try already looked quite acceptable.







There's some good news though.. I treated myself to some new headphones and a headphone amp this christmas.
Meet my audiophile setup:
Beyerdynamic DT-990 (250 Ohm "Edition"), Destiny Audio Aristaios Mk II tube amplifier, FiiO X5 2nd gen DAP


And the amp alone, shot on camera


without the cages



I will put that amp on my desk as well and hopefully be able to do a comparison against my ASUS Xonar Essence STX at some point.

That piece with the deformation looks like you might of heated it up too much. I know with the Acrylic you have a small window from it being workable and too hot and forming bubbles in the plastic. But on that same piece you got what looks like a good 90° bend. I ended up going the easy route and free-forming the hard to do bends, went through some tube but I think it turned out pretty darned good imo.

BTW that white tubing will look awesome in that rig with the colors you have for sleeving, it will just pop, but why are you putting UV dye in your water with white tubing? you wont be able to see it or did I miss something

yeah, the temperature was probably too hot there.. I had actual bubbles in one bend.. the next one just displayed deformations and then I got that "nice" 90° bend.. (with the mark from the molten tool, unfortunately)
I decided to continue practicing on that tube after messing up the first bend..

And yeah, the white tube will totally pop. That's why I'm so afraid that I won't get the bends perfectly done, because it will POP


re UV dye:
Well, there's transparent tubing and a transparent reservoir in the rear chamber. Plus, the reservoir has a UV-LED Aurora ring installed.. (just a plaything, lol)
I though it'd be funny to have some red liquid in the rear chamber..

Hey Diddly.... Hadn't caught up till recently.
Nice bypass valves!
per my recent issues, I am staying away from dyes, uv tubing and plasticized tubing...
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...-HUZAH-WHAAA!!-Got-an-infection-in-both-loops!!!

Sweet old-school look. Tubes are coming back big time!!!

Cheers!

I really like the look of the Amp without the cages. Those tubes are gorgeous!

Re uv dyes..
I asked a company that sells uv dyes for money and other high security print stuff for a quote, but they didn't even bother answering..
There are some that sell for 700bucks per 500mg.
While they won't stain the tubes and you probably only need 10mg for a full rig (at least with my Fluorescein, a few mg are enough for my 10 liter container) the price is just too crazy..

Have to wait even longer for my last package..
No progress without the friggin glue and angled fitting..

Got to do my MOLEX cables today.

This one goes to the Soundcard


My Minion helped making these, since Christmas season always stresses me out..



Then there's the special purpose power MOLEX connector


Wall-E helped with that one since it got a bit complicated with the wiring..


the two of them had it figured out quite quickly and sleeved the cables


posing with a pile of tiny cables


Wall-E then had to leave because there were mountains of scraps and leftovers to clean, but my Minion wanted to show you the final product






Explanation:
The standard Pinout of a MOLEX power connector is as follows
12V
GND
GND
5V

That's what I use for the Soundcard. The PCI-connector at the other end is plugged in at the MOLEX/SATA plug in the PSU.


However, most devices, such as LEDs, the Pump, fan controllers, etc. use only the 12V and one GND wire, leaving 50% of the connector empty.
So, inspired by another modder, I decided to merge those half-used connectors. The small dual MOLEX splitter now has the following pinout on both connectors:
12V
GND
GND
12V

It's going to be plugged in at the second PCI-Ex plug on the PSU, where there are 4 12V and 4 GND sockets.

This way, I can now merge 2 devices (Pump and Fan controller, and LEDs respectively) each into one connector and plug that in at the splitter, instead of using 4 connectors and loads of wire.

Next up (tomorrow) is the wiring for the HDD cage, my installation for the LEDs and some more bending of PETG tubing.

Stay tuned

Cables are all done now, I've got 7 SATA cables and the power cable for my drives done:


The drives are so close together that it was impossible to sleeve the areas in-between


The SSD is slightly off-set, therefore that weird bend at the end.


My Minion also, after killing another foot of tubing, worked on two more parts of the loop:





The GPU-CPU tube was actually a real pain in the butt, because there has to be an off-set of about 1,5cm


here you can see it better:



I'm quite happy with the result, but will probably shorten the CPU-MB tube slightly.

Continued to work on my build a little..

I bought 2 metres of this:


Cut them to pieces, glued them together and painted them black


They will be taped to the interior of the case to provide an angled base for the LED strips.
Have yet to find somebody who will solder the LED strips for me. Then I have to figure out whether I can run them off a fan connector (it'll be 1,2m of LEDs) alone or whether I need a MOLEX connector..


Then I worked on the most difficult of my bends and got it right the very first time:







I also redid the front connector and now it looks much prettier:


All the tubes I've got installed so far.



Now there's only the one in the back missing..


oh, yeah, I'll have to glue the caps on too, clean the cooling blocks and fittings and install them permanently


Here's one to finish off this year and keep you looking forward to the final sprint to the finish line




ps: I'm quite happy with how the bends turned out.. not what I would've dreamed off, but certainly not bad for my very first tries..
Will redo the difficult ones when I get the new video card next summer, so I'll try to make them even prettier.

The end is near!
Got my last shipment and will try to finish (leak-proof and up and running) the thing next weekend..
Stay tuned!

Here we go

I applied the glue (Monsoon hardline uv curing adhesive) and brought the tubes out into the overcast day to cure.


the blue tape is usually intended to cover sensitive areas when polishing the car, so it leaves no residue and comes off easily afterwards.



The last tube (MB to top Rad) turned out great.. (after the first attempt ended up in the trash.)

After installation:



I'll definitely change the routing at the GPU when I get the new card this summer.
I want the one coming in (from below) do so at the right and the one going out to the CPU do so at the left, to separate the tubes above the GPU better optically.


But I'm quite happy with how it looks for a first try.



I'm especially glad about how traight they turned out in the end:




Then there was the water

There were several issues.. On one hand, some of the collars yellowed noticeably (because of the glue, that I am positive about. But why only some?) and at least one didn't cure at all (as in, I could simply pull out the tube).
I didn't realise that until I had it all installed and was leak-testing the loop.

Here's my leak-testing
On the bottom right (the one at the bulkhead) you see where my leak was..



My cable chaos already started to manifest, and that's without a power suply, any of the power cables or the HDD cage with cables installed



The reservoir works very nicely and I'm curious to see how it will look with the red UV dye and the UV LED ring




I first installed the main cables so I could set up Win10 Pro (64) on my Samsung M.2 SSD


In complete darkness:



As you can see, there are only three RAM bars installed.
The reason for that is quite simple: One of them decided to stop working between my first tests and yesterday night.
I couldn't get the system to boot when that bar was installed. (Will have to RMA that one and hope that Corsair is fast about a replacement)


After I had Win 10 ready (installation from a 200MB/s USB stick to 1'500MB/s M.2 drive.. fuuuun!), I ran some benches and saw that it was good..
Furmark and Prime 95 both at "maximum heat" and the GPU and CPU both didn't exceed 42°C (with the room being at around 22°C, but I didn't check the water temp).


Then came some more serious stuff.
I installed the Raid controller and tried to set up my 2x2 + 2x1 TB Raid 10.. well.. no chance.
I didn't know that you have to use drives with identical capacity for a Raid 10 (why can't you stripe a larger and a smaller drive, then mirror the it?!?!)
So I ended up using 2x2 and 2x1 TB Raid 1's...

Over night I had the computer format the two RAIDs and I'm currently trying to get the data back from an old hard drive (I installed a WD green in the smaller Raid1 and try to copy my data from the "old" WD Gold 1TB card to my new Raid,
THEN replace the WD green with the WD Gold to have the Raid rebuild itself.. (Because my backup via W-Lan took 10+ hourse and I don't want it to go that slow.. lol)



These are from a few minutes ago:







Never mind all the fingerprints, it's a work in progress and I didn't bother cleaning anything!




Next up, after all the storage has been properly transplanted and the backups been restored..
I won't be home for the next two weeks, so there's gonna be another delay..


Coming up next:
- Install LEDs (still have to look for a PWM dimmer to control the brightness of my LEDs and actually solder the LED strips so I can power them)

- Have faulty RAM bar replaced and install fourth RAM bar

- Replace water with UV-red dyed water (just for the sake of having red glowing water in the reservoir, even though you will never see it in use)

- Take final pictures (until the GPU replacement in summer, where there will be new pictures taken)

- Overclock the crap out of this baby and install games (maybe even: play some games )

Sucks about the glue not curing, that happened to me on a couple of ends, when I tried to cure in overcast days, took like 5 hours to cure where on a bright sunny day took 10 min. probably has something to do with the amount of filtration the cloud cover has on UV rays or some scientific thing I'm not interested in... Until I start having to see a skin doctor about melanoma.

I had a couple joints turn cloudy on me, some were perfectly clear and some just had this cloudy affect, might of been where there was some soap residue or finger print oil left on the tube, I was a bit nonchalant in cleaning them prior to gluing, but after the small mistakes they all glued up and aren't coming apart, well haven't after over a year now, at least on the ones that have been there over a year.

Looking good though. Any idea on what kind of flow rate you are getting? I'd say it's a good idea to know what the flow rate is with clear water prior to putting any dye's in it so if you do have a build up you will know and can fix it before it becomes a problem, just a thought though.

Hey, no idea on the flow rate, but I don't think it's an issue because there are only 2 90-deg fittings in the entire loop and everything else is straight or 45-deg only.