Nice job on the radiator setup. Looks super clean, really liking the pass-thru job you did, a little jealous, my case won't let me take out the MB without dismantling the entire thing.
That radiator is gonna do some insane cooling, I don't imagine you have to ever turn your fans up to keep your loop cool. I was looking at that rad for an upcoming project, but it kinda turned me off when it said it had use Stainless-Steel in the shroud, does the shroud come in contact with the cooling liquid in any way? Thanks for the info and looking forward to seeing how this project turns out.
Thanks! not only does it make working on the build easier, but it looks super clean. Especially from the back (where no one will ever see it.)
I've been idling my fans at 30% and the difference between room temp and loop temp ranges between 2 and 3 c with a gpu folding. Without folding the difference is like 1c. Pretty insane for a silent build.
The parts of the radiator that contact water are plastic and copper. The tubes going through the fins are copper, and the sides that route the water thru the tubes and fittings are a hard plastic, so no worries about corrosion with this radiator (unless you don't flush it like me hurrdurr.)
I'd recommend it if you have the space. Just know that the grill for it is fairly pricey (~50 bones), and it won't fit inside most mid-size cases so you may need to get creative in where and how you mount it.
Here's the system all put together. I had to wait another week for my res mounts to ship (i ordered the wrong size because i was dumb and didn't measure)
I'm really pleased with the new res itself, it fills up all the empty space, looks sweet, and makes filling the loop waaay easier.
I finally got around to zip tying all the wiring up, and getting everything tucked away nicely. While i had the system apart, i decided to throw in my old 250 gb evo SSD from my old work laptop. My 512gb has been running out of space for several months, so i moved my steam library over to give myself some breathing room.
The completed system. I'm really satisfied, it looks awesome, and for the first time since i bought the case, i was able to close the rear panel. No more wire-vomit out the back of the case!
the brushed aluminum on the hot swap bays looks amazing, and the illuminated acrylic panel looks great through the grill. I'm really glad i wired the LED's to a switch, it's really nice to be able to turn them off. Kinda wish there was an easy way to toggle my fan led's as well...
Aaand then things started going wrong again.
I returned from my 4 day vacation to dreamhack austin to find that my fans were powered on, but not spinning. I guess my fan controller was turned down too low, so my rig had been folding with 2 gpu's at full load for who knows how long. Luckily the radiator in my loop is larger than most cars, so aside from some thermal throttling on the cpu, the system was fine. The gpu's got to around 70c or so, but the radiator was able to remove enough heat on it's own to keep my computer running.
After leaving my fans on full blast for an hour or so to return the loop to normal temps i noticed one of my gpu's was about 5-10c above normal, and the other was 15c above what it was 2 weeks ago. I checked the blocks to see if an air bubble had gotten caught and found this.
I pulled apart the entire rig, and ran the pump and rad through a 5 gallon bucket to flush out radiator debris.
I found 2 shards of aluminum in the bucket, and spent about 2 hours cleaning the gpu blocks to the best of my ability with white vinegar and a lot of elbow grease. Surprisingly the CPU block had no buildup, cleaning that took all of 5 minutes.
I will be monitoring my temps and waterblocks closely over the next few weeks. If buildup continues i will need to find a way to power-flush my radiator, as I'm out of ideas on how to deal with this problem. I've already spent at least 4 hours trying to flush out any contaminants.
Future plans:
Planning on replacing the 512 evo SSD soon, it's showing some strange smart values, and i already have a better replacement lined up. I'm transferring off files as i type this. I plan on taking this opportunity install a fresh copy of windows 10, so i can use my free upgrade and utilize all 32 gb of ram. I think I've been running this install of windows 7 for over 5 years now, even with maintenance windows rot has crept up a bit.
Drain port: Already have the valve, just haven't decided where to mount it
Sleeved power cables: I've been putting this one off, I'm afraid of wiring things up wrong and frying my system... I'll get around to it eventually
Replace D5: The aluminum shards have really done a number on my pump. Even at the lowest speeds it still makes a decent amount of noise making it the only audible part of my build.
Hardline: After spending all that money on new fittings, I'm regretting not doing hardline. Once i know all the aluminum shards are out of my loop, and I have ~$50 burning a hole in my pocket, i think I'm gonna make the jump. I can save the old fittings for my other build.
Yes, several times over the lifespan of this build. But don't underestimate the weight and size of a 9x140xfat radiator. not easy to shake around when it's full of water. I found flushing the loop repeatedly was easier, and probably more effective. However, i've recently come to the conclusion that my radiator has actually been flushed out for some time. The small flakes that i've been finding in my loop lately have been coming from somewhere i've never suspected.
It turns out the black koolance quick disconnects are known for deteriorating over time causing corrosion issues, and flaky black bits to get sucked into the loop. Even after i cleaned out any leftover radiator shavings, these fittings have continued to cause problems. Koolance doesn't seem to address any of these complaints if you aren't using only koolance parts, or fluid, so any attempts at a warranty claim, or compensation for damages would be a waste of time. I'm disappointed that they keep selling a clearly defective product with known issues this severe.
As you can see here, the chunks have worn off bits of the coating on all of my other fittings as well. This caused even more junk to float around the loop and complicate things further.
Yea, I'm still salty about koolance parts damaging my loop, but their standard quick disconnects are still pretty great, so i ordered two replacement sets, one for this project, and one for an upcoming build.
sweet new loot
hardline fittings
test fitting. looks slick
I was able to sell my 970's off to some local friends of mine for a reasonable price, allowing me to snag me a 1080. This should give me another 100-200k ppd average for folding@home, while cutting down on my electricity bills. Having 1 gpu also gets rid of SLI issues, and brings my 1'st pci lane back to 16x... plusnowihaveroomtobuyanother1080
I couldn't stand the noise or temps of folding on air cooling, so it took about a week for me to order a waterblock.
The cabling running down to my radiator was really ugly, so i picked up some sleeved 3 pin extensions, and braided them.
Pretty good looking
I'll save the installation photos for the next update. The most recent upgrade was a bit rushed, as i had to have everything ready in time for quakecon. Sorry for the rotated photos. This forum does not agree with my images for some reason.
You're not the only one disappointed with Koolance disconnects. I had 4 sets of these in my first water cooling project.
I had a couple more photos but don't want to hijack your build log thread. They will tell you because you didn't use their liquids is the reason why. I think the quality isn't up to par as Bitspower is. My almost 5 yr old bitspower compression fittings look good as new still.
You're not the only one disappointed with Koolance disconnects. I had 4 sets of these in my first water cooling project.
-snip-
I had a couple more photos but don't want to hijack your build log thread. They will tell you because you didn't use their liquids is the reason why. I think the quality isn't up to par as Bitspower is. My almost 5 yr old bitspower compression fittings look good as new still.
Thanks! I don't mind the photo's, in fact you've piqued my curiosity...
I'm really hoping these non-black fittings work better, i haven't seen any complaints online, and i recall reading some positive things about them in a skinneelabs QD test article.
This was the most memorable moment of my recent build. Closing that damn rear panel for the first time. After all of the work comes together.. Case Closed
Well i never got around to finishing up that last log update, so now it's about 5 months later, and I've made a lot of changes. As always, sorry about the rotated images. At this point i think it may be the service i use to automatically resize photos, I'll try a different service next time.
New exit quick disconnect pass thru location
Looks super clean with that 90 degree fitting. This still leaves room for a second 1080 if i decide to add one.
Cutting a new inlet panel for the rear 120mm fan location to replace the old one.
Test fitting. The new panel also covers the old external watercooling holes built into the case.
A few other bits for the build.
I sold my 512gb EVO to one of my friends and picked up this 1 tb PRO SSD since i had been out of space for quite some time. Of course, ~6 months later as i'm writing this post, i have 7.37 gb of free space Time to work on a NAS setup?
Roughly thrown back together for testing. Sorry for photo quality...
I purchased a 4u supermicro server build off a co-worker for basically nothing. I removed the motherboard tray, and have been using it on an "open air" setup. The case just so happens to be exactly as wide as my radiator.
Test fitting the radiator, and showing off a few new noctua fans...
Prepping for surgery
At over 2 hours, the cuts took a lot longer than i was expecting, but after some seriously sore knees i got it looking pretty clean.
Hey look, more noctuas! I decided to replace my riing fans for a few reasons. First, you can't turn the LED's off, and 10 riing fans put out a lot of light. I still think it looks cool, but it's nice to be able to turn ALL the lights in my living room off. Second, and most importantly, riing fans are 3 pin, and i wanted low rpm PWM fans. I can spin up these 1200 RPM noctuas at 10% speed, which equates to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 RPM. To put this into perspective, i can now see the individual blades while spinning on low, and speedfan's rpm value reads 0, because it cannot read speeds that low. The riings wouldn't spin up below 32%, and they were significantly louder than the noctuas. My current speedfan curves usually leave the fans off at idle, and during normal folding@home loads they sit at 10-13%, with the GPU hovering at 38C, and the CPU around 40-50 at a dead silent speed. Yay pascal thermal efficiency!
2nd reservoir mounted. The original plan was to mount a pump in here, but the pump top was out of stock. I also decided to switch to EK PWM pumps, and i really didn't want to run another pwm cable to the external box.
Fittings fit. I had to add a 2nd o-ring to the compression fitting that connects to the QDC, since the female threading is extremely shallow. Troubleshooting that issue alone cost me about an hour and a half, and one of my compression fittings lost to a pipe wrench. Remember to take breaks when watercooling builds get stressful. You get mad, do stupid stuff, and ruin the fun of the build.
Dat grill.
Due to the issues with deteriorating QDC's (thanks again koolance) and radiator shrapnel, i decided to go against conventional watercooling opinion and add a filter. Because i didn't know how much restriction the filter would add i included a ball valve to allow an optional/adjustable bypass.
After failing miserably at trying to crimp pins onto new cables directly, i soldered some wire into an existing 4 pin molex extension i had laying around from my fan controller and custom sleeved the result.
I also built and sleeved a PWM extension for the 9 port pwm hub i installed into the radiator box. The braiding had to be done twice, as i messed up my original pinout, but it was worth it for such a clean end result.
Here is the "completed" radiator box.
I also picked up some super cheap single monitor vesa mounts for my side monitors
The complete setup. Paired with the wall mounted TV, it makes for a pretty awesome gaming/workstation.
I ended up sticking with this setup for several months, but the radiator box wasn't as satisfying as i thought it would be. The cabling is messy and there's really no cable management spots to hide anything. It's big, grey, and not very nice looking IMO. (also it is HEAVY).. I found the ball valve to have a very insignificant impact on flowrate, so that component was pretty much pointless. My end plan was to cut out a design on the lid of the 4u case, and put that back on, but because the radiator is so wide the case walls bowed out, which meant the panel no longer fits. This also meant the radiator grill i had picked up won't fit inside the case. It was a fun project, and some of my local PC gaming friends got a kick out of it, but after all that work i decided I wasn't satisfied with the product and i dismantled it.
One of my other complaints adding 10+ feet of tubing to my already extreme loop is low flow rate. I now have to keep my pump at 100% speed, and it's pretty loud. These PWM models peaked my interest, so i picked one up, and got the other as a gift!
Picked up a monsoon pump top, and vertical mount bracket. It lines up almost perfectly, so a simple 180 degree bend should be all it takes to integrate it into the loop. My only concern is clearance for a second 1080, but i still don't have immediate plans to pick up another gpu (sorry team 32 :c)
Here's a blurry close up of the filter after a few months of 24/7 usage. Those red bits are burs from the hard tubing cuts that i didn't clean properly.
Hopefully this is a bit clearer. There's a little bit more of that teal goop, which is ether plasticiser or more weird corrosion/growth bits. Ether way, I'm glad my filter is catching some stuff that would otherwise be grinding down my pump and components. I've been using phn nuke in my loop.
The filter i purchased is fairly high quality, but it has some serious design flaws. One of these flaws are the two ball valves that are intended to allow you to close the filter off to clean without draining the entire loop. Since i don't anticipate needing to change a filter that often, I've decided to remove these.
Although the filter mesh does add some restriction to the loop, the main flowrate inhibitor seems to be these tiny inlet/outlet holes.
Bushing compared to a bitspower fitting
Simply removing the valves still leaves these small inlet/outlet holes so i decided to drill, then dremel out these holes to allow more flow.
After about 2 hours of careful carving the holes are nearly 3 times their original size.
Before
After
I'm now trying to find a good location to mount the filter inside my case. I still haven't figured out an ideal location yet, but it will probably require some creative tubing bends as things are getting pretty cramped with a 2nd pump, but i enjoy the challenge! I may need to get a bit creative. I'm also toying with the idea of mounting the radiator to the case like a "traditional build", so i can eliminate all soft tubing from my loop. My hope is that removing the soft tubing will reduce the amount of gunk i keep finding in my loop, and after my initial experience with koolance's black qdc's, the novelty has worn off, and it's just another potential point of failure.
In the meantime, I've been enjoying the flexibility of being able to freely move my radiator around. Here's a photo of me taking advantage of a cold front in an apartment full of hot electronics and folding@home. (The girlfriend did not enjoy the draft though...)
I paused folding just to see how low i could get idle temps. I was not disappointed.
Thanks! I haven't installed the second pump or filter yet, still waiting on some parts and trying to figure out how I'm going to run the hardline. I've also been distracted trying to isolate and remove some gremlins in my build causing random shutdowns :/
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