A tour of my Lubic based system

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(Please refrain from posting replies until I am done

Hi all,

I’m putting the finishing touches on my Aerocool Lubic Frame based system, so I thought I’d give y’all a little tour.

Let me explain how this whole system came about. Some 12 months back, I, with many other folks, engaged in the pursuit of achieving a stable air-cooled 4ghz overclock with a 3.2 Prescott P4 core (see the fairly legendary 4ghz threads). Here is a basic list of mods that I employed to achieve this goal on my Abit IC7Max3: max cpu cooling (XP120 + high volume delta 120mm), dedicated mosfet cooling beyond the Abit OTES, additional backside capacitors, Vcore droopmod, VRAM/VTT modification. At the time, I was working mainly with my components sitting on books on my desk. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to have something like a tech bench, upon which my components could be mounted with some security. I decided, tho, that I wanted to taylor it specifically to my needs, so that it must have excellent air flow, very high standoffs to accommodate my motherboard-backside mods, and that it would sit in front of my on my desk, so that I could allow access to my potentiometer-driven voltmods.

I made some other conscious decisions before setting out on this adventure:

I also decided upfront that I didn’t want some sort of custom one-off C&C machined structure. I’ve never taken shop or woodworking. My tools would be limited to what I know I can use: handsaw, jigsaw, and dremel.

It should also probably be obvious: this creation was to be about performance. I wasn’t setting out to make a foam/bondo crafted sculpture to honor a popular movie. The aesthetics were to be driven by performance, or at least certainly not hinder it.


So I sat down with some pencil and paper, and I tried to clear my mind of preconceived notions about case design, and I tried to formulate what every air-cooled overclocker mulls over: what is the best air flow?

This was what I came up with, a simple chimney.




It followed quickly, that perhaps I should isolate the components that most needed this crazy airflow, and so I conceived of 2 towers. One with this huge airflow that would contain just the motherboard. Then a second tower to house the powersupplies and drive racks.

After some thought tho, it’s obvious that one very big component is going to interrupt this flow: the video card. The same basic flow will happen in front of the video card and behind the motherboard, but a large portion of airflow will slam right into the video card.

So I revised the design so that a portion of flow will feed the video card, then exhaust left. A new fresh inflow above the video card will be provided with a duct:






So I cast about how to physically construct these towers. I toyed with the idea of using MDS or wood, or even Legos. Then I saw an episode of The Screen Savers back on the TechTV days, where the mad modder Yoshi had thrown together a case constructed of parts from something called an Aerocool Lubic set. And suddenly, I knew it could be done!

Well, the order went in, and my Lubic components arrived.




And the next day I put together a prototype tower.




And when I leaned that tower over and looked up that chimney, I was like effin A, that’s what I call airflow. Forget about S shaped airflow crammed into stupid ATX towers.

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Alright, that’s enough narrative, let’s get on with this tour!

Here’s a pic, with the panels removed. It’s a bit busy, so we’ll break it down, referring to this pic often.





Let’s start with the pc componentry. As I mentioned, I started off a Abit IC7Max3 and a SL7E5 Costa Rican Prescott 3.2ghz P4. The RAM is 2x512 legendary Winbond bh-5 by Kingston. To achieve a FSB in the range of 250, the bh-5 is going to need some voltage. So here is the elegant booster circuit designed by Madcat1968 that gives the IC7Max3 stable voltage thru 3.2V.




Running that kind of voltage runs the RAM quite warm, so active cooling was necessary. This is a simple supertalent RAM cooler. But I didn’t like the native fans, so I’ve changed them out. For best performance, I recommend, 40x20 fans, like some recycled Abit OTES fans, but in deference to aesthetics, I went with 2 blue LED 40x10, which generates decent airflow.




Here is the backside of my motherboard:




As all Prescott overclockers know, power mosfets get very very hot—hot enough to blow. So to keep things cool and power better regulated, I added extra capactors. Plus heatsinks to the front and backs of the motherboards.

Due to the layout of the IC7Max3, slapping down some mosfet sinks, and using a XP120 with a high volume fan set to blow keeps a strong stream of air constantly flowing over the mosfet components. Also keep in mind the top 2x120mm exhaust fans will sit within 3cm of these mosfets.




Prescotts on socket478 can induce a very large droop in core voltage under load. Compensating by setting very high idle voltages is less than ideal. So I employed the woutertal vcore droop mod:

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Okay, enough with the hardcore overclocking mods! Let’s get back to the case.

I struggled for a long time to find a power-on switch I liked. I tinkered with aircraft momentary toggles, pushbuttons, turnkeys. Finally I was like screwit, let’s go without a switch. I got a cheap deal for a wireless RF key switch. Here are the components:




I modded it so that it would get its power by a separate wall plug, added a fail-safe pushbutton, added motherboard pin connectors and an LED.

I added some LED ports on my Vantec Nexus fan controller—green for hard drive activity, red for RF remote, and yellow for power on.





Let’s talk about components in the right tower. This is what it looks like without components or windows.




and with components:




Prescotts are 12V hogs! To help out, I used a dual power supply setup. The OCZ 520W supplies the motherboard connectors only. The Ultra X Connect 500W supplies power to the fans, hard drives, and optical drives. The Ultra X Connect is slaved via a relay switch to the OCZ power supply, so that they power up simultaneously. Okay 500W is probably overkill, altho it does supply power to some 13 separate fans. But I got it for cheap, it looks nice, and its modular cabling came in handy, since only a few cables are actually in use. The power supplies sit on nice acrylic shelves.

My aging but trusty Pioneer DVR106 DVD burner is mounted next.

Then I have 2x160gb Seagate SATAs, actively cooled by a fan. The crossbar on the top does sort of break the nice outline of the box-tower, but I really appreciate the drop-in nature of the hard drive hanging racks. I can pretty easily fit 6 drives.

Finally, shut it all behind my gray-lexan door mounted on hinges. I really like the doorknob.

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Let’s talk about cooling!

I believe there are 15 fans in my system.

(Fans#1-4) The upwards draft of my chimney cooling system for the motherboard tower is comprised of 4xAspires. These were nice and fairly cheap fans with 1) nice LEDs 2) a good broad range of air flow. There aren’t actually very many lit 120mm fans that will push >80cfm, altho I fancy those nice UV LED AC Ryans.

(Fans#5-6) I’m particularly proud of the cooling unit on my X850XT:




That’s an evercool purple magic cpu cooler mounted. It has both a 70mm fan, plus a 100cfm blower mounted to exhaust the air picture left. The blower was extracted from an evercool pc air conditioner. I'm also real proud of the clean cabling--this unit alone has 4 cables (molex power, fan power, blower power, and rpm monitor).

(Fan#7) is a recycled OTES 40x20mm fan mounted to a Thermalright nb-1. The stock fan interfered with my video card custom heatsink mount. This is the ONLY fan powered off the motherboard.

(Fan#8) is my Delta 150cfm that sits atop my XP120. It’s a frikin awesome fan. I’m particularly proud, tho, of the fan duct that feeds this monster. For vanity’s sake, I just had to add a floating UV reactive navig logo. This logo is actually much much brighter than in this picture, but it is so bright at full power that it causes my digital camera to go wonkers in its settings. Okay, the logo may interfere with air flow just a bit, but with the duct, I get about 1c better in load temps, than without the duct.




(Fans#9-10) are the RAM coolers

(Fan#11) cools the hard drives: it is a Mechatronics slowed to 5V.

(Fans#12-15) are the power supply fans.

Now one might think that all these fans are quite loud, but actually, all of the loud ones are voltage regulated, making it actually quite quiet. The loudest fan is the Delta, even at 7V, its kind of loud. I may switch this one out to something quieter for daily use. The second loudest fans are the ones on the x850xt. But behind the lexan, I can run these at full voltage and not even notice them above the regular sound from a game. And at full blast, this video card cooling system is crazy; in my 27c house (no AC), idle temps are about 32c and load temps 38c!

The cabling for all these fans and components is fairly complex. Here is a picture of the motherboard tower’s backside, where many cables are hidden:




However, it’s not really as complicated as it might look. The black box is the RF remote system. Then on the horizontal bar, each red zip tie holds the end of a multiheaded cable from each of the fanbus channels. From left to right, I believe it is cpu fan, upper fans, lower fans, then graphics card.

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Now, on the bottom right of the motherboard tower is this enigmatic little panel:




And here is what it does:




Plug in a digital multimeter, and you get voltmod measures. Roll the dial and you get: Vcore, VRAM, VTT, 3.3V, 5V, and 12V. These are actual hardware measures from the motherboard or power supply measure points. If you go back to the picture of the backside of my motherboard, you can see some of the measure lines. I terminated them with easy connect terminals so that they could plug right into the panel unit. I tinkered with the idea of building a small display right in, rigged to a multimeter, but then I thought, why sacrifice a $50 multimeter? The dial has 6 more spaces, at some point in the future I’ll probably voltmod my video card.


Alright, so put it all together, and this is what you get:
In the light:




And in the dark:




My final thoughts: what started out as a tech bench certainly took a life of its own. I still feel I’ve put together a very performance oriented system. Furthermore, I didn’t use any exotic parts or hand air-brushed/sculpted aesthetics. Truth is any basic modder could probably put this case together. I could easily build another in under a week for probably under $450. Let’s do an approximate $ summary:

$200--Lubic component 2xAirplane kit (truth is I only used a few components from the second kit, leaving lots of spare parts for future projects—perhaps the watercooling or phase change unit in the near future?)

$30—fan bus
$18—wireless key unit + power plug
$60—gray lexan
$50—4xAspire fans, 1xMechatronix
$15—doorknob and hinges and sundry parts
$10—assorted additional screws
$30—assorted custom cables and LEDs.
$16—caster wheels
$5—duct
$8—black grills

Total: $442

Not so bad.

Let’s tally the hardware, again approximate prices or what I paid for it—frankly who knows how much the modded equipment is worth?

$250—modded IC7Max3
$60—XP120 with delta fan
$10—nb-1
$325—x850xt
$30—x850xt cooling unit
$200—Kingston bh-5 RAM
$30—RAM cooler
$30—assorted sinks
$180—2x160gb Seagate hard drives
$50—DVD burner
$120—OCZ 520W powerstream
$60—Ultra 500W psu
$160—Prescott 3.2ghz P4
No monitor, keyboard, mouse, or speakers listed

Total--$1505

Where to go from here? I think I will put this in a nice room without ugly wallpaper, and do a little photo session. I’ll be back and post them.

Navig

[maxxoverclocker]

W..o..w.. I really like the multimeter mod, looks very handy

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These are the spots that I got most of my components and/or specialty parts: performance-pcs, sidewindercomputers, newegg, zipzoomfly, xoxide, frozencpu, polymerplastics, electronic goldmine, surpluscenter, ACE auto glass, and my local ACE hardware store (JP, MA).

And of course, I must put in some words of thanks.

To Mrs Navig, of course, for supporting and/or putting up with my mess.

To the mods and posters of the abit forums.

To the folks at the oc forums, xtremesystems forums, and g4tv forums.

navig

[clocker2]

Let me explain how this whole system came about. Some 12 months back, I, with many other folks, engaged in the pursuit of achieving a stable air-cooled 4ghz overclock with a 3.2 Prescott P4 core (see the fairly legendary 4ghz threads).

Nice work (and well written posts, too).
In the end did you achieve your overclock and what were the temps compared to your previous setup?
I have considered a similar setup (Microcenter carries the Lubic kits), but yours is the first real life example I've seen.

[JudgeDredd]

Wow this is pretty awsome. I used to work at Fry's and at one point we sold those Lubic sets. I never figured someone could actually make something functional out of them instead of building a damn airplane.

Nice work.

[SolidxSnake]

Holy hell, thats sweet. Those are some pretty crazy voltmods. So confusing

[Navig]

Thanks for the comments.

Yup I managed 4ghz stable bencheable. Sometimes double Prime95 would kick out in under an hour tho.

I actually usually run it at about 3.84ghz. This allows nice low voltages (I think its stuck to 1.440V), which allows for quiet fans. Plus, the performance of my bh-5s have degraded over the last year, they are running 2.5-3-3-7 FSB240, 3.0V. They can only do FSB250 4ghz in 5:4 at this point.

navig

[FoxBat]

Hmmm. No pics here in Mozilla. What's up with that.

[Navig]

hmm, they are standard img links. You could try right clicking and opening in a new window, they are simple http links to my photobucket album.

navig

[Navig]

Alright bust out your T1, here are a lot more pics. I'll do 5 to a post.

Here it is off:





Here it is with flash, to emphasize the nice evil tinting:





Here are some pics, on, in medium light:

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Update voltmod dmm pic:





Medium light:





In the dark:





Another:

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The logo duct:





Top down:





The motherboard in close detail:





Sideways view, with my air flow diagram:





The backside!

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This one is probably my favorite, looming high like skyscrapers in the dusk:






Alright, any suggestions on pics? I want to move my system back to my desk, so I can play GTA SA!

navig

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Here's one with the door open:

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Okay, getting some comments about that super messy backside!

First of all, I could easily clip the cables and rig a custom wiring harness, thus making everything neat, but I didn't feel that's how I wanted to go with this project. Almost all of the equipment on this system is stock or standard, and can be changed out painlessly, even down to the fans. Probably the only item irrevocably modded is the motherboard. The OCZ psu particularly has many many cables, and I only use 5 of them (20-pin and 4-pin ATX motherboard power, ATX 4-pin for rail measures, 1 molex for the graphics card, and 1 molex to power the relay switch for the slave power supply). I didn't want to lose the extra cables, because I've been plagued by power supplies dying, and I really don't want to void my warranties.

So if I wanted to change out any fan on this system, and I do so fairly often, all I have to do is unplug its either 3 or 4 pin termination, put in the new fan, and retuck the cables.

I've labeled up the backside pic here:

[TimmAy]

wow... that is awsome..and even if the backside is messy they front is extremely clean. i am pretty much speachless about that right now. awsome job