Project-upgrade (I need to tend to my baby now)

[fin]

SSD's are just blazingly quick and will probably be the most noticable upgrade in terms of speed you will get. The raided velociraptors are great but for sheer speed in bootups and sequential read and writes the spindles just don't cut it. However with all the speed there is a downfall, the maintenance of these drives is kinda likened to cradling your date for the first time. Really depends if your up for that. Have not tried the newer SSD's with a more aggresive garbage cleaner yet though so not too sure if it be easier to maintain now.

When you say the maintainence of the drives is that the SSDs or the Velociraptors?

I did assume the SSDs would outperform the spindled drives just realised I'd never actually had any reason to think that. But that's sorted now

[gatecrasherlok]

Ohh have ot been in here quite awhile oops, been busy gaming and working :P. In response to fin, the SSD's do outperform velociraptors in raid 0 hands down.

Since I have not been on for along time i thought I'd post a few new pics of some of the new upgrades i have got.

Asus Xonar D2X gone in favour Asus Xonar Xense
i7 920 gone in favour of i7 980x (this hexacore is flippin awesome if i do say so myself)
Megahalems cooler gone in favour Modded NH-D14 cooler to fit motherboard.
Corsair AX1200 gone in favour Enermax Platimax 1500

Full custom watercooling coming soon so I might try a worklog thingy mabob. Was never really good at doing worklogs as I got into a groove of doing things and then I'd just totally forget about taking pics and stuff.

So stay tuned for those pics.

Thats righty braid from the braid god himslef Nils of MDPC





Just how badly colour coordinated those colours on those stock cables are is unbelievable


Sorted, much better looking






Aiyor Damn cables were not long enough in the end so they looked bunched up in the roof of the case, out comes some bitfenix extensions for a quick. Looking at tutorials on how to extend the original cables and rebraid everything I have braided >< .

So here is what she looks like at the mo







Catch ya'll laters

[fin]

Wow, fantastic job, looking really really smart.

Also, welcome back!

[gatecrasherlok]

Thanks fin, hopefully in the coming weeks, I will have more to add to this build

[gatecrasherlok]

Well guys, I thought with summer only a few months ahead, it would be time to get some watercooling to keep everything cooler and running alot better than it would be on air. Mind you have not touched watercooling since I had and core2duo back in the day. So suffice to say it's like I'm starting afresh really. I know some basics but I would not go as far as to say I am a total guru on the subject for one second. Therefore over the next couple of weeks I will be dismantling my air stuff in favour of some nice watercooling. I will be asking you guys for some advice on some things as I'm sure someone in here will help me out when I run into some problem (god forbid that though).

So In the attic somewhere I have a D5 Vario with a top but can't remember what brand it was but it was in pretty good nick when I put it away. I also have a tfc 360 rad up there too so I will have to fish that out some time soon.

Here is what arrives in the post today











so heres the full list

xspc 360 rad
ek HF nickle plexi cpu block
ek nickle plexi 590 ful coverage waterblock x2
ek nickle plexi x6 dominator ram block
loadsa ek block compression fittings and many more to come tomorrow.

Tomorrow i should be recieving the rest of the goodies

Fluid (nice red of course)
clear tubing
more compression fittings (I kinda miscounted in my first order ha ha)
Silver kill coils
biocide

[gatecrasherlok]

Sorry for the late update,been working quite alot but have been doing bits and bobs here and there on the actual case. I've decided to give a fresh lick of paint on the inside while I was at it. I said I was going to do it quite some time ago but have been too lazy to take my computer apart. Well now that it's all disasembled I might as well do it now rather than sweeping it under the floor and regretting it at a later date.

But before all that here is a picture of my D5 pump and my rather dusty tfc radiator.









I'm not all too good with build logs as you may already know but I thought might as well take a bit of effort this time round. So far what I have done is cut a radiator cut out at the floor of the case as I will be housing two 360mm radiators. I really hate radiators that stick off the back of cases or on side panals as it's just not semetrical to me. Luckily the p80 is roomy enough for me to do this so out come sthe dremel. Buoy do I love the dremel, it's such a versatile tool for the pc modding guy. While I was cutting i also enlarged the cpu cut out area rather than this semi open design that lian li decided on. I also enlarged the two cable management cut outs that I did way back when just to make my life a little easier in the future.

With my usual eagerness to get things done while I'm in my own world I started sanding down the internal parts of the case, only to realise thirty minutes later when I sipped my tea my camera sitting there looking at me. So better late than never, here are pictures of the actual chassis of the case in its infancy stage of being sanded. All I gotta say is that Halfords car paints are flippin great, I had to go and buy an extra four packs of co**** grit to get to where I am at now and that is not even alot of the paint off.









So what I have neglected to show you guys through my stupidity is the measuring of rad cut out areas and initial ideas, cable management extra slot area cut out's around the 5.25 bay, various hole drilling for resevoir mounts along with the D5 (which I guess is still up in the air until I find a good solution).

So over the next couple of days I will update this thread on what i will be doing (alot more sanding I guess) and hopefully some painting action.

Enjoy the pictures guys

Forgot to add I braided the D5 pump cable

[gatecrasherlok]

Okie dokey guys sorry for the late update, been busy at work but finally got two days off work so I thought might as well proceed with my main rig being built up.

Last week as the weather was strangely nice and warm I decided to cut a radiator cut out at the bottom of the case and depending on how the weather I thought I might as well repaint.

So after 2 straight days of sanding and painting before work This is the end result of the painted chassis. Not great but it'll do nontheless. This time I decided to add laquor to the paint even though I ultimately want a matt finish. The sheen is okay but matt is definately alot better when I painted the case the first time round.



And here is a closer look of the paint work, it looks fine, a few little runs here and there and the if you look closly you can see the laquor is quite hard to work with making some spots look patchy



So to start my first day off I decided to get up nice and early to do bits and bobs like flushing the radiator. If you have ever used water cooling before you will know it's a pain in the backside to clean out all the componants especially the radiator, all the gunk. I can't even remember if I washed my TFC radiator when i dismantled it a few years back oops. My other quad radiator is new so in the production process most companies just don't have the time to absolutely clean their products before putting them onto the markets (lazyness of some people) so it's up to end the end user to clean and flush them, oh great.

So instead of doing the old shakey shakey, drain and repeat for the next few hours I went out and bought some stuff from UK's DIY chain B&Q. First on the list a submersive pond pump, something cheap and compact in size will do. Then an inline filter for use with housing tap outlets.

This is the inline filter, it acclaims to filter up .5 microns of stuff so I thought that should be enough, I suppose you can change the filter cartridge inside for different filter levels but this was the only model available so it's have to do.





And here we have a pretty nifty but inexpensive piece of kit if your going to flush out your watercooling int he future, it's a submersice pond pump. Not much I can say bout it rather than it doing its job really.



I knew I totally forgot to get something, a bucket to put the pump and water in, oh well a little improvisation will have to do. After looking around the house for something that does not have too much of a wide base but just big enough to house the pump I stumbled upon my collection of whey protein tubs, maximuscle tube looks good but too small of an opening. Alas I found an empty cell tech tube which is not too wide but is able to fit the pump in through the opening. I guess i could have dremmeled the other tube but that seems to much effort.

When I bought all this perfect flushing gubbins I knew the diametre of the fittings were going to be too big for regular water cooling tube. So out comes the gaffer tape.

A good amount around the connect ends of the tubing will sort out this dilemma as I dont really fancy a water feature to appear in my kitchen. So here its is my ghetto setup for cleaning the radiator.





All in all for each radiator I kept it running for about 2 hours just to make sure everything was filtered. Sadly I forgot to take a picture of the filter after it met my tfc radiator but it certainly does do a great job.

[gatecrasherlok]

Heres a quick update



Anyways a quick update before I go to bed . I've been carefully observing this for the last hour and so far no leaks, but just to be on the safe side I'll leave it overnight while I go back to bed and hopefully all is well.

One things for sure though my thumbs are shot now, those compression fittings are soo damn hard to tighten up.





I kinda forgot to post picks of the gpu blocks by themselves ooops, kinda got into the groove. So hopefully these pics should keep you guys happy.

[gatecrasherlok]

Okies heres a sneak peak of it all running







Ran into a few problems, not with the watercooling as such but still the cable routing slots I made bigger is not able to route the graphics cards pci-e cables to where I want them, BUGGERY. So for the bottom card I am still forced to use two bitfenix extension cables and the first card I have kinda routed around the resevoir for the moment. I'm probably going to strip the bitfenix cables and redo the sleeving. The 24 pin fits perfectly as does the 8 pin epu and other peripheral cables. Come on Enermax make your damn cables please for us, it'd make my life a helluva lot easier.

I have also had to mount my hard drives in a new place as the 360 rad in the front just takes up all the slots, waddya think . i think it looks okay where they are. My SSD and music hard drive is on the back panal just to clear things up from the front so it does not look so busy.

I guess I'll have to find more of the braid and get braiding now, oh yaya.

Unfortunately I've ran out of black braid so what I have done to the pci-e cables is stripped two wires from each cable and rebraided em in red. It looks fien as it is but as the bitfenix cables don't use heatshrink, the eagle eyes of them out there will see irregularatory, even me so not really happy. I have however managed to rerout the cables so they are less in your face and are more subtly poking out of the holes I fabricated on the motherboard panal. Obviously the extra cables from the extensions meant i had refigure the backpanal but it was not too bad.

I still have some things I will be adding to the build in the coming weeks, well as soon as I get paid at the end of the month. Maybe not all at once but slowly but surely it will be here.

I'll post some better pics of the build a little later when I can be bothered. At the present moment I'm enjoying playing games in absolute silence without my graphics cards fans whirring or the two Ultra Kaze 3000rpm fans blasting away to keep everything from spontaneously bursting into fire.

I can report that my cpu under linX after 20 runs did not go over 56 degrees which is absolutely phenomenal and graphics cards playing a few hours of battlfield or skyrim or CoD4 (yes CoD4), I did not see them tick over 48 degress. So yes I am thoroughly pleased.