Scratch Build – In Progress The case that needs a cool name....

From the pictures the paint job looks good, with the noted exceptions. The solution of a vinyl border looks good. I would suggest that you match the rounded corners on the inside piece of the vinyl boarder.

When matching curve I find it is aesthetically best to adjust the radius by the boarder thickness. For example if the radius of the outer corner is 4" and the border is 1" then the inner curve should be a radius of 3".

 

That carbon fibre looks nice

 

I will be redoing the front strip with a curve from a single sheet, I'll follow your advice on the radius.

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Thanks

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Today I decided to put alot of the parts together that I've been making and see how it all looks.

(remember this is the inner part of the build, much will be covered by an outer shell with a large window).
To the far left and right are the radiators, 2x alphacool 4x140 with push&pull fans.
Along the bottom is an L shaped sheet bolted to the back wall, 4 Hard drives will be mounted to the vertical surface, the holes in the horizontal surface feed air to the PSU which lives below.
Above that are two banks of white wires, 1 set of 24 fee the main motherboard terminal, the second set feed two videocards.
Then above that is the recycled motherboard tray, mounted 90 degrees about.
to the left is another panel, this time for 4x SSD's (1 pair in raid0 for OS and software, another pair in raid0 for my games).
Above that will mount my 2x drive bay res and pump combo.

I've still not decided where to mount a Laing DDC I purchased from here recently, I've ordered a new top for it and I'll run it in series with my pump-res combo to increase pressure in the system. It'll have to mount somewhere near the pump-res in the upper left so I may have to remake the panel that will hold the SSD's to make it shorter.

I'm also waiting for a few bits and pieces to come and I have some small bits of prep to do then I will be able to start transferring components and building the loop.

 

Good call on the extra pump. The setup looks nice and clean. Of course, that could change still.

 

Yea, It's gonna get alot busier in there with four hard drives, four SSD's & wiring and the watercooling loop!

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A small update, I'm mostly waiting for parts but I have done some more wiring and made some backplates as well as paint some EK badges:


SATA data cables.


Polycarbonate backplates for two graphics cards, a fan controller board and two PCI HD controllers.
Painted black along with some EK badges (more photos of those sometime later, when they're dry! and if it worked!)

 

Spoiler

Sorry, on Russian.
Кларити, Тенасити - чо за бабские названия ?!
Тагил рулит. Ну или Челябинск. 100млн поклонников обеспечено.
Если, конечно, проект оправдает...

 

Nope, even after google translate that doesn't make much sense to me...

 

Unfortunately, this can not be translated.
I can only post a picture.
This is in mega-coolest Chelyabinsk (Челябинск) :




... and this is "Tagil rulit" (Тагил рулит) : link

 

Another small update,
I've found some time to do some work on the wiring which is almost finished now and also mounted the second pump which I bought from BeauchN and added a top inplace of the res-top from C&C (b-grade alphacool acetel)

You can see the pump mounted in the middle-left by the white wiring for the mobo and GPU's, also you can see the sata power cables coming from behind the lower panel for the HDD's and from behind the left vertical panel for the SSD's, I've also added (completely hidden) the power cable to the main pump/res combo and to the fan controller board which will both be above the SSD's & in the last expansion slot respectively.

Next plans:

• Change wiring and braid cables for the UV Cathodes
• Paint three 40mm fans
• Extend temp sensors from exhaust radiator
• start fitting everything and finish this thing!

 

Another small update,
Today I wired and sleeved the six UV cold cathodes and fitted them (3x Revoltech twin 12" kits), however when I powered them up 2 are looking great, 4 are very poor.

You can see one to the right of the photo isn't well lit, likewise two behind the radiators ant at the top.
I'm considering switching to UV LED strips instead, which will be more outlay and delay but I'm not happy with uneven lighting

I've now ordered 4x 600mm UV Phobya Flexlight LED Strips, should be here and fitted by next weekend.

 

A couple more things done, I've added some white UV-blue paint to the fan blades of the white internal fans, the main ones are already installed on the radiators (4x140mm), I also received and fitted today the UV LED Strips from Scan, 60cm Phobya Flexlights x4, custom wiring so they all run off a passthrough molex, here they are fitted and you can see the fans too:

A much better light source that the cathodes happy with that!

Now a little peek behind the scenes, these are some of the many cables that won't be at all visable when everything is put together, these ones will be completely hidden behind that panel and the pump/res combo that will be covering the top of it, but they're braided and laid neatly anyway.


That was in the upper left corner, in the upper right corner there were three cables coming across this gap:

They are from the power switch and two water temp sensors on the second radiator, I added some over braided sleeving to neaten it and it'll be mounted horizontally to the back of the motherboard tray during final assembly:

there it is at the top, the two lower ones are for two banks of 4 fans on the second radiator.
I noticed that the sleeving on one doesn't match so I'll be changing it so that it's the same and those two will also be mounted to sit horizontally, even though you'll barely be able to see them, if at all.

If I do ever show anyone my PC with the cover removed I still want it to look impressive or neat and tidy at the very least!

Right, now I'm going to shoot-up some robots for an hour

 

LED's are way better than cathodes. The ones that are dull are dead or close to it.
Coming along nicely this one is

 

4 of those 6 cathodes were brand new fresh out of the box, unfortunately I'd butchered the wiring before testing

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Today I've put in a full day and made some serious progress toward finishing this build, as usual with this one a lot went wrong...

The bad bits first; had a lot of problems stripping down from the old case, the power supply was still and truly stuck under a centimetre of silicone which took a while to dig out and i realised that the 4 pin cable I made for the motherboard needed to be an 8 pin so I had to make another cable up.
Then when switching the GPU water block on my main card I managed to nudge a couple of resistors, the tiny surface mounted kind, and my soldering attempt was making it worse so I've left it for tomorrow, it may well be kaput. I also had a geek of a job starting the plumbing from the left rad to the res, its the only section using flexible tube and multiple fittings as its very fiddly and inaccessible but assuming it doesn't leak its done now.

Good bits, hard drives mounted and ready to fit, SSD's fitted, all wiring done except neatening, motherboard and pci cards fitted.

All I have to do is repair my graphics card, finish the plumbing, leak test, finish the wiring, I'm hoping to have it finished tomorrow but as there are a couple of other things I need to do tomorrow it might not get finished.

There are photos from today but as I only have one computer you'll have to wait!

[rant]
I'm bringing the finishing of this forward so I've got a finished build log in time to enter the Intel NUC competition, so I need to find time to get the designs out of my head and into paper then choose one too, thankfully most of my work its quiet from now through to mid January. Then I've got three or four girls a week to shoot for some website and the retail side picks up towards mid Feb and I've got to get another two books published that are overdue! Argh I don't have time for anything!! That's not even mentioning the data recovery job I have in at the moment, looks like a dud, 'no fix = no fee' doesn't seem such a good idea with these jobs!
[/rant]

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Blackened, Scratchbuild, 99% done.

Well after 4 days of solid work I've got to 99% done, it was epic, here's the photos and blurb:


Hers the build starting point, the rads and fans are fitted, as is the second pump and the wiring for the motherboard and graphics cards. In the foreground is the board for the SSD's with the wiring tucked behind.


SSD's fitted.


XSPC dual-bay pump and res combo from my previous case, mounted in the top above the SSD's with some plexi brackets.


Motherboard fitted along with CPU, 2xGPU's. I couldn't source a cheap waterblock and plates for the memory so thats stock Gskill heatsinks with some fans added. Also at the bottom is the PSu which had been encased in silicone in my old case and was an absolute girlydog to remove, when I did finally get it out I realised it's only 550w, thats a problem, this build will pull 750w at full-tilt and thats before the overclock, so I'm in the market for 1KW as soon as I can afford it.
Fan controller board (NZXT Sentry) is hanging there too by the pump/res.


Fan controller board fitted. Long pipe along the top from res-to-res fitted, first bent pipe from 1st to 2nd pump fitted, also hidden pipe from left rad to res (return).


Interestingly the two graphics cards didn't line up, both are AMD, one by XFX and one by Sapphire, different models too, so I ended up having to make a little wonky pipe between them, and a pile to the CPU too.


And from CPU up to right Rad! Time to add some fluid!


Added some fluid!


But when I fired up the pumps, one didn't, this is the used pump I bought from the forums here, opened it up, corrosion and disconnected +12v line. However when I stripped cleaned and repaired it, it still didn't work. A piece of wire fell out when I stripped it and I can't see where it came from, probably why it's not working, so, a quick order to C&C Central and a replacement is coming overnight! woo!

 

UFast-forward to the next day..

A shiny new pump from Alphacool via C&CCentral, love those guys, Mick and his merry crew saved my ass once again. But wait, whats this, coloured wires?


No more coloured wires!


New pump fitted to the top, different mounting holes required, ready to go.


Add some fluid!




Success, it's not pissing white **** all over the place, ha ha!


Time to celebrate with a mug of assam and two slabs of stollen cake


Reassembled, SSD's refitted after stripping down again, bottom platform refitted with the PSU underneath, yea, kinda, not a great fit, and not alot I can do about that either!
As It's only 550W I'm going to have to cram a 1KW in there somehow sometime soon, thats going to be even tougher, I'll see if there is any scope to raise the platform a little, every few mm will help, and maybe relocate it to the middle, I'm just hoping it's not obvious with the outer case on.


Clockwise from upper left: XSPC pump-res combo, NZXT fan controller board, second GPU, Raid card, First GPU, Then two of the 4 SSD's back on the left.




Yea, that needs a polish-up...


The finished thing with the outer case on, finally!

and with the lighting on.


Main power cabling, Fans on the RAM.
All of the fans on the inside of the case are white and have been painted with UV Reactive paint.















So thats it, 99% done.
Whats the remaining 1%? I'm not 100% happy with the layout of the SATA Data cables so I'll have another look at those, I'd still like to watercool the RAM and at some point I'm going to upgrade to Intel as I've pretty much peaked with what AMD can offer and the new board will be chosen from the list of waterblocks available from EK. More immediately that PSU is being seriously overworked so another will be going in soon.

This system Spec:
AMD 8350 FX Black overclocked to 4.5GHZ
16GB G.Skill RAM
GPU1- R9 280 overclocked
GPU2- 7870 overclocked
OS on 2x RAID-0
Games on 2x RAID-0
Storage 4x 3TB Hard drives
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Suppliers used in this build.
Specialtech (wc fittings, fans and rads),
E22(wc rigid tubing, electrical connectors, sleeving, combs),
QuietPC (more fans),
C&C Central (various bits), Awesome supplier, saved my ass a few times.
Watercooling UK (UV Cathodes & misc)
Scan.co.uk (Hard Drive & Lighting)
ThePlasticPeople (perspex sheets).
Kay's Fasteners (ebay) (nuts 'n' bolts).
Carbon Supply UK (ebay) (carbon fibre and other vinyl).
Tennyson Trading (ebay) (Spray Paint).
Crabtree Stickers (ebay) (Stickers).
UV Gear (UV Reactive paint).
Bit-Tech forum member BeauchN (Second Pump).
Bit-Tech forum member Williz (New Mouse to go with the new build!)
Bit-Tech forum member jimbaw (Power Supply Corsair ax1200i)
These are all paid suppliers, not sponsors, and I use them all often, all highly recommended.

Manufacturers used in this build:
Aerocool (8x 140mm Blue LED Fans)
Alphacool (2x560mm Radiators, Second pump & Head)
AMD (cpu)
Corsair (AX1200i PSU and K50 Keyboard)
E22 (Cable Combs, Sleeving, Rigid Tube).
EK (Waterblocks and Rigid Fittings).
G.Skill (RAM)
Gelid (Fans and Thermal Paste).
Gigabyte (Motherboard)
Samsung (SSD's)
Sapphire (Main GPU)
Seagate (HDD's)
XFX (second GPU)
XFX 550 PSU (to be replaced with 1200 Corsair)
XSPC (Pump-res combo)

 

You may not think it's 100%, but it certainly has some style!