Well, bless her heart my Downtown box died on me. Rest in peace. And when I tried to fire up my backup machine, it was dead too. Wow. Moving forward I grabbed up the 'best of' parts I had in the house and started up this project. The 'ESKIMOD' is a tribute to my favorite sports team. I love my CFL and my Edmonton Eskimos team. Here are a couple of concept ideas. The project itself is very fluid. Design will shift as I go. Here are the parts I have tagged for this project: Corsair Air 540 chassis ASUS Sabertooth 990fx r2.0 motherboard AMD FX-9590 CPU 16 Gb Kingston HyperX RAM Corsair H100i AIO Corsair Link fan/led/temp controller Corsair AF120 Quiet Edition fans Cooler Master Jetflo 120 PWM LED fans Cooler Master v1200 Platinum PSU Dual MSI R9 290 GPUs Dual ADATA 256 SSDs in raid 1 config Quad WD 500 Gb HDDs in raid 10 config ancient Arctic Cooling PWM fan from CPU cooler (why? GPU airflow) In the box I'm planning a raid 10 config. Since the box only holds two drives in the front and I need four I designed this drive holder on my 3D printer. After designing those however I came across a deal on a 2nd R9 290 that I couldn't pass up. Now they are just a footnote in the project log and a weird design element at the bottom of the case. I've built out a placard (on the printer) to go between the GPUs. I have a fan blowing air in from the back to help cool the GPUs. Also to note is the brace to prevent sag. And a custom printed fan grill with the team logo. I've expanded the placard and added the green colored leather pattern for contrast. And a quick shot of the PCI fan. Also printed some custom mounts to hold that in. Stripped down the fan covers on the front & top and painted them up. And took some translucent paint to the white Jetflo fans to get them to match (since they only come in blue, white and red.) Eventually going to paint the box itself white and put a feature wall on the right side. Also want to tackle water cooling for the GPUs as well.
Small update. Just trying to fix up some airflow issues on the box. Turns out the backside of a Corsair Air 540 can get a little on the warm side. Mounted a 120 PWM fan in back for air intake. Scavenged a 90 mm fan off an old Arctic Freezer heatsink. (Quick screenie from Google.) Used the 3D printer to create a fan mount for the dual drive bay slot. And voila! One drive bay fan. Which has nicely dropped backside temperatures by 10 degrees so far. --------------------------- And a quick shot of the matching keycaps. This build remains very organic. Probably looking to paint the chassis at some point, as well as make a feature panel for the back side.
Well, I've had a pair of R9 290s in the Eskimod for a few months now. Just hooked myself up with a 3rd monitor. The system is handling Witcher 3 nicely in an eyefinity setup and the 290s are handling the three 60 mhz monitors on ultra settings with no problem. Now as per this recent Eteknix article the 295x2 is still top dog, so grabbing a pair of used 290s for way less than a new single card ended up being a pretty good investment. I just bumped up to the initial Crimson drivers release. I haven't really seen anything specific for performance gains other than the second card is suddenly working WAY less and has dropped a good 10 degrees while maintaining the same frame rates. My guess is some pretty good efficiencies were built into the drivers. No complaints here on that. But these cards do get stinkin hot. Right now they're just air cooled and I think I've tweaked the system fans about as much as I can manage. With the 3rd monitor the eyefinity will push the primary card up over 90 degrees at peak and I'm none too happy about that. So, slowly but surely water cooling relief is on the way. I have a pair of waterblocks for the two cards. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Alphacool for their great promo they had going. If you never heard about it basically if they didn't have a block for your card model you could send yours in (on your shipping dime) and they'd make a custom design & free card for you and send it back. I didn't take advantage of that and didn't need to because they had models for both of my cards. Both are MSI R9 290s, but the boards are different designs. Great to know that someone out there handled for it. Now I know these aren't a traditional full block cooling. The vram and such are still technically passively cooled, but reasonable airflow should hopefully handle that without issue. For this setup I think it's just a matter of getting that GPU heat under control. Blocks & PETG are already here. Radiator is on the way. I believe I have some cool fittings arranged as well. Can't wait to tell you about that. Plus I had this interesting little water bottle tucked away in a drawer doing nothing. I'm thinking it might make one mighty sweet little reservoir for the system.
Nice case. If the Esks win tomorrow, err today now, you'll have to print yourself a little grey cup to go with the case.
Just working through some ideas to see if the water-bottle/reservoir idea is going to work out. Thinking of mounting it directly on top. And designing up a 3D model to print off as a base. Will need to figure out what I can use as a quality adhesive/sealant to prevent leakage.
