I'm finally getting my feet wet, watercooling, case modding. Having lurked around the forums for the last 4 odd years and most of the time, well who am I kidding all of the time, feeling flabbergasted by the skill and creativity on display, I want to do this right. So I'm going to do my best at a build log here and I'm looking forward to your feedback and suggestions. So without further ado, so begin's project Little Brother: If you haven't guessed it yet, I'm building into a Cosair 250D. But considering what I'd like to do with it, the dark and stormy is an apt way to begin. So here's the plan, it's simple really it only has(had) two steps 1.) Sell old gaming consoles + games 2.) Build Itx build to replace both the blu-ray/living room gaming capability that I had in the consoles and the desktop gaming capability that I have in my current PC (it happens to live in the monstrosity that is NZXT Phantom). Step 1 went swimmingly. step 2 has, in not unexpected fashion, taken on life and become much larger than I originally anticipated. Now I could tell you a whole yarn about how things went from a simple down size to a major project, but I'll keep things short: I've always wanted to watercool a computer (and I mean properly so not via a AIO option), I've always wanted to mod a case, and I finally have the opportunity to do both without spending unreasonable amounts of money. And step 2 has become: Build an Itx computer with a custom water cooling loop, cpu + gpu + 2 rads, into the 250D without removing the 5.25" drive as I'll need that for the blu-ray player that must be a part of this build. Ambitious? Well that's why it started with a drink.
Will it all fit? Drink one down, and I'm sure there will be plenty more before I'm done, it's time to bring let you all know a little bit more about what's going on, and where I'm at in the process. Step one after coming home with the case was to pull it all apart and take stock of all its wonderful pieces: If you haven't read the reviews on this cube, here's the link to bit-tech's: Cosair 250D Review I picked up the case in the first place because I was fairly certain it would all fit, there are certainly no lack of pictures of people creating custom watercooling loops in their 250D's, but there is a suspicious lack of builds with optical drives, especially seeing as a favorite location of the reservoir/pump combo is that single 5.25" drive bay. So before I went crazy with the part ordering, some sanity prevailed: Hurrah for tack-board mock ups! So briefly the critical dimension are thus: 55mm left side to motherboard 200mm bottom to bottom of 5.25" drive bay, 100mm bottom to bottom of motherboard tray The front space is about 135mm deep I'd seen it mentioned several times that this was the case, but I was surprised but just how tight that tolerance was. This does mean that a 240mm X 30mm thick radiator fits with full thickness size fans, and a 140mm radiator fits in the front with 25mm thick fans. However, my original plan was to eek a little extra cooling out of the 140mm radiator by going with a ticker one, those plans were nixed. Having collected those measurements, I now needed to figure out a pump/reservoir(?) combo. I add the question mark as this is my first crack at watercooling and I learned as I explored the internet that some loops are built without a reservoir, and have simply a T for filling and bleeding. I didn't particularly like the aesthetics of loops without one, so the hunt was definitely on for one that would fit my needs, and not break my budget. I'll go ahead and let the cat out of the bag, I think I've found one, but I won't really know until it gets here. Speaking of which, my first order of components arrived the other day: Astute readers will notice the Z77 motherboard, which relates to a LGA1155 socket. So here's the other cat in the bag, the "performance" parts of this build are coming out of my current computer. I fact the only new pieces of silicon I've purchased are the motherboard and blu-ray drive. The processor (i5-2500k), video card (nVidia GTX 570), power supply (seasonic platinum 660W XP2), and hard drive's (2 WD black edition 640GB HDD's) are all being reused. But that leaves me with all the extra money to spend of the fun parts. In this instance those happen to be a Alphacool NexXxoS ST30 140mm radiator and a Noctua NF-A14 FLX 140mm fan to go with it. A parting note about the Noctua fan, it's wonderful, but it's biege, and that's just not going to work color wise with everything else:
