Scratch Build – Complete Posthuman

Looking great.
The plumbing run is fine, as long as you get that angle soldered close enough. You want that lift over the GPU area, even if you don't use one now, and keeping the line as simple as possible is a good thing.
The lack of air on the PSU is a bit troubling, though.

 

I am absolutely loving it! Specially the keyboard and its grills.

 

The radiator fan is pretty close to it pulling air, and it is exposed all around, so considering I'm not exactly running very power-hungry hardware I think I'll be fine (water cooling is definitely overkill, the stock cooler would have been plenty . If I would ever add a GPU, I would obviously have to change that.
But I guess I can take some readings with an IR thermometer when it's running and if anything gets too hot I'll come up with sth.

 

With this week's progress, the end of this project really is coming close!
I started off by doing some light cable management using some bare copper wire. It was surprisingly difficult to find some wire that isn't either stranded or tinned in my big box of random wires, but in the end, I found a really crusty-looking one that fits perfectly.



The next step was soldering the cooling loop. For the solder, I took Cheapskate's advice seriously but then was too lazy to go to the hardware store and just used electronics solder. Since I won't be drinking from these pipes I don't care about the lead content, the only annoying part was all the flux that is in that stuff. I just used the same flux I used before to liberally coat all the contacting surfaces and then heated the parts way too hot for tin solder (flux has a quite high melting point) but with some smoke and patience, I got them soldered up.





All in all, this was a lot easier and quicker than anticipated, even the angles worked out quite well. What was a much bigger pain in the rear was cleaning the parts up... I really wish I had a belt sander for this, I could have saved hours...






I also went ahead and added some bigger chamfers to the ends of the tubes, as after the first test fit this is how the o-rings looked


Luckily the fittings came with slightly different sizes of o-rings and since I had no idea which ones to use anyhow the red ones seemed to fit just as well as the yellow ones did.
When it came to filling the loop, I was not too confident about my solder joints, so I used a liberal amount of paper towels everywhere. And they were certainly needed, but not because of a bad solder joint, instead, it turns out that the pump seals better to its housing if you actually have the o-ring installed... What a shocker!



While I had the reservoir disassembled again to install the o-ring, I also noticed that the acrylic paint I used doesn't seem to like the water. It just rubbed off the Delrin parts. Good thing I noticed that before turning on the pump, otherwise, I'd be cleaning parts of it out of the CPU block for days.


Filling the second time around was fairly eventless, all the tubes sealed nicely and the system bled in just an hour or so, guess it helps to have a pump that can circulate all the water in just about two seconds Guess I'll be running that at 20% later.
For the coolant color I have two ideas, either just clear to not make this busy build any more busy, or red because it's blood that is being pumped into the brain. Since the CPU block has lighting anyhow, the only place where it will be really seen is the reservoir. Here I have two different possible reds next to the currently clear liquid, what do you guys think?



I also went ahead and plugged it in for the first time, and while it didn't turn on, the 5V standby power certainly works judging by the CPU block. I'll have to investigate why it doesn't turn on next time.



There are still some small details and touchups to do, but I can smell the finish line!
Also, in case anyone is curious I released another video about the build:

And I don't think I posted this one here either:

 

You should color it like spinal fluid. Just kidding, I have no idea what color spinal fluid has.
I like the idea of the blood. The 1st red looks better, I think.

 

I think you have enough red with all the copper parts already, but a dark red would work.
Ripped O-rings: The other thing you could have picked up at the hardware store was silicone O-ring grease.
Some older boards refuse to power up without the perifs. It's possible that the fan header on the psu has something to keep it from running without a fan too.
Pipes look great. If you had used a belt sander on them, you would have burned your fingers in about 5 seconds. The heat transfer is crazy on pipes. Just don't ask how I know.

 

There are three types of pain:
1. it hurts.
2. very painful.
3. The cutter is broken.

 

After taking a week off due to procrastinating on investigating why it won't turn off, I bit the bullet and took it all apart again. Right before I was about to try things like reattaching the fan (which is only a two-pin, so no rpm sense, but maybe they sense the load... (they don't)) I decided to try again and it worked again.
Only while putting it back together not having found any reason why it worked again I noticed that the 12V and GND pins of the CPU power were reversed. Thanks to modern hardware being idiot-proof luckily nothing broke!
One scare later when I forgot to put the RAM back in and was wondering why it still didn't post it booted right up.
Getting the stupid RGB software installed also took a few tries, but well worth the effort.




The next issue was that my soldering job wasn't quite as perfect as I initially thought. After a week of soaking the flux was eaten away and a tiny pinhole has developed. While it is truly tiny with the droplet evaporating almost as fast as it develops, it needs to be fixed. No chance though of me soldering it again, I'm not repolishing that thing! So I first tried 5min epoxy, which sadly didn't cure fast enough, so the water had already made itself a channel. Next I tried superglue, which also didn't work (big surprise). So I gave in and drained the loop again and used epoxy to fix it. Would have been too easy though as it still leaked, guess I was trying to keep it too small. At this point the leak is slow enough to not form a drop large enough to fall down, still not ideal. Does anyone have some genius ideas? Otherwise, I'll probably have to take it apart again and try again with slightly more epoxy.




With the PC basically done I set my focus to getting the rest of the setup up to part. This involved painting some peripherals and getting a new monitor, since the crack in this one had been annoying me for months but now I have a good enough reason to spend the money on a new one.







And that's it for now. I'll see you guys here soon with the final shots, just need to select and edit them!

 

Looks absolutely awesome! I'm surprised you didn't go for Klipsch speakers for the setup though, as they pretty much already come in the correct colour scheme.

 

It came out great!
-As for the leak; You will have to re-solder, or make a new pipe with the right flux and solder. Copper has a habit of corroding in little channels under glue. Even if you seal it now, it will eventually leak again.

 

That would have been really nice, though sadly a bit out of the price range for being my secondary workshop setup

Darn, well here is something to procrastinate on

I also put together a little video montage of the whole build if you guys are interested in some moving pictures:

 

And here are the final pictures, hope you enjoy:

 

Still- looks great.

 

Love it, congrats!

 

It looks ****ing awesome! Congrats!

 

Very tidy build, the end result is fantastic, grats!

 

Would look great with the thicker cables for atx etc cables coming down like the spinal cord to the brain.

 

Did you use 1/2" copper tubing? I'm trying to figure out what fittings I need and 1/2" copper tubing OD is actually 0.62 inches or 15.83mm.

 

@67Elco - I use bitspower 16mm fittings with US copper pipe. The US tends to measure pipe standards from the inside.

 

Thank you - I went with these from my research thus far... https://www.performance-pcs.com/wat...61806-16mm-copper-fitting-rjk-0r40b00234.html