Case Mod - Complete Project code name - Time.Sync. End name The Hellcat.

No power tools after 8 PM is the only rule that you should follow.

 

Calling it done for now. Couple of things left and will get some pics somewhen.

I need to mount the PCIE edge cover but need to make standoffs and I don't have the tools here. Try as I might I failed.

I need to sort out the USB hubs as they hate the board. Thus the rainbow farts as I can't connect to the main Farbwerk. Other than that though, yeah she's done (for now)









The PCIE edge cover is here on the desk.

 

I must like torture. Water torture.

I bought this card for the rig.



With a lovely Barrow block. However, it didn't fit. Yesterday wasn't a good day lol. So I bought another one and it fits.



Bit of 3M tape will resolve this issue like last time.



And bob's your Aunt's live in lover. Oh, and I don't like the EK badge so I bought these.



Black one, obs.

 

there's a lot of work to do but you are going strong, keep it up!

 

Wow I didn't even post the climax. Well here it *was* noting was as in past tense.



It worked fine, yet two weeks after I put the 2070 in there I had a windfall and built a relatively simple new PC. However, I want this one for my bedroom for winter, so I decided to change it slightly.

Firstly the RGB is not working properly right now. As soon as I switched to Threadripper the issues began. Aquacomputer blame it on AMD, AMD blame it on Aquasuite. I don't know if this has been fixed now but if not I will need to plug the RGB system into an Intel PC and change it to one colour. That's not very hard, due to the way I designed it.

OK. So I decided now to upgrade the GPU, given 2080Tis were going for a song. So I bought this.



For cheap. I was hoping to use the Barrow block I had, but before I could even reach that stage this happened.





So I bought another, this time away from the EvilBay. This time I bought a 2080Ti Aorus Xtreme with a Barrow block already fitted. This arrived today, and I took it apart and gave it a good clean (guy was new to water cooling so there was green stuff in it from the rads not being flushed).



I would have polished the nickel whilst it was apart, but I noticed that when it was wet you can't see it at all. So I didn't bother busting out the chrome polish.



All re pasted and rebuilt etc. I also needed a special adapter for the Gigabyte implementation of D RGB. Instead of using a 4 pin with one missing (standard) they used what can only be described as a 3 pin fan header. So I bought the adapter cable for that.



Then I decided to replace the Bykski block with this.



The Bykski was cheap when I got it back in January, around £30. However it doesn't fit the best, has gold rings around the G 1/4 and doesn't cool the best either. The BP was on sale for £59, and given the RRP is more like £90 I thought that was a score.





I bought four of these on sale



And decided to get a new res. For no other reason than I cracked one of the bracket plastics (you can't even really see it) but also I wanted something larger. To prevent mass headaches and redesigns I got the exact same res, only in 150ml as opposed to 100 that is in there.



Again it was on sale and again it was cheap.

 

OK so it's done for the moment. Lots of issues, will run through those.

I got home last night and fitted the new CPU block. Went well. I then drilled the reinforcement plate I made the other week and bolted that in. Which allows me to fit all three nuts and bolts to the vertical riser. The Phanteks riser never fitted very well, as I had basically modded the entire case to take the Cooler Master one, yet the ribbons on those are crap and it failed.

Now I could fit and remove the GPU waaaay easier. It's night and day, with literally no sag at all. Before it had one bolt in the bottom, so it sagged even with a 2070 in there (a literal featherweight).

I then ran into issue number one. The res is huge. How they work it out IDK, but mine was a 100mm and this was supposed to be a 150 yet it is twice as long. This is good, because it means I can have more coolant in there, but the whole loop was not going to work as it was. There was just no room.

I removed a stop plug on the flow meter to move it to the bottom hole (so I could come out at an angle) and it cross threaded. The only way to remove it was to take the flow meter apart. All told it took me about two hours to fix this, and it was leaking afterward. I've also fitted the ceramic pole the wrong way around and thus it won't spin now (but flow is still very good).

Issue two then raised its head. The RGB adapter for Gigabyte's unique 3 pin fan but RGB connector was wired with the black wire as 5v. I have never seen something so idiotic. So of course I fitted it with the blue wire to 5v. Problem is once you put the GPU in you can not get to it without removing the GPU which isn't fun when you have two litres of coolant in your PC. Any way I found a way around it (thanks to the new design of the vertical riser) and got that working.

Issue 3. I thought I had two 8 pin extensions in the rig (black). Turns out I had a 8 pin and 6 pin. That's OK though, thankfully I had a spare 8 pin in grey which looks fantastic in there.

Issue 4. Windows killdate. Windows updated itself. The rig rebooted. I installed the GPU driver, tried to run 3dmark (anything just to test the card) and I installed Precision X1. I went into Precision but I had no clock control, no voltage, no power or thermal limit nothing. It was all greyed out. Then 3dmark would not get past the hardware scan. So I disabled the hardware scan and ran Time Spy, card was not boosting and was sitting at 1350mhz which made it slower than a 2080.

By now it was midnight. I had spent two hours just trying to get something running so I could test the GPU. I conceded that in the end I would need to reinstall Windows.

By this time Windows had died any way, and I was getting "unable to find boot device". This was after the killdate.

Great, only one issue. I took every single USB stick I own over to my mother's for building the NAS. I found a SD card, but I have thrown away all of the readers. In desperation I dug through my crawl space and found my PSone mini and thank the heavens there was a 32gb stick poking out of the front. Took the rig down, moved it, put my other rig in and made a boot stick.

By 2am I had Windows back on, this time in UEFI. How it ended up in Legacy I have absolutely no idea. This time, however, it worked. Seems I did well on the GPU front too.





There is one thing left I want to do. Aquasuite still will not pick up my Farbwerk or LT on their own USB splitters. So I am going to have to connect them directly to the mobo.

Then I can get rid of that god awful bloody pink it has defaulted to and have full control over all of the RGB again. Something lacking since I removed my Intel mobo and AquaComputer blame on Ryzen /rolls eyes.

 

Windows: "What's all this software and device drivers nonsense? Away with it!"
Just be glad nvidia are paying the protection money. It would suck if your video card was permanently recognized as a harddrive.

 

I found the Windows killing culprit earlier. Gigabyte RGB fusion. It's like AIDS for your PC.

 

Oh... Seems I forgot about updating this thread again.



It's done. Like, done done. Obviously I got the loop finished. However I had loads to fix. The USB hubs are not compatible with AMD. Hence the rainbow vomit for the best part of 10 months since putting in the TR board. Every time I tried to install Aquasuite it would refuse to detect the devices. Well no, it would detect them and tell me I couldn't use them and blame it on AMD. So for ages and ages I could not access the Farbwerk. That has been sorted though. I simply took all of the AC stuff off the Hubby 7s and put them into the board. Which meant I needed to buy cables etc etc.

It's done though. Like, done done. Everything works now.

 

I see that you are an Alienware estimator like me! Good job here! Also getting the original lights to work its a challenge!

 

Yeah it was. Lots of work with wires haha.

 

See you next upgrade season, then?