Good morning Hi people, i have recently upgraded my pc with the following components Motherboard - Asus M4N75TD NF 750a SLI AM3 Motherboard Processor - AMD CPU Phenom II 1090T Black Edition Six Core Processor Ram - Corsair Memory 8GB Vengeance Performance Kit Graphics - 2 x Nvidia 8800gtx BFG cards running SLI (water-cooled) HDD - OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, + 1 raptor 160gb drive and 4 500gb drives 1 x 320gb drive 1 120mm rad acrylic water pump and reservoir 2 x 19" widescreen monitors after the build i decided i didn’t like the case i was using, the case i had was a ally Lian li case, this was donated to me by a friend about 6 month prior to the build. There was nothing wrong with the case i just didn’t like it and it wasn’t doing what i wanted it to do. I am a big fan of movies and have a lot on many different hard drives and this case just wasn’t practical. I then started hunting around for a new case that would cater for all my needs then i found this, THE FRACTAL DESIGN XL. SO i got in contact with Fractal Design and after a couple of emails and a phone call they decided to sponcer me for the build and sent me a case. Two days later there it was waiting for me. I must say guys the standard of the service was second to none. I removed the case from the box and OMG it was massive and so was the smile on my face. What a case, this has everything 10 hard drive bays, 2 140mm fans, 1 180mm fan, removable filters, fan controller, noise reduction system, black screw set, cable ties, 4 5.25 bays, cable management system and the list goes on. So the build starts. WE took apart my old pc and started transferring the parts, the hard drives were first on the list. bottom left was the OCZ vertex 2 SSD followed byt the 160gb raptor drive and 4 500gb hard drives Next on the list was the motherboard and CPU After screwing in the motherboard risers we fixed the motherboard in place. As mentioned earlier there is 10 hard drives bays in this case, i only wanted to use 6 of these so i removed the 4 bay in the middle section of the case and decided this is were i wanted the radiator mounted. after removing one of the runners for the hard drive caddy i got the rad in place and i was very happy with the result. After looking at this a little more i realised that the rad need to be rotated, i span the rad round and swapped the runners over from the top to the bottom and placed the rad back in. On with the cabling I received sponsorship from MOD PC who provided me with the cables for the build, he sent them through and the quality of the cables is awesome. That’s it for part one guys thanks for reading Thanks to my sponsors http://www.fractal-design.com/ http://www.modpc.co.uk/ http://www.exornosolutions.co.uk/
Where are the casemodding ? What do you plan to do, and what have you done. Remember, if its just a build log, it should not be in the casemod worklog forums
I just looked and cant find build log sub forum lol! My bad. Just leave it here for the moment I am sure an admin will chime in sometime. I like the radiator position btw
thanks, i wasnt sure were to stick it to start with, i was going to go for twin 120mm rads, but not sure yet
Ooo i love the fractal case i was a fan of the design but always thought the old case was'nt tall enough then when they brought this one out it seemed perfect
Good morning Guys I managed to get some more done last night and thought i would update you with the process. just another pic of the cables and how they are run through the case The next step was to decide how to run the water pipes. I decided to mount the pump in front of the power supply and run one of the pipes between the motherboard tray and the back of the case so it was hidden, this connects to the Phobya Balancer 150 Gold Plated purchased from YOYO Tech, (Thanks for the great service). Whithin the system is a thermaltake flow indicator, i wanted to do something a little different and have this out side the case, I decided to use the water cooling holes in the back of the case, these also have the silicone rubber grommets as standard, so i run the pipes through and attached the flow indicator. Thats part 2 of the build Thanks for looking and any comments welcome
A word of advice, ditch the thermaltake flowindicator! Its crap! It will make the flow worse, and if i remember corectly (have one lying in a scrap pile at home) its made of alu
I hav found it to be alright, but i will def look into to getting a better one, whatr one would you recomend? thanks for the advice
Little update I havnt had much time to put a lot of work in but i managed to get on the laser cutter at work and make a little piece up I also got my 2nd graphics card through ready to be water cooled and installed After clearing out some boxes at home i found some white coils so i thought i would stick them on and see how they look I also recieved a NZXT Sentry XL so i stuck her in and done all the cables apart from the sensors, im still deciding how to run those. Next on the list is to fit the GPU block and install the card and finish off the loop. Thanks for reading
Weekend update Good morning people I mmanaged to get the pc fully build and running but have got a couple of small issues to deal with I installed the second 8800GTX card with waterblock and finished the water loop Filling up the loop took some time i must say but i am happy with the result. I still have a little bit of air in the system but i a can work on this a little. Problems to resolve The graphics cards are getting to hot, i am going to try changing the thermol paste and re seating the water blocks. The power suply cant handle running the cards in SLI mode (very sad) Air in the system - any help for bleading the system, im not sure if i need to move the cyclone to a verticle posistion. Conclusion I am think of changing the graphics cards to a air cooled 1GB EVGA GTX 560Ti DS Superclocked Selling the GTX cards - this mean i wont have to change the power suply Thoughts and coments welcome Thanks for reading I am in the process of writing my own review on the case and the products i have used. Rob.
First, I think the big problem is, that you decided to go with just a single 120mm radiator to cool a CPU and two GFX. If you want a watercooled SLI set-up, you will need at least a triple 120mm radiator. Second, you have a lot of flow restrictors, such as the flow indicator and you have dual reservoirs, which i pointless and just ruins the flow. I would also recommend a more powerful pump.
Thanks for the comment, i am thinking of changing the graphics card to a single card air cooled so the water loop should be ok with that what do you think? thanks rob
I don't know much about AMD's CPUs, so I don't know how hot it runs. But since it's a six-core i'd reckon it gets pretty hot and I still wouldn't feel sure, that a single 120mm would be suffecient.
I had it running under load on the single rad before the sli configuration was added and it was hitting 45c this under load i thoguht that was ok thanks rob
Good rule of thumb You need 1x120mm rad for every processing unit in loop as a minimum. So 1 cpu and 2 gpu needs 2x120/single 360. Ideally, you should go dual loop if you can afford the money and case space
Thanks mate as mentioned above im ditching the duel 8800gtx and just water cooling the CPU and going to buy a new 560TI and leave it air cooled. the loop will be fine then thanks rob
Well... I really don't like the blue "Big Fractal"-thingy you made with the laser cutter. It doesn't have the right size and looks like a stencil. But that's only my opinion^^ But otherwise a nice build
