Scratch Build – In Progress Another PC in the wall

Ooooh, very very nice.

Load of practicality & a ton of awesome.

 

Moving on to the graphics cards supports, here's how it was done.

First, a few pics of the "beasts" (or so they were called when I bought them. Only 3 months later, the Ti was released at the same price I bought my graphics cards. That's one of my worse timed purchase ever...)






Then, I tested whether the PCIe risers worked as expected.
At first, I tried to use chead risers like that :



Everything worked fine with one graphics card. I even chained two of those risers, since I wanted the graphics cards to be away from the mobo, and it worked ! So I went on and plugged in the second graphics cards, also with 2 chained risers. But the system would simply hang on boot, no beeps, no images...
Since I was quite a novice regarding PCIe risers, I thought the problem was coming from the PCIe slots I was using. Of course, it worked for 1 graphics card, why not for 2, huh ?
So I tried every possible combination of PCIe slots, but it was no use...
I eventually resigned to not chaining the risers.

And guess what ? This time the system booted !!!

Here's a pic of the "PC" switched on, with the risers :



(Okay, you can't really see the risers here, but they were there )


But that wasn't the end of it... In Windows, only one graphics card was detected
Again, I thought it was because of the slots I was using and again I tried every possible combination. It actually worked once, and I threw in a 3D Mark run, but I got a nice BSOD

After some research on the all knowing Internet, I finally understood that unshielded risers are affected by EMI (electromagnetic interference), specially when it comes to using high bandwidth components like graphics cards. Not to mention using two of those side by side...

So I looked up shielded 16x risers and came across 3M models : http://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/pci-express/30025
But OMG, 80€ for 1 riser !!!!

I decided to give a shot to a lower priced model found on Amazon : http://www.amazon.fr/KALEA-INFORMAT...d=1397383388&sr=8-2&keywords=riser+16x+blindé

I thought that if those didn't work, I would send them back and buy the 3M ones.

Fortunately, they worked fine !
I got a score of 13639 on Firestrike 1.1 benchmark with the risers, and about the same results with the graphics cards plugged directly into the mobo.
Here's the link to the benchmark score : http://www.3dmark.com/fs/1309124

All's well that ends well

 

Let's go back to the components' panel, and zoom on the graphics cards support mechanism.

NB : I used the unshielded PCIe risers for this part, in order not to dammage the shielded ones










In order to support the weight of the graphics cards, I chose not to take any chances and add angle brackets as shown below.
On the following picture, you can also notice that I have added two thin panels on each side of the main panel.
They are to hide the tubing links as well as the cables which will be routed along the sides.
The cuts that I made are to be explained later, don't worry

 

Thank you

More to come ! I'm gonna have lunch first

edit : yes, it's already past noon in France

 

Very nice tech wall indeed. Love the general layout and the angled mounts.

 

Lovely, lovely, lovely. When I win the lottery, I will be spending my time making things like this (though doubtless not as well as you).

 

Absolutely gorgeous

 

OMG, very nice work. Chapeau bas !

 

Nice experimentation! Information like this is invaluable for the modder.

 

Hi guys, thanks for your comments

Invaluable information which I could have used to save a lot of time
Hope this is gonna be useful to some

 

Just have to say, this is an absolute brilliant job on the execution of this. Well done.

 

Hello everyone

Today's public holiday in France, so I'll have some time to update this topic. Here we go !


In order to make things more clear as to where the components panel is going to fit, let's take a look back at the desk's structure...




... zoom on the right side, with the desk's work-top closed (with a flat handle at the top to help "open" the desk)...




...held in place by magnets :




The work-top fully open looks like this (the desk is never to be used this way, it's juste to show the "unfolding" steps) :




And finally, the work-top in it's "working" position, with the components panel in place :

 

Getting back to the components panel, the next step was to work on the graphics cards "PCI brackets", which are to be drilled through the left vertical panel below (we'll refer to the thinner vertical panels as "side panels" in the rest of the topic) :




So, I took off that part to work on it :










And with a bracket in place :

 

If you're OK with it, I'll skip most of the zooming on the watercooling components like fittings and waterblocks to focus mainly on the building steps. However, if you want to have more information on particular parts, feel free to ask, I'll be glad to give specifics

Now that the desk is ready to house the components, let's get to the watercooling part should we ?

First, we'll take care of the tubing.

I bought a bunch of 10mm/12mm x 1m tubes from an acrylic shop, and not from specialized watercooling shops who charge 4 times the price for "special watercooling tubes".




As I was going for tube bending, I was afraid the cheaper tubes would not be happy with that, but let's take a look at how things turned out to be.

Heat gun securely seated :



With the help of a 9mm diameter silicone tube from Primochill, my first try without any stencils looked like this :






Not bad huh ? I really could not figure out why Primochill tubes would be more expensive than those that can be found at specialized shops, except for coloured tubes which are indeed hard to find.

After a few tries, here's what I was able to accomplish :





I didn't use any particular method with exact measurements to get to what I wanted, and only used a rounded leg chair to get the rounded angles which I ajusted little by little by heating some more if needed. Thats quite "crafty", I know, but hey, as long as you get the expected results, where's the problem ?

Regarding the holes positionning in the side panels to let the tubes through, I had to be very precise and after spending some time in calculating the exact location of each hole, here's what it looked like :




Last bend but not least, the piece of tubing used to link the two graphics cards :



(on this picture, there's a GTX 680 on top and a GTX 780 below, but no worry, two 780 are to be used in the final setup )

 

After the graphics cards support, the pumps support.

I cut a simple rectagle out of a piece of wood, drilled a few holes in order to hold the pumps in place, and added two angled mounts underneath to support the weight.
With the two pumps in place and a reservoir attached, here's how it looks :






Of course, when adding the second reservoir, the two of them won't be able to stay in an angled position without support.
So, I mounted a pair of reservoir braces on a wooden support :








And if you wanna take a peek at what it will look like with the tubing, here goes !

 

Afterwards, I decided to tackle one of my favourite parts of the mod : a motherboard hiding plate.
I was very fond of Asus Sabertooth "armor", and wanted to extend this idea of hiding unwanted parts a little bit more.
So, I ordered a few pieces of 3mm thick transluscent white acrylic panes from my the same shop I ordered the acrylic tubes :






Then, I had to come up with a nice design for my home-made "armor". The idea was to hide everything that wasn't necessary. Therefore, were to be made visible : the CPU waterblock, the RAM sticks, the LED POST, the power and reset buttons, the graphics cards and the sound card.
I also wanted to use this "armor" to visually link the different parts, as I wanted the graphics cards and sound card to be away from the motherboard.
However, I had no specific idea of the final result I wanted...
Therefore, after a few hours of trial and error, I came up with this design :



(NB : CG = graphics card, CS = sound card, CM = mobo)


The next step was to translate this design to the acrylic pane.
On the left, my "blueprint", on the right, my measurements, and in the middle, the "victim"




After spending some time with my drawing tools :





Afterwards, I took out my fretsaw, which I used on the dining table despite my wife getting mad at me for that...




Since I was working on my build during the week, and could not work outside late because of the lack of lighting, I managed to keep her busy in front of "The vampire diaries" for a few hours while I was tackling the acrylic cutting

After a first rough cut, here's what it looked like :






Then I took some time to sand the edges and corners to get this :






You may have noticed there are "holes" which do not match any components. This is to add a touch of blue, by using coloured acrylic which i held in position using small pieces of double sided tape :