Case Mod - In Progress Lian Li PC-O9 - Maximus Leader in a glass house

I haz done some work..


Received my new pump and installed it with a 45° fitting to get the tube to the port in the wall.




It's hanging off the reservoir and sitting on a foam cushion (Phobya)



and this time (last build I forgot it..) I included the drain
I really like how this looks and works..


Even more so, I really hope that this will seal neatly with all those connections..



Also got some more sleeve, so I could finish my SATA sleeves and the i/o Panel cables.. and ordered more Shade-19 and Atomic Green for my HTPC build.. (however far out this one still is )



Sleeving (CPU, ATX and PCI-Ex only)




The ATX only



Too bad you can see the blue from the USB connector..


Cables on the GPU look amazing, imo




I chose shade 19 for most cables on purpose. This way they won't disturb the looks of the hardware too much

 

Still waiting for the thermal pads to fix the backplates to my cards, the glue for the monsoon tubes, the 45° fitting for the top rad and the uv reactive water additive..
2 weeks ago, I received an e-mail that they would send my stuff right away.. no news since.

Without the 45° fitting in the top left corner, I cannot start assembling any more, because that part there will require some space to work with.
Without the glue, I cannot install any tubes. Without leak testing first, I won't install any cables..

Looks like I'm stuck..

sorry for the crappy smartphone pics that follow, but besides being stuck with my project, I also caught a nasty flu and feel like ****.

I installed the WD Gold hard drives in the cage. Oh, Lian Li, how I would like to punch the guy who designed this cage!





Also, I experimented with the bending tool yesterday and damaged it already.
Didn't realise that you can take your time after heating the tubing and so I held the tool over the heat gun.. now it's molten in some place and leaves a mark in the tube..




However, even though I do have the Monsoon insert, the tubes don't really bend evenly.. loads of deformation in my first tries..





the front connection will be done with a tube after all. The second try already looked quite acceptable.







There's some good news though.. I treated myself to some new headphones and a headphone amp this christmas.
Meet my audiophile setup:
Beyerdynamic DT-990 (250 Ohm "Edition"), Destiny Audio Aristaios Mk II tube amplifier, FiiO X5 2nd gen DAP


And the amp alone, shot on camera


without the cages



I will put that amp on my desk as well and hopefully be able to do a comparison against my ASUS Xonar Essence STX at some point.

 

i can whole heartedly recommend the digital master edition release of Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, that album really pops with good sounding cans and processing gear!

both your pc and sound setup looks tasty a.f.!

 

Thanks, love the 180g remaster on vinyl, so I'll check the digital remaster out

 

Got to do my MOLEX cables today.

This one goes to the Soundcard


My Minion helped making these, since Christmas season always stresses me out..



Then there's the special purpose power MOLEX connector


Wall-E helped with that one since it got a bit complicated with the wiring..


the two of them had it figured out quite quickly and sleeved the cables


posing with a pile of tiny cables


Wall-E then had to leave because there were mountains of scraps and leftovers to clean, but my Minion wanted to show you the final product






Explanation:
The standard Pinout of a MOLEX power connector is as follows
12V
GND
GND
5V

That's what I use for the Soundcard. The PCI-connector at the other end is plugged in at the MOLEX/SATA plug in the PSU.


However, most devices, such as LEDs, the Pump, fan controllers, etc. use only the 12V and one GND wire, leaving 50% of the connector empty.
So, inspired by another modder, I decided to merge those half-used connectors. The small dual MOLEX splitter now has the following pinout on both connectors:
12V
GND
GND
12V

It's going to be plugged in at the second PCI-Ex plug on the PSU, where there are 4 12V and 4 GND sockets.

This way, I can now merge 2 devices (Pump and Fan controller, and LEDs respectively) each into one connector and plug that in at the splitter, instead of using 4 connectors and loads of wire.

Next up (tomorrow) is the wiring for the HDD cage, my installation for the LEDs and some more bending of PETG tubing.

Stay tuned

 

Cables are all done now, I've got 7 SATA cables and the power cable for my drives done:


The drives are so close together that it was impossible to sleeve the areas in-between


The SSD is slightly off-set, therefore that weird bend at the end.


My Minion also, after killing another foot of tubing, worked on two more parts of the loop:





The GPU-CPU tube was actually a real pain in the butt, because there has to be an off-set of about 1,5cm


here you can see it better:



I'm quite happy with the result, but will probably shorten the CPU-MB tube slightly.

 

Continued to work on my build a little..

I bought 2 metres of this:


Cut them to pieces, glued them together and painted them black


They will be taped to the interior of the case to provide an angled base for the LED strips.
Have yet to find somebody who will solder the LED strips for me. Then I have to figure out whether I can run them off a fan connector (it'll be 1,2m of LEDs) alone or whether I need a MOLEX connector..


Then I worked on the most difficult of my bends and got it right the very first time:







I also redid the front connector and now it looks much prettier:


All the tubes I've got installed so far.



Now there's only the one in the back missing..


oh, yeah, I'll have to glue the caps on too, clean the cooling blocks and fittings and install them permanently


Here's one to finish off this year and keep you looking forward to the final sprint to the finish line




ps: I'm quite happy with how the bends turned out.. not what I would've dreamed off, but certainly not bad for my very first tries..
Will redo the difficult ones when I get the new video card next summer, so I'll try to make them even prettier.

 

This is so very true. The forums have changed a lot. It used to be a really lively place, at times it was like the wild west, total chaos but so much fun.

One of my projects went for ove 80 pages had over 800 comments and over 250,00 views.

Sadly those days are gone. But keep up the good work, you're doing well.

And the bit about his sister is true. I had to take her some crisps and a pot noodle to keep her going

 

Hey guys

Thank you so much for the nice words!

I hope I can make the time to finish the tubing I've got so far.. and maybe Aquatuning will be so nice as to send me my stuff already..

I was really hoping to get this build up and running before school starts again.. looks like I'm outta luck.. (resulting in several weeks delay, I'm afraid..)

 

Got my last package and I really hope I can finish it, leak-test and set up an OS over the next weekend..
I'll be gone for two full weeks after then..

 

I'm really looking forward to seeing this completed. Super work so far, loving it!

 

Here we go

I applied the glue (Monsoon hardline uv curing adhesive) and brought the tubes out into the overcast day to cure.


the blue tape is usually intended to cover sensitive areas when polishing the car, so it leaves no residue and comes off easily afterwards.



The last tube (MB to top Rad) turned out great.. (after the first attempt ended up in the trash.)

After installation:



I'll definitely change the routing at the GPU when I get the new card this summer.
I want the one coming in (from below) do so at the right and the one going out to the CPU do so at the left, to separate the tubes above the GPU better optically.


But I'm quite happy with how it looks for a first try.



I'm especially glad about how traight they turned out in the end:




Then there was the water

There were several issues.. On one hand, some of the collars yellowed noticeably (because of the glue, that I am positive about. But why only some?) and at least one didn't cure at all (as in, I could simply pull out the tube).
I didn't realise that until I had it all installed and was leak-testing the loop.

Here's my leak-testing
On the bottom right (the one at the bulkhead) you see where my leak was..



My cable chaos already started to manifest, and that's without a power suply, any of the power cables or the HDD cage with cables installed



The reservoir works very nicely and I'm curious to see how it will look with the red UV dye and the UV LED ring




I first installed the main cables so I could set up Win10 Pro (64) on my Samsung M.2 SSD


In complete darkness:



As you can see, there are only three RAM bars installed.
The reason for that is quite simple: One of them decided to stop working between my first tests and yesterday night.
I couldn't get the system to boot when that bar was installed. (Will have to RMA that one and hope that Corsair is fast about a replacement)


After I had Win 10 ready (installation from a 200MB/s USB stick to 1'500MB/s M.2 drive.. fuuuun!), I ran some benches and saw that it was good..
Furmark and Prime 95 both at "maximum heat" and the GPU and CPU both didn't exceed 42°C (with the room being at around 22°C, but I didn't check the water temp).


Then came some more serious stuff.
I installed the Raid controller and tried to set up my 2x2 + 2x1 TB Raid 10.. well.. no chance.
I didn't know that you have to use drives with identical capacity for a Raid 10 (why can't you stripe a larger and a smaller drive, then mirror the it?!?!)
So I ended up using 2x2 and 2x1 TB Raid 1's...

Over night I had the computer format the two RAIDs and I'm currently trying to get the data back from an old hard drive (I installed a WD green in the smaller Raid1 and try to copy my data from the "old" WD Gold 1TB card to my new Raid,
THEN replace the WD green with the WD Gold to have the Raid rebuild itself.. (Because my backup via W-Lan took 10+ hourse and I don't want it to go that slow.. lol)



These are from a few minutes ago:







Never mind all the fingerprints, it's a work in progress and I didn't bother cleaning anything!




Next up, after all the storage has been properly transplanted and the backups been restored..
I won't be home for the next two weeks, so there's gonna be another delay..


Coming up next:
- Install LEDs (still have to look for a PWM dimmer to control the brightness of my LEDs and actually solder the LED strips so I can power them)

- Have faulty RAM bar replaced and install fourth RAM bar

- Replace water with UV-red dyed water (just for the sake of having red glowing water in the reservoir, even though you will never see it in use)

- Take final pictures (until the GPU replacement in summer, where there will be new pictures taken)

- Overclock the crap out of this baby and install games (maybe even: play some games )

 

Well, well, well.. 2 weeks, maybe 48 hours of running and that's what the super clear tubing looks like..

Any ideas as to how this happened?

 

First test with overclocking:



I only enabled TPU II in the UEFI, then ran prime95 (max heat) and furmark at the same time.

Didn't further OC the gpu, just copied the settings I last used on my old build.

Guess there's some room to reduce the voltage on the GPU, that would also reduce the temps significantly.

 

I now set the multiplier to 46 (4.6GHz)
Voltage manually set to 1.35V and LLC to lvl 6.. that way the cpu gets 1.41V under load.
maximum temperature it reaches under prime 95 (max heat setting) is 58°C. (With the fans at 800rpm)
The water never exceeds 31°C (which is a dT of 10K)

Couldn't get it stable at 4.7GHz with 1.35V but it worked at 1.40V (rising to 1.46V under load) without exceeding 60°C.

I was really hoping to be able to get 4.8GHz stable, but that only works with 1.50V (1.56V under load) and I fear that this would be too much for the CPU in the long run..
Even though it can't get beyond 70°C (in the max heat test in prime95).


I guess I'm lucky with the outcome of my delidding and the temperatures I can achieve, but not so much with the performance of my CPU..

 

Shuld get my LED pwm dimmer, the cable combs and the norprene tubing soon and be able to install all those things within the next two weeks (I'm off to go shredding some pow next week)
Will snap some final pics once that's done.

I soldered the LEDs and am quite happy with the outcome, considering it's my first time ever.







The main cable will get some sleeving too, as soon as I know the exact length I need to connect it to the pwm dimmer.
Using an old MOLEX cable with connectors already installed (since I don't have any spare ones to crimp my own cable )

The dimmer will be installed at the back of the case with the poti peeking out where the old dimmer for the Lian Li RGB LEDs was, so that I can regulate the brightness easily.


Once all that's done, I'll provide pics of the setup in use. (Including my desk, studio monitors, the tube amp, etc. )

 

Done, done, and done
Got the RAM, tubing, LEDs and dimmer.

Only thing missing now are the cable combs, but I'm finally up and running and happily so.

Dimmer and LED's are connected for a test run


full power


a little dimmer (no pun intended)


abused the RGB-control panels space to install the dimmer:




Then there was that.. I was told it's the UV light, but cannot be, since the little tube at the bottom was affected too and no UV reached there..


got norprene tubing now:



refill please..


added some UV active (red fluorescent dye) to the water





not perfectly happy with the cables, but I'm not gonna lose my mind over this, you can't even see them.. (okay, you can't see the red water with UV effect either, but I love that I know that it's there in secret )



LED's in open case
too bright at full power


a little better


almost at the lowest level now




Now, with the windows on and on my desk

no LEDs


so glad I bought the dimmer.. would've been a pita with max brightness


dimmer..


dimmer


how I have it now:



And the view on my desk right now:



white balance is weird, because the halogen desk lamp is much warmer than the LEDs, so I had to make a compromise with the white balance in the image.

Periphery:
Yamaha HS5 studio monitors
Destiny Audio Aristaios Mk II headphone tube amp
EIZO CS270 27" Adobe RGB monitor
Corsair K70 keyboard
MIONIX Naos 7000 mouse



Ask away, if you want to know something.

 

I really expected more feedback once the project was finished..

 

once again mate, very nice job...big amount of work, clean pics and a pleasant thread to follow, your desk is just amazing now, and I absolutely love your amp. There is only one point witch tickels me, and even if MDPC sleeving is so great, I would prefer a more symmetric cable managment IMO , but its a detail.