Project: FrozenFire (MORE!! Watercooling changes Sep 8 05)

In my most painful act of spending so far, I've ordered my pair of 6800 GT PCI Express graphics cards! Newegg had them on sale for $375 each so relatively speaking it was a pretty good deal. Even if I can't get them watercooled too soon *cough*dan/SNT*cough* I can at least watch the spinny thing on the power meter go around faster.

 

Lol! Nice project btw

 

The CF mod looks good and fits your project well. I would say congrats on 3K posts, but your already up to 3018. That is a mammoth number of posts dude.

 

that CF mod looks really good, if i can find some CF, i might just have to CF my

keep up the good work

 

Really diggin' those double pumps and rads, you got a really good system coming together. The wire management looks like it will be a little bit hard, but with the bottom of the case being as big as it is, I'm sure you will find room somewhere. Good job!!
Mafia

 

Looking good...

 

Thanks for the encouraging words all. Yeah, wire management will be a bit tricky (to say the least) but I have plans. I've already made the molex leads modular (I never got a great pic of it though, I will so don't worry) and I'm basically doing custom wiring for all of those.

I just don't know how much power I can safely pull off of a single set of wires, so I'm hoping I don't have a meltdown when it comes to powering all the SATA drives. It'll be five or six total

Anyone know the maximum current (or I suppose wattage, I'm not sure how it would be measured) I can put down 18ga stranded copper wire?

My Raptor says .75a @ 12v, .93a @ 5v, 9 and 4.65w respectively. I'll likely have two Raptors, a triplet of 80 gig-ers and possibly one of those massive 300GB 16MB cache drives. So in theory I could be drawing up to 4.5a at 12v and 5.58a at 5v. I'm almost positive that the 7.2k rpm drives won't draw as much power but I'd rather be on the safe side!

I'm guessing I'll get the video cards on Wednesday or maybe Thursday. I live in VT and everything is shipping from NJ (lucky me!) and it looks like it's already packed and probably sent, and just doesn't have a tracking # yet.

 

all i can say is for the carbon drive

 

Know what kicks ass?

^^

A PCIE 6800GT.

Know what kicks more ass?

Two of them.

Know what kicks EVEN more ass?

Getting them delivered by 11:30am a day early (when I got out of school today)!

Thank you Newegg!

Also, my 10 (!) 39" SATA cables are in. Ten because it was cheaper after shipping than six since they have a bulk rate and I'll find a use or sell them or something. The 80GB SATA HDD for my dad's new comp (my old P4) also came in but that's irrelavent.

Pics in a little while, but SUH-WEET!

/edit - the cards are in. I think I still need some tweaking but at stock everything (incl CPU which is hugely bottlenecking it right now) and quite a bit going in the background I hit ~14k 3dm03. One of the fans is... kinda off... *crunchcrunchcrunch* but I'll deal with that.

/edit2 - fixed the fan. Apparently one of the stickers on the blower wasn't on right. It came off and got sucked right into the fan and was hitting it. All better now. It's quieter than before (it got sucked in) if anything Really doesn't seem any louder than the single 6600GT.
Unfortunately I can only use one monitor (at this time) when in SLI mode. Hopefully nVidia either a) changes/fixes that or b) lets you enable/disable SLI without rebooting. Not a huge problem, I was just starting to get used to dual displays though. I can do at least four (all DVI!) with SLI off though.

 

New parts

Some stuff came in today... unfortunately I don't have any pics yet but it IS here.



What can I say, they deserve it! Like I said earlier, Chris at CECM was kind enough to sponsor me with a pretty decent amount of stuff:
5 total "large" size Plexi sheets:
1 Yellow
1 Clear
2 Smoke
1 Radiant - Damn is that stuff cool! It changes color with the angle you're looking at it. The effect is amazing... I'm just not totally sure how I'll use it. The pics on their site don't do it justice at all.

2 Oversize plexi sheets (24x18" I think)
1 Clear
1 Smoke

Other:
2 120x25mm Sunon fans
2 12" Logisys UV CCFL kits

Apparently it's 15 pounds worth of stuff! Came in a box bigger than anything I've even gotten from Newegg. I'm really at a loss as for what to do with all the boxes I've gotten... they're starting to accumulate! Not to mention two trash bags full of packing peanuts

Not only that, but the rest of my Carbon Fibre vinyl sheets came in. Bill was really easy to get in touch with about the shipping issue and with any luck I'll actually have enough to cover everything that I want to, which is quite a bit... At the very least I have one drive down.

I also (temporarily of course!) zip-tied a 120mm fan to the reservoir for some better chipset cooling. The passive thing is starting to scare me, especially with the added heat from two graphics cards. It does seem that I've fixed my overclocking issue that I was having (check out the hardware area) by a different driver... I've now hit about 18.5k on 3dMark03.

 

Must be nice getting free stuff.. Chris is a good guy. I have been getting my acrylic from him for a few years. I wondered how that Radiant acrylic looked! I almost purchased some (a few times) just to find out..

 

Well having run a small review site (we've never really had the time nor the manpower to make it a huge place) made it a bit easier, but we never got anything like graphics cards or CPUs (not for lack of trying though...). Really mostly just heatsinks and case mod stuff. We did get a decent Swiftech H2O kit but as I'm not using socket A anymore (or high-flow watercooling) it's not going to a whole lot of use.

Chris mentioned this to me about the radiant:
Some info about the radiant. The material has a protective poly film on
both sides. When it is peeled off you can see a difference between the
two sides. The radiant is clear acrylic with a mylar applied to one
side. The mylar will scratch and scuff kinda easy so that is the side
you want on the inside of your case. If you have any questions about
this please let me know.

Basically it's clear plexi with the color-change film on one side. Straight on it looked bluish and at angles it went to purple then red then yellow and right around the highest viewing angles (I guess) towards green. Really cool effect.

The fans I got push a ton of air! They should be excellent candidates for my controller setup. The stock 120mm fans move a decent amount of air at an acceptable noise level but I couldn't imagine they'd be too effective turned down as radiator fans. Especially with all the stuff I'll have in my loop... it probably adds up to cooling three prescotts. At least considering that the cards each idle around 65c, probably another 10-15 higher at load (unfortunately Rivatuner has trouble reading SLI'd GPU temps which is what my LCD plugin relies on).

The good news is that my PSU has no trouble at all handling the immense load. I've yet to really overclock my CPU much, really just because of the passive cooler on the chipset rather than stock cooling on the CPU, but it was the graphics cards that worried me. Plus another good 60 watts in hard drives alone (5 and counting!). How DO I have 5 HDDs and not even break the 300GB mark? Once I've had my say though, we'll have near a terabyte in the house I think, a good two thirds of that being mine.

 

The Radiant Plexi is AWESOME!!!

Firehed you are going to love the "Radiant" acrylic. I bet it is going to look really nice against the black case. I am building a box for my rad out of the stuff. So far I've replaced my clear window for my side panel with the radiant material and it is awesome.

My acrylic guy is taking too long to finish my rad. I've built a model out of cardboard and he is simply taking what I built and making a box to fit my rad into. Should be sweet when it is done. I'm thinking about sending it to Chris so he can finish it up. Well finish would imply that my guy has started working on it, which he hasn't. I may have to give Chris a call.

 

I'm not sure how (or even if!) I'm going to use the radiant stuff yet but it does look great, that's for sure. If I do a top window over the Audigy it may go there, or possibly over the PSU area.

 

Well, I didn't do much on the weekend (busy with other stuff) but some parts came in and I spent last night doing more carbon fibre work. The PSU was just horrible to do but came out pretty nicely - not only were the 200 someodd hexagons I had to cut out but all the stuff on the back (misc plugs and sockets) had to be worked around as well.

Anyways, onto the pics!


My new babies - a pair of eVGA 6800 GT PCI Express cards!


Just the junk they came with... I've now got plenty of DVI adaptors


And more..


Some purdy cards


Ten 100cm SATA cables. Cheaper than buying the six I needed so I can't go wrong. I'm not totally sure how I'll route them yet but I've got ideas.


The reason I couldn't do anything this weekend... feel free to visit me in July if you're in VA but I won't have the comp with me.


The cards installed.... SLI baby!


Lots of acrylic!




A decent view of the radiant material. Looks better in real life and you can't get a great pic with a flash. Oh well... it's still cool and if you're looking for a really interesting window material, head over to The Cutting Edge and pick some up!


A quartet of 120mm vantec stealths. I got them cheap off a fellow Bit member, but they probably won't go in this comp. I'll likely be using the much more powerful 120mm's from CECM that'll be controlled.


Some misc tools and whatnot... the other 120mm fans that CECM sent are in there too.

Here's some carbon fibre'd PSU action! And yes, it still works. I kinda cheated on how I cut out all the little hexagons so in person it's not quite perfect but the flash makes any imperfections show up more than you'd notice in real life. I'm not even sure if the PSU will be visible when the mod is done so it may not matter anyways.






I did the other DVD drive, it looks the same as the other one so just look at the back of it.


The PSU in it's home.


Just an overall shot. People always seem to forget these! That ziptied 120mm is just temporary of course.... with the dual graphics cards the passively-cooled chipset was getting less airflow than ever and that was scaring me as I've already fried one nForce4-SLI.


Another shot of the cards installed. My homemade PCIE power plugs work and both cards still live.


Just another shot of the top of the case.

Enjoy it! I've got more carbon fibre vinyl left over than I anticipated (a good thing) and I'll get around to using it. The audigy drive seems to stick out a bit but it may move anyways. I've got plenty of ideas. I just hope the rest of my damned watercooling stuff comes before July!

 

Looks really nice!
The dual graphics cards are starting to get popular.


Offtopic:

Tell me if you see any people from texas, who are in the crew 425 or something smilar to that, I'm pretty sure it was 42-something-.

 

Nice work Firehed! What Audigy card do you use? I want to buy an Audigy 4 pro but need to know the lenght of the card first. I don't know if there enough room left for it. (17,4 cm) I've mailed several shops and posted the question on several forums but no answer yet.

 

It's an Audigy 2 Plat. However I'm pretty sure an Audigy4 would be almost identical in size. May be a close fit... I seem to remember it being ~7" long which is just under 18cm. I can double-check for you in a little while.

I'll be seeing people from all over the country if it's anything like last time

 

Nice, however I feel that the PSU is being let down by the holes. Maybe paint the "inside" of the holes black to mask them against the CF, make it look a little more ... dammit whats the word... cohesive (that'll do) and not just a "quick (which it was far from ) 'n dirty" componant mod.

Keep up the good work otherwise!

 

I agree, however like I said the flash makes it a lot more noticible than it really is. And there's this odd plastic sheet that covers a few holes which is presumably for insulating purposes which doesn't help but I don't feel comfortable removing it. I'll ponder that a bit more. Unfortunately my options are fairly limited as it's nearly impossible to get the guts out of this PSU (not all, I've done it before, just this one, because of how the back stuff is connected). I could end up just cutting out at least parts of the mesh but I don't want to risk a screw or something falling in there somehow (not that I know how one would randomly appear there, but things happen).

Oh Isuo - upon more thinking, Texas is probably the entire 400 set (up to 440 or 450). Vermont has 140, 141 and 142 which is 3 troops (of 40 kids+adults) and the number of troops depends on the state population. There'll be ~40k scouts there which means a thousand troops, and we have three of them. Our state pop is ~650k I think, versus, what, 10M in Texas?