Case Mod - In Progress A faster horse - Updated oct 2

After many years of sitting with a 4670K, literally in a shopping basket, I finally have time to upgrade my system and have been gathering components since the start of the year.

This is my second time water cooling, but it has been many years, and as such, I'm not going to do anything super ambitious. I also want to be able to change components in a couple of years without having to redo everything. I also need everything to look neat since this will take up a lot of space in a rather smallish apartment.

But since we are on the topic of "small", I bought a case...



To be continued.

 

Sillyness, but... If anyone want's to know what a 4670K with dual R9 200-series cards look like in a 1000D, here it is.



The system used to be dope, now it's potato.

 

Live in the case. Use the apartment for the computer.

 

So when I ordered the thing, I was aware that it was large. Seeing it live, it is even a bit bigger than I expected.

 

So anyway, a case is not enough. I ordered some more things.

Some RAM.



A motherboard.

 

More things...




This was mid February, thus I was very happy getting my mittens on a 3000-series card.

 

Pressing on, though, as usual, humbled by the mod of the month builds.

I did try running the old 4670K with a 3080 and it performs about as bad as expected, getting about 40 fps on lowest settings 1080p in Doom Eternal. But it IS playable.

I've been getting deliveries for a long time now so most components have arrived...








So the water cooling will be Alphacool radiators, gold fittings from Bitspower, EK pump-res-combo units and blocks with black matte tubing from Corsair.

The idea I have is for 2 separate loops, one for CPU and one for GPU. I'm hoping that it will be fairly easy to upgrade in the future with this setup. The idea I have is to not require moving the tubes between the rads and pumps for a very long time, basically for the lifetime of the components so I can change mobo, CPU & GPU with less effort.

 

I was honestly very happy to do a first test fitting in may, getting to see how the rad would look installed and how the color of the fittings would work inside the case.

Already managed to collect some dust. The system has been running on an AIO for the CPU and box air cooler for GPU for a while now.

So I turned my attention to the pump-res combos units.


The box comes with some mounting hardware that seems to be fairly high quality, sturdy stuff.



However, there is a small problem for me with the case.
There is an area in front of the mobo that I fin looks visually way to busy with all the stock cut outs that they put that I will not be using at all.

Consider this picture. I really like the rubber grommeted pass throughs, but it's too busy for my taste.



I also don't want to mount them on the rads as the mounting hardware seems designed for, because I don't want to obstruct airflow.
So, I had an idea for a mounting plate to make it look much cleaner. I took some measurements and drew a thing in ScetchUp.



(Yes, I photographer my screen with my phone. What kind of an iijit even does that?)

And I made a prototype out of wood...



Which was very good, because somewhere along the line I mucked up the measurements and this thing is way too tall. XD

I took it as proof of concept though. I let the slot for graphics card be large to allow me to potentially, temporarily of course, slot in an air cooled card in the future, if necessary. I ended up with this drawing.



Center of the M3 holes needed for mounting these reservoars is 105 mm, the PDF manual on the website has a lot of useful measurements.

In closing for today, I'd just like to mention that the gold anodized stuff from Bitspower have a very nice finish to them.

 

So I had the idea of mounting my plate with something like these...

Finding these parts was way more difficult than I expected though, and when they arrived from China I realized that the bars are too short and the color is a bit off. So I needed to come up with something else. Thus, I settled on using the mounting brackets that ships with the pump-res from EK on the back of my custom mounting plate.

Speaking of which, I decided to try and make a new prototype in aluminum, then either redo it my self, or send it of the be water jet or laser cut.



I have access to a rotary tool of decent quality so...



I'm no expert but the cuts look decent.

So the thing fits and the cuts are acctually decent after going over the edges with a file so I decided to paint this version and see how it turns out.

 

Everytime I make a hole or otherwise do "damage" to an expensive case, I feel a bit anxious. But, after the first cut, it gets easier. XD

Apart fro the drill hitting the pain, it fits...

And pretty much looks like it's still stock.

So I gave the thing some aluminium primer...

And then some black matte spray paint.

I'm definitely no expert at spray painting, and I can see a few thing I could have done better, but inside the case with other hard ware, I'm going to call it good enough.
Because two screws on the lower pump-rad is placed where there are stock rubber grommets, I made a brace to go on the back side of the mother board tray to make sure everything is super secure, had to order some longer screws for that. Perhaps, whishful thinking, the rubber might even give a touch of vibration dampening?

I'd like to find some washers in matching gold. If anyone knows where to order, tips appreciated.
Otherwise, I'll have to switch to black.

 

Paint them black. You don't want the gold saying "HEY! Look at this bracket!"

 

I'm divided on that issue. The back side is rarely seen and I might use the stock doors that hide the cables. It looks ok in reality, so I might be ok with it showing. Will have to do the cables before I decide on this one.

 

First, someone might care that Arctic has a nice polish on their cool plate.



But I think EK has even better, at least on this Crosshair VIII monoblock.



Technically, the block is not made for Dark Hero motherboard, but it fits. Also, the installation steps in the manual are the same, so it's very easy to take of the old heat sinks and put the block on. Just follow the steps.





Front covers back on, block installed. The only thing I don't like, is the back plate being silver with a blue insulation pad. Will need to change the pad and paint the plate black in a future upgrade. I'll accept it as is for now, since it won't be visible normally.



I also need to buy black replacement mounting screws. But that is also not critical at the moment.



I'mn starting to feel better about the way things look, though.



I would have liked a smaller cutout in the pump-rad mounting plate, but it's a necessary compromise to allow me to slot in most cards in the future without hassle, even with eg a stock air cooler.

I've never tried bending hard tubes before, but after surprisingly few attempts, I seem to get acceptable results.



The gold fittings look sexy af to me. I'd also say, better IRL than on camera.



So for the graphics card, which is an officially supported model, the EK manual is flawless as well.





So I guess I've voided some warranties...



MSI is a bit heavy on the TIM tho. But it's supposed to be non-conductive, so moderate clean up should be fine.



Shiny!

Most here probably know what to do... Put the pads...



Just follow the manual, but remember to get the RGB cable on the right side so you don't have to take the thing apart again like I had to...
Back plat on, put in case.



It doesn't show much in this picture, but there is actually a bit of a tolerance issue that makes the card look like I have a bit of GPU-sag going. It's in place solid though, I don't think I can do much about it.

So next time, I will mention how a leak tester messed with my mind and cost me extra days...

 

So I feel like the loops are done. It is 2 separate runs, onr for CPU, one for GPU.

Top reservoir-pump --> CPU --> Top radiator --> top reservoir-pump.
Bot reservoir-pump --> GPU --> Bot rad 1 --> bot rad 2 --> Bot reservoir-pump.

The slight tilt on the GPU made the tube runs look less perfect than I wanted, but I will accept it for the foreseeable future. When I change hardware, I'll figure something out to make it look perfectly aligned.

The picture is with the loop finally filled, but it was a long way to get there. I hade the loop finished and happily connected a pressure tester, not knowing what head ache it would give me.



If you are in the know, you can spot one of my mistakes instantly, that is too much pressure. I was fooled by the green marking on the gauge and too lazy to RTFM. I can also swear I saw some youtuber use 0,5 bar. So it leaks air. Aaand a few days of fiddling and re-seating basically everything, it still bloody leaks air.

It took me a couple of days of testing, including figuring out that the leak tester it self leaks a bit. The manual suggest 0,3 bar for an entire loop. Still leaks, you can tell after about 30 mins.

Even artificial runs leak air.



In the end, I just accepted that my loop will leak air and that anything more than a 15 min test to rule out a catastrophically large leak is useless.



This seems to have resolved my head ache, because going on a couple weeks of running with water, there is still not a drop of fluid leaked.

Moral of the story? RTFM. And, EK need to change the markings on their gauge. And leak testing with air is of limited value above making sure you didn't forget and end cap, or didn't screw everything in properly. Air leak if fine as long as it's water tight.

Of course, the loop is operational so I can now use my rig, which was a high priority. But, there are still issues...

I also changed the project name to reflect that this computer is meant to be a very functional work horse and therefore needs to be usable and upgradable without too much fabrication required to accommodate new parts.

 

I ran in to another weird issue. I tried to run the commander pro units in a daisy chain of a single USB 2.0 port on the motherboard, and then the lighting nodes from the ComPro's. It seemed to work fine for a while, but then I started to get a strange behavior where one or more units randomly, but frequently, disconnects. It got to the point where it is unusable because of windows making the device disconnected & detected sounds more than every 2 minutes.

I tried basically all possible connection configurations.

It's USB, so it should allow a lot of units.
All units have separate SATA power, so power draw should be fine.

I'm at a complete loss as to what's causing this behavior.

So I googled around a bit, and the best guess I could find was an issue with ComPro and X570 chipset drivers, but not more closely explained or specified. However, I saw suggested on more than one reddit and forum to try an internal USB hub, and decided to give this a go. I thus bought an internal USB hub from NZXT.



For some reason, all issues have so far disappeared, and I can connect the devices in any order and any level of daisy chaining that I have tried so far has worked.

I have no idea why this is, but perhaps X570 chipset drivers don't play nice with the ComPro drivers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

So cable management is something that I will put of for a future upgrade, especially the lower left corner needs better sorting around the drive bays. For now, I'm only running 2 older HDDs, so I've put 2 commander pro's inside the drive bays, which keeps them sorted but attracts a lot of cables. I can just close the back doors, though, and not be bothered for now. Any future upgrade should probably include fully custom cables.



I chose to order a custom cable from pirate dog across the pond to be able to connect EK's rgb-headers to corsairs LED-headers on ComPro.



They work as advertised. So, now the basic look is done. I still have some upgrades in mind to keep my tube runs more secure, but I'm taking a break and focusing on some other projects because I now have all intended the functionality. I will run some benchmarks soon as well. And, I need to get better pictures, the camera on my phone doesn't do justice to the thing, it looks noticeably better in person.

 

There's no shame in hiding a big ball of cables behind a bulkhead. Your only mistake was sharing the picture.
The end result is great.

 

Huge build got the same videocard it's a beast and I've asked msi about putting a block on mine and they said as long as you don't damage anything as they do let you put better pads on.

 

I've had no issues so far. But I consider water cooling something that I do at my own peril, I'm sure my warranty is gone. XD

 

Thx for feed back.

I want the tubes to be straighter and I also want to add more support to the longer running tubes. So, a future upgrade is comming.
Other than that, I'm pretty happy and feel like I've achieved my goal of having an easy upgrade path, or as easy as it can be with water cooling.
I have some issues with the case that I guess I should write about as well.