Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Hush!

I saw the reviews for it maybe a year ago - really seems like an excellently designed block with incredibly fine and fantastically machined channels (they're so uniform I presume they're CNC machined with a slot disc rather than skived) - 0.15mm wide fins with 0.2mm thick channels, and the acceleration nozzle aimed at the CCX/cores to optimize turbulence there. Can see why it came top in testing by a decent margin, though restrictive as a result of the design.

 

Totally agree, the machining is made with "scrupulous attention to detail" (I quote them ) and I believe so when it's manufactured in Germany, those guys are serious...EK certainly offers some high end coolers as well, but I found, in addition to their efficiency, that the overall design of TechN coolers is much more beautiful...
BTW, may be you visited it already, but if not, they have other wonderful items on their site, I like their pumps a lot too...

I would think that the design wouldn't be that restrictive, considering the dimention of the case, it seems to me that the free space for air circulation is enough for a good heat dissipation

 

Yes I saw their DDC pumps - very nice design (though I'd prefer a clear top with a surrounding hidden band of LEDs behind aluminium housing). I'm going for D5 this time round for noise reasons - in the past I found the 18w ddc noisy and even the 10w DDC was only really quiet at very low voltage.

 

Update

Tidied up the alternative orientation PSU hole with some dremelling/filing and sanding. Cut and installed some rubber spacer strip between the aluminium angle legs and the veneered backwall, and drilled/countersunk 8 more holes to the aluminium angle legs, to give more structural rigidity and some vibration dampening. Made things shiny.

Here's the backwall/frame, with the 'alternative PSU orientation' hole open.

PSX_20221201_231915 by Tom ., on Flickr

Really must break out the full-frame DSLR and take some better pics as my phone camera really struggles in low light and smears detail with aggressive noise reduction!

PSX_20221201_234912 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20221201_234350 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20221201_232600 by Tom ., on Flickr

Thanks for reading.

 

Looking LUSH.

 

Glorious. Can't wait to see it get stuffed like a turkey !

 

Brrrrraaakkkk! Turkey getting stuffed, and merry Christmas!

Been a bit snowed under with flu and family things.

Gave the walnut-veneered wall 2 coats of the finishing oil (tung/polyurethane mix mainly). Got an EK FLT80 reservoir and gold-plated D5 bottom. Probably going to live like in the video below as gives a super short loop. Very shiny! Replaced some of the countersunk black screws with GR5 titanium ones. Made a temporary polystyrene block to hold up to pump (need to make a vibration-dampened bracket). Soft tubing doesn't like any bend radius with an unsecured pump, hence the pump being at a funny angle in the vid.

Hammered in the 14mm pipe bender pivot pin (it was misaligned by about 2mm for the two halves with the pipe grooves. I hammered through by perhaps 2mm with a centre punch chisel, and inserted two external 8mm circlips as spacers for tge pivot pin. Seems to be about right from eyeballing. The polished and lacquered copper hard-tubing with the golden corsair (bitspower) fittings will be added later.

Something of a temporary loop atm - need to check the GTX 4090 works fine aircooled before putting the block on and redoing the loop, so just the CPU in the loop currently. Doesn't leak!

Got a Bitspower vertical GPU bracket.

https://shop.bitspower.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=7012

It can have two cards vertical, and it's modular so you can remove half when one one card is in use. It's CNCed and looks very nice, though it's black (I think anodised rather than powder-coated). May well be fine as the motherboard is black and looks pretty good installed, but need to see what it's like when the cards in place.

Anyhow, here's a vid. Will post more photos for the bits I described, but it's 10:51pm and I wanted to make the xmas turkey pun and fighting against the cluck a bit here. Merry Christmas all!

YouCut_20221225_222010169 by Tom ., on Flickr

 

Woop woop!

 

Here's the Bitspower vertical GPU conversion bracket (disassembled). As with most Bitspower stuff it's very nice, CNCed aluminium, though anodised black which doesn't fit the walnut and shiny aluminium of the rest of the case.

20230102_224607_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

Thanks Andy (Vault-Tec) for the advice on stripping the anodising with sodium hydroxide - from a bit of reading chromic/phosphoric acid is cleaner at just removing the aluminium oxide/dye of the anodised layer and leaving the underlying aluminium and surface finish intact if anyone needs dimension-critical de-anodisation or wants to strip the reanodise. I'm going to sand down to mirror surface, and have caustic soda granules already and no want to get phosphoric or chromic acid and the hazard and difficulty that poses, so caustic soda it is!

I used 12 teaspoons (~60mls) of caustic soda granules in 3l of water at around 45C. Very quick reaction! Stripped the anodising layer in around 90 seconds. Slower would probabIy be better (less chance of pitting from localised rapid reaction with a faster overall stripping apparently, though I saw no issues). I put screws in all the threads with medium strength loctite 243 threadlocker in to seal to preserve the anodising on the screwthreads to keep them anodised and hopefully prevent galling in future.

Here's the vertical GPU bracket after and assembled - here with both 'struts' for 2 vertical cards - it'll be with just the left-hand gpu strut used. The odd smudge there is just a bit of dye and smut that's stubborn to get out of the material-blasted aluminium with an old toothbrush - will go with sanding and polishing.

20230105_154119_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230105_154148_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

A little bit of lapping of the flat faces of the pci-bracket plate with 600 grit sandpaper. It's quite delicate with chamfered edges... I'll only be using the left-strut to vertically mount the GPU (the other one is unneeded restriction to passive upwards airflow). I'll end up mirror-polishing it all, bar maybe bits that only will be seen from the back of the case. I'm leaving the other bits unsanded for the moment, as I have some plans for that solid block of aluminium at the end and need to keep the faces dimensionally accurate/true until that's done...

20230105_200749_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230105_200727_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

 

You will hate the decision to polish such a complicated part.

 

Yup. Especially because it looks like it has been bead blasted for a lovely satin finish.

Personally (but feel free to ignore me) I would polish the face edges and leave the rest satin. IMO it will still look incredible, but you won't sacrifice your sanity. That is why when I talked about doing the BMX parts I said I just go over it will the finest steel wool and leave it there. If you attempt to go further? you will see what Cheaps is getting at lmao.

 

You were fairly right Cheaps, though not as soul-destroying as you'd have thought - fairly sure Bitspower went for an easily anodised and easily workable aluminium alloy (probably 6061) so a4 sheet of wet'n'dry sandpaper on a flat surface/plane, with most of the surfaces being flat meant most was surprisingly easy, and only a few intricate surfaces needed sanding with sandpaper wrapped around a small flat aluminium piece to get to the fiddly bits.

 

I was merely unable to calculate the size of your 'ball locks'.

 

Cheaps, we've found us a massochist.

 

Well, DUH. He's here, isn't he?

 

Sorry for delay in updating - life got in the way. Right then. System in, ghetto-rigged.
Photos below

That big fat heatsink on the 4090 goes well past the PCI bracket and made fitting thumbscrews to attach the 4090 to the pci bracket very, very annoying

That is a block of polystyrene and some neoprene mat temporarily supporting the D5 pump/reservoir until I fit the gpu block and bracket and know what height to attach a pump bracket to the case. That is a bottle of Copydex glue helping support the 4090. PSU is sat external in a coolermaster vertical frame waiting for screwholes to attach to the back of the case, wires everywhere. Tubing and compression fittings are temporary - needed to check everything works before positioning and fitting the lovely Alphacool Eisblock Aurora waterblock and Bitspower vertical GPU bracket, hard polished copper piping and shiny gold corsair compression fittings used.

Lighting on the TechN CPU block, EK FLT 80 D5 reservoir and G skill trident z5 neo RAM all synced to a low whitish light. Inno3D ichill card RGB lighting decided not to play ball with their own ITune overclocking/RGB control software, and so cycles through the rainbow...

Just the CPU in the loop atm, with the GTX4090 aircooled sat it in spewing most of the hot air into the case to warm the top of the passive radiator! 7950x at it's stock, auto-voltage, which seems very high around 1.43 + Vcore ish at times. Absolutely ragging all cores in linpack in a hot room yesterday and I saw it get to 89C max with cpu drawing 205w in hardware monitoring software, with 42C at largely idle on desktop web-browsing. Need to get to grips with the dynamic clocking - seems a little tricky to know how the CPU is doing and will need to tinker around with power curves etc. From HWMonitor logs it's boosted up to 6510mhz max on core0 during gaming. No idea if that's decent! Today in normal ambient room (maybe 19C) and the 7950x seems to sit at around 60C using around 90w for the CPU (at 4k with 4090 gpu) after an hour or so - presume the game is GPU limited. Corsair AX600i PSU doesn't spin up - gives a brief spin up at boot then just runs passive (think it starts spinning at above 600w or so wattage draw.

Here's a few pics

20230213_232438_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230213_215105_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230213_232417_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

20230213_215048_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

 

What the...? 6510! a u kidding me>?

 

Haha - yeah 6.51GHz on a single core looks really impressive, but how long does it stay that high for? No idea! Could be a quick blip where it used onpy one core for a second then went back to 5.7-5.8. From the design it has around 20kg of copper and maybe just under 2 litres of water in the loop. So if it's sat idle on a game menu screen the loop will be at around room temperature and on the CPU ramping up GHz and power it gets ~ 2 litres of cold water (around 15 seconds) before it starts to get water warmed from the CPU feeding the CPU block again. May look really impressive but reduce down again fairly quickly with sustained CPU load. Cinebench R23 single and multicore seem in line with the review scores of around 2.2k single 38.8k multicore scores at stock settings. Will need to have a play with the cpu power settings etc

 

We both got to the ghetto-but-running stage at the same time... only you had a 10 year head start.

 

Well, the way I see it is that it was sat under a table for 11 years, so technically I'm ahead of schedule!