Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Hush!

The fact that you managed that bend and didn't resort to solder connections is a massive accomplishment. It came out great.
That box extrusion is delicious. I'd design entire rigs around stuff like that... if I could.

 

Thanks! Ended up having to get some 12mm diameter stainless steel rod, bevel the edges, use to lever and keep the copper pipe inserting into the compression fittings straight and round, and even then had to file into the copper pipe a little, as whilst the o-rings clamped on straight pipe, the gold/brass compression ring past that was fouling on the curve.

20230523_151529_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

Will probably use the low profile terminal - have made up copper piping connections, though all a bit disassembled atm so can't post photos.

Forgot to mention: Got a cablemods 180 degree 12VHPWR connector for the GTX4090. It fouled against the gskill RAM heatspreaders by several mm, and wasn't shiny enough...!

20230519_165020_HDR by Tom ., on Flickr

The aluminium heatsink comes off with 2 screws, and after a bit of filing down on one side by a few mm and some polishing...

PSX_20230618_233920 by Tom ., on Flickr

 

Yep, You got the polisher's disease. It's not fatal, but it will affect you for the rest of your life.

 

You're not wrong.

 

Update part 1 (click the photos below for the 42mp versions):

I've made a bracket for the pump to 'float' through a hole cut in the walnut backwall, and also double up as a support for the vertical GPU bracket to prevent sag.

The IO bracket supporting the vertical GPU looks like this from behind, with little m4 round lugs the gpu bracket screws to, that you can see at the top of this photo:

PSX_20230828_203027 by Tom ., on Flickr

Some 1/4"(6.35mm) x 1"(25.4mm) x
1"(25.4mm) aluminium angle, cut down and milled with holes that those lugs snap into - from clamping them against the cut down aluminium angle and using some m4 spike screws, it marked the aluminium bracket pretty exactly for drilling out holes/using an end-mill for the hole for the 'lugs'.

PSX_20230828_200029 by Tom ., on Flickr

The box section is 1/4" thick x 4" x 4", and those are a few bits of drilled and polished 1/2" x 3/4" rectangular bar, plus some nice gr5 titanium m6 and m4 bolts.

Bolted together:

PSX_20230828_200655 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230828_201535 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230828_194725 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230828_201906 by Tom ., on Flickr

To bolt to the back wall/frame the 'leg' (to the left there) needed a bit cut out and some countersunk holes for clamping into place - needed to be countersunk as the walnut-veneered aluminium back wall sits ~1.7mm above it, so no room for nuts or bolt heads.

PSX_20230828_202517 by Tom ., on Flickr

With the pump support bracket in place, with the IO bracket clipped into place(though only bolted with the countersunk bolts to the frame on the left in this pic). The black perforated thing on the right is the PSU bracket.

PSX_20230828_203545 by Tom ., on Flickr

 

Update 2 of 2 on the pump bracket:


Firstly, can anyone recommend a good free image hosting site? - flickr's trying to force me to pay them when I have 507 of 1000 free images uploaded... I've deleted some photos to get it to let me upload - click on images for full resolution version.



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Time to mount the dampening for the pump in the aluminium box section - first with some adhesive backed neoprene on the inner walls. Those black hemispheres are the squidgy vibration-dampening sorbothane hemipheres. They're sticky and look black and shiny like this for about 5 minutes out of the bag before they encounter dust.

PSX_20230909_211234 by Tom ., on Flickr

And then with some sorbothane adhesive backed hemispheres - this is a type of urethane that's better than silicone, rubber and neoprene at absorbing vibrations, and particularly at the base frequencies the D5 runs at in its PWM range.



The golden EK pump mount is understandably upset at my choice of 'extra strong' duct tape to try and tape down and guide the pump's power and PWM wires so they don't press against the walls and transmit vibration...

PSX_20230909_212146 by Tom ., on Flickr

I'll probably bed in the pump to the gold mount with some soft silicone resin and use that to guide the cables. Either that or thermally insulate and kill the now potted pump, though the D5 apparently dumps all it's heat into the loop, so hopefully not!



Squidgy vibration dampening hemispheres mounted and pump in place.

PSX_20230909_222636 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230909_223319 by Tom ., on Flickr

Right then, time to mount the pump/GPU anti-sag bracket to the case back wall section. Here's some shiny stuff that won't be seen! For reference this is one half of the skeleton case that holds the copper radiator. At each side are aluminium angle legs. The slits are where the copper radiator fins slot into, the milled step is for the walnut veneered backwall to sit in, the I/O and PCI bracket clips into the pump bracket thing, the black perforated doohickey is the PSU bracket that sits behind the case.

PSX_20230909_210805 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230909_231145 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230910_001300 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230910_000659 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230909_233114 by Tom ., on Flickr

One hole cut from the veneered aluminium backwall. EK couldn't just have rounded corners on a square could they? Sadly a little bit of veneer got mangled in the process and will likely need to be cut out and replaced - can't see this with the pump res top mounted but will likely be visible when it's filled with water.



The veneer looks a bit beaten up here - those funny grey-white marks at the top are from sanding and will disappear as soon as another coat of finishing oil goes on.

PSX_20230909_232315 by Tom ., on Flickr

Time to put the veneered wall back on, with the pump poking through the hole.


PSX_20230910_002007 by Tom ., on Flickr


Ta-da! A floating pump. There's around 3mm between the acrylic reservoir top and the wooden veneered wall.

PSX_20230910_003030 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230910_003434 by Tom ., on Flickr

PSX_20230910_003837 by Tom ., on Flickr

 

Merry Christmas all, it's been a while.

A lot of time and effort have gone into bending the 14mm copper pipes for the hard-tubing, and if I'm honest I procrastinated for a good while because I found this very annoying - it's easy to put a lot of time in only to find the tubes were a little off and needed to be redone. I'd replaced the clear acrylic inlet and outlet port block from the Alphacool Eisblock aurora block they kindly sponsored the project with with an alphacool delrin one instead that you can see in the photos below. It changes the orientation of the inlet and outlet ports and makes plumbing easier with a vertical gpu on a riser block and cuts down on 90 degree bends - might be somewhat pointless with the restriction from the GP and CPU blocks, but every little helps in lowering restriction and allowing a lower and quieter pump speed! I used a hand pipe bender for 14mm copper tube. It's inaccurate and tricky to get the bends clean without scouring into the soft copper leaving a dent. After a lot of trial and error I found barrow black painted copper prebent pipes are easiest to work with - the copper is still soft apart from where it's been work-hardened at the prebent 90 degree bends, which saves having to heat the copper to anneal it, and means not having to then subsequently give the copper an acid bath to remove the oxidised copper inside the pipe (which leaves nasty copper salts behind that are a pain to remove and risk crapping up the water loop.) I used stainless steel 12mm rods to run inside the copper pipe to hold the pipe in place, and removed the paint with 0000 grade steel wool soaked in acetone, and used the rods again to keep the soft copper from getting deformed when polishing and for bevelling the ends of the copper pipes after cutting with sandpaper, so they easily pass the O-rings in the compression fittings. Without smooth bevelling they mangle the orings and are tricky to add/remove the pipes in my experience). Removing the pipes is actually quite quick and easy - the aluminium motherboard tray can flex back a couple of mm which is needed for the pipes to get into the bottom bit of the compression fittings, and the pump is sat in a bracket surrounded by squidgy sorbothane hemispheres so can move around by several mm in all directions to allow pipe fitting.

These photos are a bit of a cheat - this is bare polished copper; I'll still need to drain the loop to remove the pipes to repolish and lacquer at some stage to prevent the copper tarnishing over time, but the polished copper looks so pretty I thought some photos first would be nice.

Some polished and bent copper pipes - the little z shaped one is from pump to GPU block, the bigger z from CPU to the radiator. The small 90 degree one has a small band of around 15 degrees at one side that's tricky to see. The long pipe with a 90 degree and the short straight pipe connect with a 45 degree fitting to give a pipe that runs from the radiator back to the pump reservoir.

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All plumbed up! There's pretty much enough light from the LED strips in the reservoir and CPU and GPU blocks not to need to use the led strips that are hidden behind the front aluminium frame.

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DSC07645

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I'm not sure if the polishing and removal of all the burnt flux coating the copper fins and pipes of the radiator has done it, or what the case is, but cooling performance seems to have improved. I still need to tinker and see what the performance is like with the pump at lower speeds - the ASUS BIOS is not clear in how to adjust pump speed and I've only just figured out how to do it, but it still seems limited to adjusting pump speed by CPU temperature rather than the water temperature sensor (there's a g1/4 gold screw in temperature probe hiding in the reservoir port beneath the pump outlet port in the photos). I'm going to need to replace the massive bulky cables that come with the ax1600i PSU which is hidden vertically behind the case - you can see the power cable to the PSU in a few of the photos..

Noise-wise, at full speed the pump is quietly audible - the hard piping is certainly not helping I think, but it looks nice so it stays! At 20% speed (~950rpm) I can't hear the pump over the rooms ambient noise floor. I now notice that my 4090 has some mild coil whine when its rendering over ~150FPS in 3D mark testing - I'd thought it had none when it had the air-cooler on.

The PC has a D5 pump, INNO3D 4090 (450w card) and 7950x CPU. With the pump at around 30 percent speed (~1400rpm) when gaming the GPU overclocked at a little over 3GHz core and 11600Mhz memory with the CPU a little overclocked at +100Mhz boost, the GPU after several hours gaming seems to settle at around 52-55 degrees centrigrade with the CPU around perhaps 65-75C. From a wall meter the power draw for the PC is around 600W when gaming, with max of 808W.

 

NICE
The temps are still a little high, but you got it quiet enough to hear the electronics.
Will you be saving the lacquer work for the 15th year anniversary?

 

You cheeky monkey! I'm happy enough with the temps - I stripped down the CPU and GPU block a few days back - a big flake of something (probably black paint) got into the gpu block and had blocked a few channels, and all the tiny 0.2mm channels of the CPU block had done a great job of filtering the water of any smaller bits - probably flakes of paint and sludge from the new copper pipes, and had blocked off 50%+ of the cpu channels - it took ages scrubbing the cpu copper plate after first trying isopropanol and acetone, and then still not looking exactly pristine with some channels very discoloured and possibly still blocked. Put it back together and then found I had bought another spare copper base plate when I got the CPU block, so may give that a go and see if there's any improvement. The 7950x puts out a lot of heat and does everything it can to get to 95C, and the 4090 is a power-hungry card, so overclocked and fanless at a low pump speed with a big margin before any thermal throttling seems fine. Still have a wall of 9 gentle typhoon fans to connect up at some point for fun!

 

They paint the inside of the pipes? Yeah. That's bad.

 

Oddly enough they managed to spray black paint more than 5cm I'd guess into each end of the pipes, like they purposefully held the pipe at one end, left the ends open and went to town with a spray gun, then held from the other side and did the same.