Case Mod - In Progress Project: Warp Core - offline indefinitely...

What's this, a member of staff doing a real project log!

I guess getting into mod of the month might be very difficult, or very easy depending on how sneaky I'm feeling! Anyway, I love my water cooling, love my Lian Li V2000 and I love Star Trek so thought I'd try and combine the three. Not the old Star Trek stuff mind you, mainly Picard's lot.



I always liked the way the warp core, nacelles and various plasma conduits and cooling thingys looked with the eerie purple or blue glow and bright lights. The water-cooling in my case, while extensive has usually been quite hidden but I've decided to change that and, well pimp things up in general really.

LATEST UPDATE - 10th Sept 2011
Page 8

Current Status:



Update #1 SketchUp designs and 'warp core' UV reservoir
Update #2 Tubing, acrylic, first paint scheme and Dremeling
Update #3 Lian Li V2000 roof modding, reservoir + acrylic + lighting
Update #4 Reservoir video
Update #5 Aquatuning sponsorship
Update #6 V2000 bottom section modding + water cooling
Update #7 Laing pump failure + more water cooling
Update #8 Graphite paint scheme
Update #9 UV blue cable braid/tubing
Update #10 Illuminated acrylic floor prototype
Update #11 Illuminated floor final version
Here's some more on what I'm talking about.
Update #12 Watercooling bulkhead fittings installed
Update #13 Warp factor i7
Update #14 New illuminated panel work and paint job
Update #15 Quad 120mm-fan radiator fitted
Update #16 Isolinear SSDs






First off, unless I have a major change of heart half way through this is going to be simple and clean with little done to the exterior apart from a paint job, lighting and cutting. The concept so far is to use a Primochill Typhoon - 120X- UV Blue reservoir. I've actually already done the work to fit this - I originally bought a UV green one but the novelty soon wore off. Unfortunately the res then became unavailable in the UK so I had to order from Primochill direct in the U.S. Thankfully it only cost £25 inc postage.

I’ve also been teaching myself Google Sketchup – a long overdue task but given the skill I’ve seen on show in other project logs, I felt compelled to at least give it a go. Thankfully a kind gent called Apocalyps has made an excellent render of the V2000 which I found in jezmck’s awesome Sketchup components collection http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=46003 and his website at http://scc.jezmckean.com/home Saved me hours I can tell you! With loads of water cooling bits in there too I’ll be away in no time but for now here are some early renders.











Finally here is a bit of work I did over the summer when I was still tinkering with designs.



Started by the usually ripping out of the hard drive cages to make way for the rads. Initially I sat the hard drives in the top section but then I found that Lian Li sell spare 5.25in hard drive bays. More on that later.



Most of the gear fitted:

Q9650 @ 4.2GHz
Asus Maximus II Formula with the tops of the NB and one of the mosfets removed and a Swiftech NB block and EK mosfet block installed. Beauty of this board is that you don’t have to remove the heatpipes to install motherboard blocks – just remove the removable heatsinks and away you go. MSI GTX 280 with a Watercool Heatkiller GPU block – by far the sexiest block I’ve ever seen.

Rads are a Thermochill PA 120.2 and an XSPC RX 360. I could have fitted triple and a quad 120mm rads instead of double and triple but this is what I had at the time – if anyone wants to sponsor me some larger beasties feel free! Still it's insane the amount of gear you can fit in the V2000. Without doubt the best tower case for water cooling. Laing DDC Ultra with an XSPC rev 1 standard top and 1/2in compression fittings all round.

A mix of fans too – Scythe GTs and Sharkoon Silent Eagles , just what I had laying around– I never need these at full speed, 1000rpm or less is all that’s needed to keep things in check and very quiet. 4GB of Kingston DDR2 PC8000 @ 1050MHz and that completes the interesting stuff.



Here’s that gorgeous res fitted, not lit up yet.



Tada!



Green was good for a while but I eventually found it a bit tacky.





However, this arrived recently and I’ve already started work installing it. Looks sooooo much better already.





More soon!

 

Thanks for the encouragement guys! Yeah, I haven't played for a while and I'm happy with the rest of the system now, no plans to upgrade so why not!

Just got the pics for Project: Pure back - saw them on Friday. They're awesome! No doubt Bill our production guy will make it into a great looking feature as always. We get the mag in about 4 weeks - will pop a few in the post

 

Another little update. Scketchup us fun! Finished off most of the rendering but may well tinker with it a bit more to try out some more designs. I'm fairly keen on the dark blue paint though. I saw it in a hobby store a few weeks ago, it's called night navy.







Still not 100% sure on the design at the top but it looks good so far. If I had another 4mm to spare I could have fitted the rads on top of each other. I think someone has done this on the XS forums but short of cutting great pieces out of the mid section plate or using smaller rads, I can't see how. Still the airflow is seperate and both rads draw air in from one side and out the other so it's pretty efficient.







Got the res installed after draining the system. The old res plus two large rads must be close to two litres. It took ages anyway! Need to do some more lining up with the res though and then seal the edges with silicone sealant to stop any coolant dripping down the small cracks into the case. The mount isn't wonerful and I may well see if I can find some silver screws instead of black ones and also a more atttactive way of lining the res hole.





Leak tested and fired up! Way cooler than green! Looks like it needs topping up with all the those bubbles too.

 

Very good idea . I might have a play with Sketchup later and see how it looks. I've already cut the vents for the rads but there's plenty of room on the panels for something else.

 

A minor update but big things planned for the next week or so! Finally got most of the bits I need although still waiting on a few bits from www.aquatuning.co.uk. In the mean time lookie lookie!



Been searching for weeks for flourecent acrylic but couldn't find purple anywhere. In the end I found normal translucent in both blue and purple which I needed and decided to light the inside well with white cathodes instead of going with UV like the res. www.hindleys.com - awesome site and very quick delivery. I've got two huge sheets so plenty of scope for adding bits to other parts of the PC

Also above are two of thermochill's brand new compression fittings for their 3/8in thread radiators. Until now you've had to use standard barbs as nothing else fitted their giant threads. Ordered a couple of these the day I found them at www.watercoolinguk.co.uk. I'll be using the dual 120mm TC rad unless I can find a nice sponor to line me up with a quad rad and in that case I'll use the quad and the RX360 I already have.



More bits! I'm still not sure about the colour scheme, especially the tubing. At the moment I have clear tubing with purple UV coloured coolant but it doesn't glow as much as I'd like and that's set to get worse if I use white cathodes. I couldn't find purple 1/2in tubing so went with blue and also some white anti kink coils and about a mile of cable braid!



I'm liking this scheme already but we'll have to wait and see how it looks when everything's lit up.



Gotta love the compression fittings and I can at last get rid of the ghastly brass things on my TC rad which have been on there for about 3 years since I upgraded from an HE to a PA series. Must have been in use constantly since I first went with water about 8 years ago! Can't wait to see them go. Thankfully they've been hidden in the lower section of the V2000.



Now something all you lucky people in warm countries probably take for granted is the weather. Here in the UK it's been struggling to get above freezing for the last two weeks and as such, it's pretty dire weather for spraying. Even the first coat started running straight away! Now I'm not good enough to be on an episode of Pimp my Ride, but I did spray the rear spoiler on my Celica GT in the summer and I'm pretty impressed with the result. What I'm trying to say is that I blame the weather, not my spraying skills!

Thankfully I had a little trick up my sleave which was to warm up the garage with a heater and leave the heater pointed at me and case throughout the sessions to warm things up a bit and get that paint drying! After a bit of wet and dry sanding, it was smooth again...







It worked a treat however I'm not happy at all with the colour! It's meant to be Night Navy, a mean, dark shade of blue - this is not what I was after at all. Looks like I'm going to have to make another trip to the hardware store to find something darker.



I finally cracked open my new Rotary tool set I found for a bargain-tastic price of £9.99! Awesome!

Cable tidying in the V2000 is pretty good but lots of bits are exposed which is why we've seen mods like Neptune's Trident hide them away with various bits and bobs. The first stage on this for me was to cut a few notches out of the case to allow for better cable routing.





This meant the ATX MB connector, USB, SATA and power/HDD LED cables could be routed out of site pretty much.



Finally for this update, I've got as far as marking the case for the cutting in the roof to be replaced with blue acrylic and lit from beneath as per the Sketchup renders above! Would have done that today but some git has lost my alu cutting saw for the jigsaw Will have to get another tomorrow along with some new paint and some deionised water

 

Yep I think it looks pretty good although I did like having UV reactive coils. We'll see.

Anyway new update!

Stripped the whole system down to replace the tubing and do some cutting. The downside to watercooling is that to strip down and reassemble my system it took over 8 hours!!! Don't want to have to do it again in a hurry



New compression fitting on the Thermochill rad. Sooooo much nicer than the brass barbs I had on there.

Got a metal cutting jigsaw blade from B&Q in the sale! Woot! With a little help from Mr Dremel we soon had the section in the roof cut out.









Then started plumbing everything back in again. I'm definitely liking the blue tubing and white coils.


Time to start chopping the acrylic! Thankfully it's a lot easier than aluminium so I had the piece for the roof cut to shape in just a few mins.



I needed it as flush with the roof panel as possible so to avoid any nasty gaps between the acrylic and the panel. That ruled out glue between the two so I decided to use a glue gun to stick little sections firmly to the roof . I applied glue to the edge of the panels only.



It worked brilliantly and means there's little if any gap between the sheet and the roof. Just need to do a bit of tidying up!



More soon!

 

A few more pics! It's looking quite Star Trek like already! I have loads of acrylic left so I need some ideas about where to put it! I have been thinking about surrounding the radiator grills in the bottom maybe? I'm open to suggestions!







The lights from Aqua-tuning finally arrived and I have to say I'm very impressed! Very bright indeed and because they're flexible you can bend them round things. I got some white ones seen here and some UV ones too which I'll attach to the reservoir.







I'm really pleased with how the reservoir looks!









I need to decide on a colour for the case now - I think blue is out. I got some gun metal grey that seems to be the same colour as the externals of the warp core on the Enterprise but I'm not convinced a dark colour is best as the brushed alu of the case as it is seems to go well with the modding so far.

What do you guys think?