Big Bombastic Bastich

[madmat]

As a few of you know I'm building a PC for a fellow from Miami.

It's based on an 4800 X2 A64, A8N32-SLI Deluxe mobo, 4 gigs of Patriot 2-3-2-5-1t ram, 2 x 74 gig Raptors, a 400 gig 16mb buffer WD sata drive, 2 x BFG 7800GTX OC vid cards, X-Fi Elite Pro sound card, Danger Den water cooling kit with cooling for both the vid cards and CPU, PC Power and Cooling 850w PSU, Thermatake armor case, 2 x LG 16x dual-layer DVDRW drives and a Mitsumi combo floppy/8-1 media reader and an Enermax 4 fan rheobus/temp monitor.

Today the parts have begun their slow trickling in with the arrival of the WC gear from Danger Den.

As more parts make it in I'll start posting pics of the gear to share with everyone.

I'm also planning to do a worklog as well.

 

[Jakal]

Wow!

That's about all I can say.
That.. That's awesome.

 

[Rob Williams]

Good stuff man, looking forward.

 

[madmat]

The TDX is now laser etched with the DD logo, looks killer.

 

[madmat]

Here are a few pics of the WC gear;

The D5

The Black Ice Extreme II

The whole works, pump, rad, fillport, tubing, SLI low-pro waterblocks.

The hardware and ramsinks aren't in the pics since I didn't want the small parts loose in a house with three cats, one of which is a kitten that thinks all small things are its toys.

When the loop is plumbed I will run all the cool water lines in blue, warm water lines in red.

 

[Buck-O]

Thats a preaty sweet looking kit.

Though i would expect more out of DD on the radiator, then spray paint. Seriously makes it look tacky.


Anodizing cant be THAT expensive.

 

[madmat]

That isn't spray paint. Trust me, it's a very, very shiny metalic painted surface, it's not some rattle can job. As far as I know you can't anodize copper.

 

[madmat]

Well, the case, PSU, ODD's, Fan Controller and (w00t) a tube of AS5 (this big box with just the thermal paste, go figure, it was in an order with other stuff) arrived today.

Here's what went down;

That's where the rad will live.

I used a pair of bay covers from my PC6070 to make brackets for the rad.

Here's the inside of the case with the HDD bay in place, it sets beside the PSU in the top of the case which is beautiful for allowing the rad to go where it is now.

There's the PSU, this thing is friggen huge, it's so long that the blowhole fan had to be abandoned and so much larger in width I had to actually enlarge the PSU hole.

To Be Continued...

 

[madmat]

If you look at the top of the case you'll see where the hole for the PSU had to be enlarged, the line for the case roof is almost 1/4" raised in that area.

The front of the case as it will look assembled.

The front of the case with the "doors" closed.

And this is where I'm stopping for the night since I need the mobo, CPU and vid cards to get the blocks mounted.

More to come!

 

[Rob Williams]

That power supply.. is huge

 

[Blumen]

Man... that's a first rate job right there... Nice.

Anyone else notice that that Enermax fan controller looks just like a Thermaltake Hardcano 9?

 

[Buck-O]

That isn't spray paint. Trust me, it's a very, very shiny metalic painted surface, it's not some rattle can job. As far as I know you can't anodize copper.

I cant imagine that ENTIRE rad is copper. From the looks of it, the fins are aluminum. And i would imagine the end caps are aluminum as well.

Either way, the paint, as glossy as it may appear, still has some fisheye, and orange peel present on it. And when the shots inot the fins, shows sections of metal that havent even been touched by paint.

Im sure its a quality mass produced paint job. But i still expect a little better better quality.

 

[madmat]

The rad is 100% copper and brass, no one would be so stupid as to make a rad out of such disimilar metals since given the slightest amount of moisture it would start galvanic corrosion and the rad would eat itself.

Trust me, the pictures don't do the paint justice, there aren't any fisheyes. What you're seeing on the side of the rad is a reflection of the surface it's sitting on.

And you only want the ends of the fins covered with paint anyways otherwise it wouldn't transfer heat worth a damn.

 

[madmat]

I've got the mobo in and all the plumbing done, the fans are mounted on the rad and as I write this it's running it's leak test and getting the air out of the loop.

I did run into a bit of a conundrum, the blocks are big enough (on the GTX's) that they block the next pci slot and the hardware in the stock config sticks up so far as to block the upper slot.

With the layout of this particular board it works out to one thing, you can't use ANY pci slots at all...damnit.

So I had to re-engineer the mounting for the bottom waterblock. I took the factory allthread and cut about 40% of it off so that it just stuck up thru the bottom of the card by about 1/4", then instead of the D.D. plastic X brace I used the stock stamped steel one with the D.D. foam piece under it for some give and did away with the springs.

The thumbscrews for the D.D. mount fit down into the cupped area of the stock mount perfectly and when it's assembled it lowers the top profile of the card by about 50%.

look at the hardware on the top card, see how high it sticks up?

Now by compairison you can see the relatively low profile of my method, in fact the ram sinks stick up further than the mounting hardware now!

Here's the fans and off to the left you'll see the fillport line snaking it's way down.

I'll show the location of the fillport after my camera batteries are charged.

 

[madstork91]

price check?

 

[madmat]

$5500.00 U.S. With labor. I've spent $110 of my own money on tools.

 

[Jakal]

Yeah a rig like that will punch you right where it hurts. It's great to see such a masterpiece though. Nice work 2 thumbs up

 

[madmat]

Minor update, I got the rest of the parts in and routed all the power, usb and front panel connector wiring and did a test POST and it fired up and ran like it knew what it was doing.

I'll tell you what though, it takes a bit of time to check that much ram.

 

[madmat]

The rest of the parts made it today and I've been a busy little beaver.

First I promised a shot of the fillport and so here it is;

It's on the off side of the case to allow you not have a problem with the tubing interefering with the ODD power and data cables.

Here's the front all finished up...

I ended up with 5 free bays with the bottom 6 taken up by the rad. It took a bit of work to relocate the rad but it was neccessary since the media reader cable was so short I had to push the drive down another bay.

Here's what I like to call the "power Trio";

It's a RAID 0 stripe of 2-74 gig Raptors surrounding a 400 gig 16meg buffer WD bulk storage drive.

And Here's the whole business all put together.

I wish I could've gotten trickier with my cable-fu but the sad fact of the matter is that with the way the drive bays are configured there's really nowhere to run the cables other than out in the open.

I can't show a pic with the side on because sadly I have to send this bad boy away to it's proud pappa and there's protective film over the window and I'm not pulling it off.