Build/Upgrade Log: A Load of Hot Air

[marshallbradley]

Hi all,

This is a WIP, and will be fleshed out when I have the time.

The name stems from three things:

A) Since this build is air-cooled under load conditions it will produce a lot of hot air. Funny right?

B) Some people might believe that my idea that an air-cooled setup can aesthetically compete with a water-cooled one is a load of hot air.

C) [to a lesser extent] The colour red, which will hopefully feature heavily in my build ranging from the Force 3 GT to the Asus DirectCU II Cooler to the AX 860 and everything in between) is often associated with the temperature hot, whereas the blue-ish hues of bodies of water are associated with cold.

Pictures of my build in it's current incarnation can be found at my flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/93844079@N07/sets/72157632961388989/

Unfortunately most of the time I won't have access to the lovely SLR that took most of those, so a lot of the pictures will be taken on my rather mediocre HTC Desire S.

My current objectives for project A Load of Hot Air are:

- Clean up thee nest that is behind my motherboard (it may look pretty from the front but I want my build to be nice on the inside too).

- Sleeve and make every cable the perfect length so stuff doesn't have to be routed this way and that to use up space (this ties in to the above object).

- Overclock the CPU and GPU to more interesting levels. At the moment I have the CPU sitting at 4.2 with stock volts. It was at 4.5 earlier with 1.17v (so I at least know it's a decent chip) with 24 hours of prime95 behind it, but I felt my old U9B was not quite able to cool it sufficiently, esp. with the low noise adapters on. Now with a DH-14 behind me I really feel I can start to flex. I also haven't tried anything with my (first nVidia) GTX 670. I'm only thankful it's quieter than the XFX I had before, and that's managed to suppress my overclocking urges, at least for now.

- To prove (hopefully not disprove!) that air cooling setups, having had the right thought, care and attention to detail put into them, can have much the same build quality, clean look and beauty of a water cooled rig. This object is until I go water-cooled myself, and even the words 'air cooling' leave a sour taste in my mouth 😉.

Any feedback, advice, hate, poems or whatever you have for me is of course an important part of this process and would be greatly appreciated.

Enjoy the read,

M

 

[Motopsychojdn]

**Clean up the nest that is behind my motherboard**
Mobo back panel is what you need

I made that from an old case sidepanel
I look forward to seeing this build happen/evolve and as for,
**an air-cooled setup can aesthetically compete with a water-cooled one**
Heres a benchmark to aim for....

Both cards and Cpu under water, although that pic is before I modded the cards up and doesn't show the fan modded over the waterblock, its a good indication of what is possible though.
Are you OCD enough? 😛

Moto

 

[marshallbradley]

Motherboard back panel you say? I take it that goes between the motherboard and the right hand side side-panel? It's quite hard to tell the exact location from the picture. See it does look cleaner when you take the side panel off, but the messy cabling is still 'there' so to speak. I'm looking for tidiness right down to the core of the build . No quick fixes for me :/.

I have seen some Murder Box builds which are very clean in this respect, for example:

Obviously that is a rather extreme, and it helps that the Murder Box has been modified to allow for such strong cable management, but I feel with custom length cables, the same style of cabling is achievable.

Here's my current behind the scenes situation (ugh):

Have you got any advice as far as what type of sheathing to go for? I'll probably need quite a bit. I need it in both black and red with matching heat shrink. What tool do I need for re-crimping pins as well?

M

 

[mlcaouette]

First thing I would fix is the USB cable, it can come up through the little cutout that holds the PSU down. That will shorten the amount of visible cable.

Plus the top 200mm fan wire needs to be cleaned up either sleeve it or use fabric/electrical tape to black out the cable.

Give us a shot of the back of the motherboard panel, I'm only curious to see if there is any way of better hiding the cables that go to the front/top of your case.

That's all I really see that could use some minor touch-ups, otherwise you have an excellent looking rig. I look forward to seeing your future updates!

Edit: I didn't see your most recent post before I posted this reply..

 

[nukemaster]

Nice clean cases.

I like the stealth DVD drive.

 

[Motopsychojdn]

/Flatlines at the second picture 😛
first ones not too shabby though,
I don't sleeve but any modstore online should have a good selection of the stuff, maybe a separate thread for that question is a good idea?
Moto

 

[marshallbradley]

Yeah sorry about the awfully low-res, should have done that when I had the SLR...

Unfortunately the thing that holds the PSU down is not actually a cut out IIRC. I might drill a hole at some point, but I think if I just move the USB cable more to the left side of the grommet it will be fine.

Yeah the fan and stuff will all be sleeved. I might run it along to the right and down actually.

Annoyingly the stuff at the top right is sort of pushed out by the hot-swap bay. I will try and tighten it up when I sleeve it though.

EDIT: @Moto Yeah I know... Hey that's why I'm embarking on this project though! It's not as bad as the picture makes it look really, the main issue is that I'm using cable extensions on the already very long AX860 cables. The 24 pin especially has to snake back and forth across the motherboard tray. Also if stuff isn't flat enough, the sides on the 650D have a tendency to bulge a lot.

M

 

[marshallbradley]

My first update of photos has been posted on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/93844079@N07/sets/72157632975403382/. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do very much today as I only just ordered the cabling and crimper from MDPC. Hopefully it will all be with me within a week, so I can crack on!

I mostly focused on painting the back of the DVD drive so it doesn't stand out so much, it actually looks pretty decent now. I've also done an official "before" shot of the nest behind my motherboard tray, as well as an annotated version with the cable layout I'm hoping to achieve, when I'm able to customise the length of my cables.

M

 

[nukemaster]

Do I see this right? You have the DVD drive taped in

So you are gonna place the drive behind the MB tray as well? This helps clean things up no doubt, but drives run hotter too. My WD black 2 TB was a hot drive behind the tray on my system. Swapping to SSDs made all the difference, but at a cost of overall space.

FT03 HDD mount location.

 

[marshallbradley]

@Nukemaster Well sort of! It's mainly being held in by a small plastic tab glued to the side of the DVD-drive. I tried to show this in one of pictures, but it didn't come out very well. The issue is that the holes no longer align after having stealthed the drive; and the holes are so slightly offset that to drill new holes would only make matters worse. When slotted into the rack it 'clicks' into place quite nicely and is generally rock solid. The tape is just for insurance.

Hmm, do you know how much hotter? Was it also nosier? It's only an idea at the moment, I'll see how the cabling works out. Was it hard to mount them in that position?

M

 

[nukemaster]

@Nukemaster Well sort of! It's mainly being held in by a small plastic tab glued to the side of the DVD-drive. I tried to show this in one of pictures, but it didn't come out very well. The issue is that the holes no longer align after having stealthed the drive; and the holes are so slightly offset that to drill new holes would only make matters worse. When slotted into the rack it 'clicks' into place quite nicely and is generally rock solid. The tape is just for insurance.

Hmm, do you know how much hotter? Was it also nosier? It's only an idea at the moment, I'll see how the cabling works out. Was it hard to mount them in that position?

M

For my hard drives, It is a case designed that way(silverstone TF03). So only thing I had to do was mod the mouting system to allow a small(100mm scythe) fan under the hard drive(it helped, but I added the other one to pull some air past the back[replaced the un-used hot swap bay], since it is a quiet fan, I do not even hear it).

I would guess up to 10c hotter at the worst of times. My green drives still run at a lowish temp behind the tray. It is not any louder to have the drives like that.

The temperatures are dependent on the load the system is under. For mine, behind the video card was hottest.

To be honest, standoffs and angle clips should mount a hard drive fine back behind the tray if you have room. Failing that a metal plate that covers the bottom of the drive with screws on the side should work as well(as long as you leave room for those screws).

If you never plan to have to move it, you may be able to just drill 4 holes from the MB side and screw it in. The down side is if you ever need to remove it, the MB has to come out.

 

[marshallbradley]

I'm probably just going to keep the hard drives in the rack. I had a rather unfortunate incident yesterday where I snapped off the plastic of the SATA connection on the back of my SSD (damn should have taken pictures, I was too scared of what I'd done though). That my friends is why you don't take stuff out of the rack with an L shaped SATA connector still plugged in... Luckily after straightening the pins, some super glue fixed it up nicely, but I was really on edge there... Also now that I've adjusted the distance between the SATA power connects and it has made a really big difference to how tidy the cabling is from behind (easy mod, 10/10 recommended).

I'm still waiting on the MDPC stuff to come in. Once it does I'll post a ton of pictures of my burnt fingers and what not.

M

 

[nukemaster]

IDE did have an advantage, nearly indestructible connectors.

Good thing you got it all fixed up.

 

[marshallbradley]

Day 2 --

OK so the MDPC order arrived!! Excited! Clearly judging by the back of the envelope Nils is a bit of a legend:

Here's all the lovely goodies I got:

This is my first sleeving attempt on the peripherals (I think it went pretty well):

The HDR SLR shots have also finally been processed, so I'll try and get around to uploading those. My next step is to shorten/sleeve all the fan cables and the fan controller cables. Also shortening and re-sleeving the PCI-E cables is important, since at the moment it looks terrible (same goes for the SATA power cables).

M

 

[marshallbradley]

I've been a bit lazy about updating this. Today I worked on the SATA Power connectors though, first shortening than sleeving one. I still have the one for the DVD drive and the hotswap bay to do. I think it came out pretty nice though:

Here's a side view:

This is what it looks like installed:

M

 

[nukemaster]

Keep the updates coming

 

[marshallbradley]

I'll post the PCI-E power connectors later today, I think they came out really well.

M

 

[marshallbradley]

Day 4 --

Today I worked a on the PCI-E power connectors. A lot of people hide these away behind the motherboard. I thought it would be cool to just shorten them, and have them come straight up from the power supply. It frees up quite a bit of space behind the motherboard too. It actually came out really well looking, and if you have the tools, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go. I followed a guide about MDPC-X sleeving online, which made it fairly straight-forward to get the sleeving nice and clean.

I'd actually shortened them a couple of days back, to make sure they'd fit and look alright. Here's the before and after of the sleeving though (1 of 2 done):

Here's a top down view (you can see how nicely the heatshrink lines up):

And here's the final product installed (hell yeah!):

You can also see in that last picture the improved bracer (stealthed cable tie basically) for keeping the graphics card flat.

M