Loon; Two loops in a cube case

[Xtrafresh]

Thanks Slader, this suddenly became very relevant to my own build...

 

[Gieron]

I thought about it long and hard. In the end I don't like the fans sucking. And I think I prefer the pumps in the bottom. Also there would be a lot of screwing in the case if I would change it now. :woot

But it did deserve to be considered. So thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Xtrafresh]

It was the horrible paint action that put you off the plan, right?

Anyway, please do continue, we'd all like moar pics!

 

[Gieron]

When I finally got to testing the pumps it turned out my Corsair PSU refused to power them. Whenever I tried to power any of the pumps the PSU would just shut down. So I took it out and replaced it with a Fractal Design Newton R2 1000W.

The Fractal Design is much smaller and should give me more room to connect cables to it, so that's a bonus. My old computer has a PSU from Cooltek which I like very much. It turns out Fractal Design is really the same company under a different name. And they are Swedish. So I'm actually kind of happy with this change. And the Corsair makes an excellent doorstop.

More below...

 

[Freddy]

Nice doorstop hahaha

 

[Gieron]

The case is pretty much finished now. I have tested it for a couple of days without any signs of leaking. So it was time to buy the hardware.

12GB of memory (2 sets of 3x2GB each). Efficiently packages in eleven tons of plastic.

And came with a memory cooler each. But I didn't know that so I bought an extra as well. I have to see how much noise these make. I will probably slow them down or maybe replace the fans.

The ASUS Rampage II Extreme came in a really nice package.

Water blocks for the graphics card, CPU and north bridge. The north bridge block is made specifically for the ASUS boards. The plan is to put the CPU and NB blocks on one loop and the GPU on the other.

In the middle, not clearly visible, is an Intel i7 950 processor. Here shown without the huge stock cooler that they force upon you. The other two things are an Intel X25-M G2 SSD disk (160GB) and a Western Digital disk (1TB).

I have ordered an ASUS nVidia GeForce GTX295, but it won't arrive until after christmas. They seem to have trouble keeping up with demand.

More to come...

 

[Freddy]

Nice hardware! It's a bummer you have to wait for the hardware...

The Corsair memory cooler is quite noisy, I have one too.
So I connected it to a fan controller, otherwise the noise is overwhelming.

 

[Gieron]

The Corsair memory cooler is quite noisy, I have one too.
So I connected it to a fan controller, otherwise the noise is overwhelming

I tested the cooler to see how it would sound. I wasn't impressed. Then I tried to slow the fans down. That cut out the noise. But it still vibrated in a really horrible way.

Then I bought two new 60mm fans to replace the ones in the cooler. But of course I forgot to check the thickness, the new fans were much thicker and wouldn't fit.

Anyway, I might not use one at all. I'll try to put up some pictures of my latest work soon. And then you'll see why

 

[Gieron]

The motherboard with CPU block, north bridge block and memory fitted.

The hard drive case with the HDD and SSD fitted. The SSD rests on a piece of aluminium to make it 3.5" compatible. I painted that piece black to match the case.

Here is the mother board in place and with tubes connected. My camera was surprisingly able to take pictures without a flash. So this is a much better image of how it really looks.

From this angle you can barely see the top of the RAM modules. If I put a cooler on top of them that will be all one can see through the front window. So I really don't want to do it. Also, the big fan in the left side of the case will hopefully be enough to cool them. Ironically I have three memory coolers and won't use any of them.

The only thing I'm waiting for now is the graphics card. The ASUS card I ordered never arrived. So I canceled it and ordered an XFX card instead. That should already be on its way.

More to come...

 

[Thierry]

Its looking good :023:

 

[Oli4v]

it's a bit erhm, RED

keep it up !

 

[Slader]

Wow that red...reminds me of amsterdam

I like that its pretty clean on the mobo tray right now, i really hope you can keep it that way :033:

 

[Gieron]

Finally the graphic card arrived. Here it is with the water block and back plate ready to be assembled.

And here it is assembled and put into the case. The cross of the tubes looks stupid, but there was no way to make a tube go from the outlet of the graphics card to the reservoir if I put it the other way around.

This picture also shows the hard drive case in place. I had to cut a corner off it to fit under the graphics card. The card actually rests a bit on the hard drive case, which I guess isn't a bad thing.

The card above the graphics card (if you can see it) is a sound card that came with the mother board. It had a nice case around it which I had to remove to make it fit above the graphics card. Sometimes this case feels like the anti-TARDIS.

There will be better pictures of the finished thing when I get a better camera. In the mean time here is the total cost of the project.

More to come...

 

[Gieron]

Loon - Finished

 

[Brutus]

a real nice job dude

 

[dopestuff]

wow man looks realy nice!!
the only thing i would change is the noctua fans behind the front mesh (or just paint them a other color)