In my never ending quest to compete with my friends, I seem to be addicted to spending lots of money on shit. The latest quest for greatness came in the form of revamping my gaming PC. A few days of research lead me to a list of the best water cooling parts i could source. Frozen PC .com is the shit by the way, prices are great and they are in Rochester, so they are to your door the next day.
The Shopping list:
Swiftech Apogee GTZ CPU water block
Bitspower 790i North & South bridge chipset water block
EK 790i Mosfet water blocks
EK Acetal+Nickel full cover water block for GTX285
BFTech GTX285 2GB OC edition
XSPC dual 5.25 bay reservoir with 750Lph pump
Black Ice GTX Xtreme 240 radiator
Swiftech Quiet Power 120mm radiator
Coolermaster 120mm 90cfm 19db fan
LianLi 140mm 90cmf 19db fan
Synth Ultra Kaze 133CFM 45db fans (5 total)
Primo Chill PC Ice water, 2 bottles of 32oz each.
Primo Chill PrimoFlex 3/8” ID 5/8” OD green tubing
Bitspower chrome 3/8” barbs
Frozen PC 5/8” reusable clamps
Reusing the following:
LianLi PC7-F Aluminum case
OCZ ModXtreme 700 watt PSU
Intel E8600 3.3ghz core duo
Crucial Balistix DDR3 1800MHZ 2gb’s
EVGA 790iFTW motherboard
Creative X-Fi pro gamer audio card
LiteOn SATA combo drive
WD Caviar Green 750gb
NZXT Sentry LCD fan controller
All the stuff came in Friday and I started tearing down the machine. This is what it looks like prior to the rebuild.
I mounted the waterblocks on the motherboard in about an hour. The video card was next in line. It isn’t a very good feeling unpacking a brand new $400 video card, and taking it all apart a min later. BFGTech is nice about rma’s though, there isn’t any VOID if broken seals so as long as you keep the old air cooler and all the screws you can put it back together and get it RMA, but still it isn’t something you just slap together. It took me about an hour to clean the old thermal compounds off the chips. The fucking water block was shipped to me with the wrong screws to mount it. The directions say M2, 5x8mm, and they sent me M3’s. True value didn’t have m2’s and I didn’t want to wait. I drilled and tapped all ten holes on the block by hand, that took me 2 more hours and was sketchy to say the least, but they all came out perfect.
The rest was just putting it all in the case. I mounted the 120mm Coolermaster to the single 120 radiator and attached it to the case, one if the 120mm UltraKaze fans to the exhaust on the case and the 140mm to the intake. The dual 120mm radiator was a beast. I took my time and mounted the 4 more Ultra Kaze fans to it with o-rings and washers to isolate the vibrations in a push-pull configuration. Then drilled out the 4 mounting holes on the fab cases to 1/4 inch. I used some ¼ threaded rod to go through the case and hold the radiator off the back of the case. Sleeved the rod with some 3/8 inch copper tubing and then slipped some extra water hose over it to make the stand offs look nice. I then took all the wires on the fans and soldered/heat shrinked the connections and took an extra PCI slot cover and cut it to accept a rubber grommet to send the wires into the case. I took great attention to detail and keep everything very clean and neat. The rest was plumbing and wiring. All the wires were tucked away and hidden as best I could.
The plumbing goes from the pump to the dual 120mm radiator, then out to the CPU. CPU jumps to the Mosfet blocks and then to the north and south bridge block. After that it gets chilled again by the single 120mm in the bottom before it goes into the GPU block and back to the reservoir. I ended up using about 11 feet of tubing and 36oz of fluid.
So here it is:
Performance:
Last night I got a chance to benchmark it stock. GPU was turned back to 3.8ghz for some reason, I think the last time I flashed the bios I didn’t send it back to 4.X where I was prior to. The GPU at the stock clocks and the CPU at 3.8ghz, I hit 17965 in 3dMark06. Max temps with the 3dmark run were, 44C CPU, 38C GPU, 34C/29C 790i chipsets! I ran OCCT on for 10 mins and the CPU hit a max of 46C.
I bumped the CPU up to 4.2ghz and +.1 volt and the GPU up to 720mhz and the shader up about 50mhz. Max temps went up only to 45C on the CPU and 40 on the GPU the rest were the same! 3Dmark06 hit 18795! I am still not 19,000+ where I was with the 4.5ghz and the cranked up 260, but I am sure I will get there. I would love to see 4.7ghz and 20,000 points. I gotta get to work I guess!
