New case a coming

muddocktor

Well, I decided to watercool my main rig, which meant I needed a new case to do it properly. My Silverstone TJ06 just isn't set up to watercool efficiently without going external for a double or triple radiator. I have been slowly collecting my watercooling stuff over the last several months, buying from forum Classified sections and so far had gotten myself a double 120mm fan sized heatercore, an Iwaki waterpump and a D-Tek Fuzion block with the Pro mount. I already had enough Tygon R3400 tubing left over from my last rebuild on my daughter's machine. And in a moment of insanity, I went and ordered a Mountain Mods U2-UFO case to base the build on. It was damn expensive but I wanted to have plenty of room inside to mount either a double or triple radiator, as well as that beast of a waterpump too (it's freaking huge). I ordered it in white powdercoat and plan to do a black and white color scheme, with all the drives and bay covers and bay reservoir being black, as well as my tubing internally.

This case has spots to mount 9-120 mm fans in it. I ordered a bunch of blue led Yate Loon fans to mount inside the case, as well as some carbon wire sleeving for the fans. I also ordered 4 black fan filters and 5 black wire guards for the case too.

Anyways, when I get it in next week I will be sure to post some pics of the case while I build it up. I plan to take it nice and slow and do as neat a job as I can on this one.:bigggrin:

DanG

I've seen those cases but would have a really tough time justifying the money for it. They do look really sweet though.

primesuspect

Can't wait for pics! Sounds sweet.

MAGIC

sweet

muddocktor

I can hardly wait either. I've heard these cases are great and I've seen some pics of some damn nice rigs using them and I want to see what the hype is all about. As for the affordability of them DanG, just check the prices of any other wide case such as the U2-UFO. I found a wide Lian Li at performance PC's, but it was at least as expensive and would have taken even more mods to make it like I would want. At least with the U2-UFO, you already have plenty of cutouts for fans and radiators and you can even specify the cutout spacing to fit particular series of rads too. I got mine spaced out for the PA series of Thermochill rads.

BTW, my fans, wire guards and filters came in yesterday afternoon from Jab-Tech. They were shipped FedEx Home and I didn't even know that they delivered on Saturdays. So keep that in mind when you are choosing shipping options when you place orders online.

muddocktor

Here's a few pics of what I was able to do before having to come back to work. I did get my water loop installed and tested and got some of my fan wires sleeved but ran out of time before I had to go back to work.

Front: Note the waterpump power cord coming out the open bay slot for leak testing.


Left side: This is just a spare mobo I have that I used for routing purposes for the waterblock and tubing.


Right side: You can see the dual fan heatercore radiator and the waterpump.


Back side: Note all the fans in the pics were running as I just jumped the psu to power them up while leak testing the loop. Otherwise the heat would slowly build up inside the case from the waterpump.


I presently have some more Tygon tubing, black anodized thumbscrews and wire sleeving material on order. It should be waiting for me when I get back in from the rig next week so I can continue getting things together. Also, none of the wiring is straightened up yet since I'm still in the process of sleeving the fan wiring. I should also have a northbridge waterblock and gpu block at the house by the time I get in from the rig (found a good deal on some Swiftech blocks on OCForums). I haven't decided whether I will add them into the loop now or wait until later.

Snarkasm

Good LORD is that thing massive. How impressive.

csimon

Snarkasm wrote:

Good LORD is that thing massive. How impressive.

:bigggrin:

Looks great mudd! What radiator is that? Is it single pass?

fatcat

that case is pretty swank. nice job mudd

BuddyJ

Any updates on the build? What temps are you getting? There's gotta be a law of diminishing returns in effect here somewhere. Is it really worth it to get that huge case and all those fans?

lemonlime

Wow, that is a massive case! Inspirational.

My personal favorite for watercooling is the TJ07. You can mount a triple down where the HDD cages should be. I'm seriously thinking of giving H2o another go. Or, I may get the Vapo up and running again.

muddocktor

Time to update this thread. I finally got enough time off to finish up phase 1 of the build today. I've been delayed quite a bit since I started the build due to work. Last week I had to work 5 days out of my days off because we are so busy right now. Good for the wallet but bad for having time to do anything. I started last night and took down my main rig and started gutting the TJ06-B I had been using. Since my last post in this thread, I had decided to go ahead and cool my 8800GTS 512 too. To do this I had gotten a good deal on a MCW60-R gpu block and MCW30 nb block. Since my X38-DQ6 board already has a very good chipset cooling solution on the nb, sb and vergs, I decided to not watercool the nb. But to add the vid card to the block I was concerned about the radiator being able to handle the heat dump so I went ahead and ordered a Thermochill PA120.3 to add into the loop in addition to the dual rad I already have. But like a dummy, when I ordered the PA120.3, I forgot to choose some barbs from the dropdown box at Sidewinder so when I received the rad on Wednesday I had no way to connect tubing to it.:( I have some barbs on order now, but the PA120.3 and the 8800GTS will be phase 2 of the project, most probably when I come in from work in a few weeks.

csimon wrote:

Looks great mudd! What radiator is that? Is it single pass?

It's a heater core I picked up out of the OCForums Classifieds last year. I think it's single pass, but I'm not sure. But it is all copper and brass. And it's bigger than a normal dual fan rad such as a PA120.2. I made me a shroud out of some aluminum flashing left over from fixing the flashing on my house.

The next few posts will be pictures of the finish of phase 1 of the build (before the 8800GTS and PA120.3 additions).

muddocktor

OK, here comes some pics of it.

This is a picture of the right side, which should be finished with totally except for the return tubing for after phase 2


Here is a picture of the front on my machine. The leds are pretty damn bright. I wouldn't want to sleep with this machine in my room because it glows pretty good with the fans and those bright leds. And you can see the turbulence that Iwaki beast makes in the reservoir too.:D


This is a pic of the left side, the board area. I'm using a Sunbeam pci controller card to turn my pump on with the system. This is the second one of these cards I'm using and they work well for controlling a 120v pump in your system. It also has a switch on the back side for manual control for bleeding your loop down or turning it off. Since this X38-DQ6 board has such a nice cooling solution for the nb, sb and vregs, I decided to not add the MCW30 into the loop.


Here's a pic of the top of the system:


Here's a pic of the back. If you look at the bottom slot, you can see the switch for the pump contoller as well as the 120v input for it.

muddocktor

I forgot to take some pics of it with the sides mounted on the case this time. But I have phase 2 coming up and I'll get a few pics of everything all assembled. Phase 2 will be mounting the following in the case:

The vid card:


Note that I had to trim some of the pins down on the 2 sinks in front of the barbs for extra clearance in this pic:


And here is the Thermochill PA120.3 that will be mounted in the left front of the case:


And here is the reason why I decided to get a new case in the first place. This TJ-06B just didn't leave enough room on the bottom to mount my TRUE correctly in a front-to-back arrangement. The TRUE would hit the case side when you tried to install the mobo with it mounted blowing front-to-back, so I had to mount it in a horizontal arrangement, which I'm sure affected it's cooling ability a bit. This picture was taken right before I tore it down to start installing the components in the U2-UFO, so you can see it was kind of dusty.


So far I'm seeing much better temps than with the TRUE in my TJ06-B case. I'm now seeing crunching temps of around 40-43 C on the hottest core on my QX9650, which is around 10 C less than when it was aircooled. And this is with it running at the same speed as before, 3800 MHz. The system is also pretty quiet, since I'm using 6 low speed and 3 medium speed Yate Loon fans in the case. The pump is actually the noisiest component in there, which makes a low rumble sound. I think I will have to hunt up a more elastic rubber for mounting it than the O-rings I'm presently using. The size of this case is a big plus for watercooling, let me tell you. It has the ability to mount radiators from a single all the way to triple fan rads and it has enough room to mount dual rads like I plan to do. After I add the PA to the loop, I'm sure I could add another watercooled 8800GTS to the system with no problems dealing with the heat load. The main reason I am going with all the radiator area is that with me working offshore all the time and my machines running 24/7/365, I want to make sure I have more than adequate cooling capacity for when things get busy like now and I don't have time to properly clean the dust bunnies out.

muddocktor

One other thing I want to add that I found especially neat about this case: I love the hard drive backet mounts. It's pretty clever in that it uses the holes on a 120mm fan to mount to and they can be used in any case that uses 120mm fans. You can mount up to 3 hard drives per bracket/fan and you can also buy them separately if you want to add some more drives to your present case and it uses 120mm fans.

BuddyJ

Cool deal with those bracket mounts to the fans. I hadn't noticed it until you pointed it out.

DJ_Evergreen

Sheesh, how much did all that stuff cost?

Zuntar

Not sure how I missed this thread.... I LOVE the U2-UFO cases!!! So much that I biult one from scratch!!

I am at work, so most of the pics don't show up I'll check it out at home.;)

mas0n

Nice work Mudd! What kind of temps are you getting all around now that you've added the PA120.3 and the 8800GTS into the loop. I have a PA120.3 on a single block (CPU) loop and am thinking of adding my GPU into it.

Love that case, how tall is it? I think I need a case that can double as a big square ottoman.

muddocktor

I haven't had a chance yet to add the vid card and PA120.3 to the loop yet, mas0n. I'm still out on the rig until next Monday. But I imagine that I will have quite an excess of cooling capacity with both radiators in the loop and I imagine that I could go Crossfire without doing anything but adding the some ATI vid cards to the loop. The case is a cube and measures 18" X 18" X 18". So while it's very wide, it isn't as tall as my old TJ-06B case. Mountain Mods did just come out with a new cube though, for people that want even more room called the Ascension. It is 24" tall X 18" X 18" and it has enough room (depending on the front face choice) of mounting 4 triple fan radiators inside.

DJ_Evergreen, I have quite a bit tied up in it, but since this my hobby I don't care. I haven't bought everything all at once for this setup but rather bought bits here and there when I could afford them.

Zuntar, I would love to see your homebuilt U2-UFO build. Do you have any pics of it posted anywhere?

Zuntar

muddocktor wrote:

...........

Zuntar, I would love to see your homebuilt U2-UFO build. Do you have any pics of it posted anywhere?

Sadly, no. I am almost done with the rough draft for a large "mod" article for IC, but I suck at writing soooo....:o

I'll try to wrap it up soon, I've got LOTS of pics too. Might have to lean on the writers guild at IC to help clean it up though.

Komete

Wow Muddoctor, you don't F around. That case screams pure blunt force. And that waterpump looks like it's Katrina ready. Does it run off of 12v or does it plug into the wall? I'm always weary of small water pumps but that thing looks trustworthy. GPH must be high.

That space must be nice to work in. I wanted to ask you about the fan filters. Do they do a good job at keeping the dust out? Also how big of an impact is it reducing the air flow. It looks negligible but thought I would ask.

muddocktor

Thanks, Komete. The waterpump runs off 120v and is controlled by a controller card that plugs into a pci slot but doesn't actually use any power or draw a signal from the PCI slot. It draws the 120v power from a plug on the pci slot card back face that has a female receptacle in it and it gets it's signal and draws the relay power from a 12v molex connector. I never did post any updates pics of the system but I will soon as I need to take it out and do some minor cleanup and add some PT Nuke to the loop and change out the pump suction line to thicker wall tubing. The filters are pretty non-restrictive but do allow very fine dust to get past. But they do a decent job of getting out a little coarser particles such as fluff and animal hair, which collects on them and can simply be vacuumed off of them. And once they do get a little bit of fluff built on their surface their filtering efficiency actually goes up, but then so does restriction too. It's all a trade-off, but all in all I would much rather have the filters instead of wire fan grills.

It's hard to believe that I scored that pump in a forum classified section for less than $60. They sell for over $200 new and there was nothing wrong with it at all.

PS: And watercooling the vid card made a hell of a difference in temps on it too. I have to try very hard just to get vid card temps up to 40 C even when running Furmark on it.