Well here’s my real upcoming Nehalem build. My last post about it was a bit of a joke. I’m not really good at taking night shots so this one is a little bit overexposed, which is most evident in the tubing. I’m very happy with the results of this setup though. Looking forward to getting a CPU to pop in there.

The ES 965 I’ve been playing with had to go back to the person who owns it.

HAI GUISE,

ALMOST FINISH I7 UPGRADE LULZ XD I CAN USE MY OLD CPU FOR GAMEING?

SEEMS WONT FIT SO I HELPED TO UPDATE THE BOTTOM HALF

I WILL HAVE CPU BOTTLENECK NOW?!?!?!

I’ve got a post upcoming about my most recent water cooling adventure, but I thought I’d do a segment on one of the more interesting parts of this build: Making the MCW60 work with D-TEK’s Uni-Sink for the GTX 260 (and 280 if you have more money than I do…)

So here you can see the Uni-Sink in all its glory, along with my ghetto-fabulous method of removing my GPU blocks without actually draining my loop. The third picture is what the whole setup will theoretically look like when I’m done.

From talking to Danny at D-TEK I knew I was going to have to drill out the threaded holes that are set up for the FuZion GFX. The pictures above show me setting up for drilling by using saran wrap to keep the thermal pads from getting covered in aluminum shavings. The third picture shows why that doesn’t work very well… On the second attempt (SLI) I just peeled all the pads off ahead of time. It worked much better.

What I didn’t know is that there’s quite a bit more modification that needs to be done….. There are about 20-25 pins that need to be cut off in order for the MCW60 hold down plate to fit. Back to the dremel and then we’re done.

Haha. That was a good one! The baseplate of the MCW60 is not the same shape as the baseplate of the FuZion GFX… Talk about a round peg and a square hole. I was able to make it fit with a reinforced cutting disc and my dremel, but I really wouldn’t recommend this method…. I made a bit of a mess of things.

Nothing a little bit of nailpolish can’t fix I guess. Rather than leave the bare aluminum showing, I painted the exposed stuff with some black nailpolish. Never leave home without it.

After that I was finally able to mount the Uni-Sinks to the cards. My overheating problems are now a thing of the past (folding away on my GPU as we speak) and it’s nice to not have to worry about little junk falling off the VRMs. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to use safety goggles.

Edit: Yeah… It occurs to me now that this thread is missing temp readings. I’m using GPU-Z to take temps and I’m just kinda eyeballing it because quite frankly I don’t care. I water cool for looks/silence, not for extreme overclocking.

Idle GPU0: GPU-36/GPU-28/PCB-39
Idle GPU1: GPU-36/GPU-28/PCB-34 (this one gets only a little bit more airflow over the uni-sink)
Folding GPU0: GPU-40/GPU-33/PCB-42
Folding GPU1: GPU-42/GPU-33/PCB-37

Read the rest of this entry »

Look for this wicked system to show up at our Burnaby store. It was built by yours truly as a show piece to demonstrate the kind of wicked gaming PC you can build with all parts from NCIX.com.

With the Mountain Mods H2G0 case it only took about 2 hours to do this build. Here are some shots of the hardware used.

One of the first steps for me is always to install the CPU block and mount the radiator. I used a Danger Den MC-TDX for this build on account of the flashy look of the block. For the radiator I took a far more practical approach and went with a Thermochill PA120.2. This thing is a monster performer and the H2G0 is designed to be used with it, so the spacing is just right. At least it’s supposed to be just right. Even using 3/8″ barbs, there was HARDLY enough room to fit the tubing through the pre-cut holes

I opted to use a full cover EK nickel plated water block on the 3870 graphics card. Here you can see the card with the stock cooler stripped off and the second picture shows the EK block installed in the system.

Hard drive installation was pretty straightforward if you’ve worked in a Mountain Mods case, but the optical drive was kinda challenging. The pictures below show the hard drive installed in the bottom, rear 120mm fan mount, as well as a couple views of how the 5.25″ devices get installed. You must have at least one full size 5.25″ device (such as an optical drive) installed in order for this system to work.

Here are a couple shots showing cable management in the bottom. The modular Corsair power supply really makes cable management a snap. I only have 3 modular cables plugged into it. One for SATA, one for molex, and one for PCIe.

And here are the shots showing the system completed with the lights all aglow. So sexy. Be sure to check it out in the Burnaby store if you’re down there. If you’re interested in building a system like this for yourself, send an email to PC@ncix.com and we’ll get you set up.

Thanks for reading

These suckers are HUGE! I was actually the original builder of this PC, so when I got a call from the owner that it needed work my first thought was “Oh great… A failed GPU or something that will take forever to remove”. Actually it was even better than that. He wanted an upgrade.

So we threw a new 790i FTW, 4GB of DDR3, and 3 GTX 280 SuperClocked cards into his rig. Here’s some glam shots that I took while I was working on it. The whole thing took more than 6 hours.

Here’s a gallery with some great shots of this system including a night shot. It doesn’t include the actual “final” picture with all the tip ties cut short and the panels closed up, but it gives you a pretty good idea

Well this is a fun project. Corsair has asked NCIX to participate in building a couple of “show-off” systems that will accompany them to various shows and just generally impress people. Before I talk too much about the specs I’ll let you check out the goodies that arrived this week from Corsair and the other sponsors.

There are two systems and each will a liquid cooled monster powered by the following:

Corsair EPP 2.0 DDR3 memory at 1600MHz
Corsair HX1000W power supply
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU (I’ll be overclocking these a touch just for giggles)
eVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard
2x eVGA 9800 GX2 video cards in quad SLI
Samsung F1 series hard drive
LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD optical drive
Microsoft Windows Vista

Here’s a picture of one of them on the test bench (familiarizing myself with the board a little bit and making sure nothing is DOA), but unfortunately the really good pictures don’t come until I get the cases from Danger Den…

PROGRESS! I didn’t get the Thermochill radiator that I was planning to use for this build, but what I was able to get was a Feser X-changer 360 radiator, which is marketed as a “Thermochill Killer”. What better way to test this claim than to put it up against the Skulltrail system.

Here you can see it installed in the bottom. The cabling has also been tidied up substantially down there now that I have a radiator in. Everything needs to be tucked away perfectly to keep the cables out of the fans.

Here’s the cable management from the back. You can see the both of these Noctua fans have a clear path to the other side of the case. The 3rd fan is exhausting right into the intake of the power supply, then directly out of the case. I thought there might be cause for concern having the hot radiator air going into the power supply, but the exhaust from the power supply is quite cool, even under full load.

All of the Tygon tubing is full of Feser One black fluid and green UV reactive zip ties are being used on all the tubes to ensure that they do not slip off. There is still some fine work to be done, such as splicing the power cords for the two cathode kits so that they will both turn on and off with the same switch.

I also need to go get some blue UV SATA cables from home. Intel, in their infinite wisdom only included 4 SATA cables with the Skulltrail motherboard when there are 6 ports, all of which are being used in this system. Fortunately I have some extras at home that I’m willing to part with for the sake of my customer. Otherwise he’d end up with mismatched cables, and in a system like that, that kind of thing is unacceptable.

I also still need a RAM cooler for the FB-DIMM memory. I had a CoolIT one on there before, and it works great, but I took it off out of curiosity to see how hot the memory would run.

Just wanted to share some photos of an awesome water cooled system that I’ve had the pleasure of working on.

A customer asked for a wicked crazy gaming (or whatever else you want to do, I suppose) system, so this is what I put together for him

2x Xeon 5430 Harpertown LGA771 CPUs

Intel D5400XS “Skulltrail” motherboard

4×2GB Buffalo FB-DIMM memory modules (PC2-6400)

2x Visiontek 3870 X2 video cards in Crossfire-X

Silverstone Decathlon 1200W Power Supply

4x 1TB HDD

LG DVD/BLU-RAY/HD-DVD Combo Drive

Auzentech X-fi Prelude

Fully customized water cooling system powered by Swiftech, D-TEK, Thermochill, Vadim, and Noctua with Feser One UV Black coolant

UV Cold Cathodes

So I’ve made some progress on the build over the course of the day since I took that last picture, and one of the things I discovered is that you can’t use just any FB-DIMM memory in Skulltrail. I had initially thought that Mac Pro memory would work fine as long as it’s PC2-6400 (for best speed of course), but (silly me), the Mac Pro memory has HUGE heatspreaders on it, so if you’re looking for memory for your new Skulltrail system, be sure to get appropriate memory. The recommended SKUs are listed on the page for the Skulltrail board on NCIX.com

Here’s a better view of the internals, and the loop order. The CPU on the left will have water coming directly from the pump in the bottom.

And here’s where a Thermochill PA120.3 loaded up with Noctua fans is going to go to keep this beast cool. I may end up adding another radiator, but I’m not sure yet at this point. It’s going to depend on the temps. The customer is pretty flexible, and very patient, but as you can see, he’s going to get a VERY fine system. I’ll make sure to post some pictures of the system when it’s done with a little bit better lighting so you can see it all lit up in all its glory.