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.

My APOGEE GTZ i7 hold down arrived today, and looking at it got me thinking, “Do I really NEED this thing?”

It looks like with some bolts, nuts, springs, and washers, it may be possible to mount your LGA775 block on LGA1366. This picture is a Swiftech APOGEE with the stock hold down from like 2 years ago using a bolt-thru mounting kit from the D-TEK FuZion V1 (any bolts and nuts would work I think).

The second pictures is me holding up my board by the CPU block… I think it’s secure enough to get some serious mounting pressure at least as a short-term solution.

PS I haven’t tested it because my FuZion V1 is in my system right now, but I believe it would also work on the FuZion V1 with the classic hold down plate.

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

The user Schnoops over at www.overclock.net put together a fantastic reservoir side panel for the Antec Nine Hundred (900) case. It reminds me of the old aquarium side panel that Lian Li came out with years ago.

You can check out the original thread here. Very cool work