Working on a Skulltrail System

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.