Top floor has the motherboard done and all the fittings sorted out:











For old times sake i put the old board and video cards ( left side) right beside the new board on the right side....It's actually quite a bit smaller overall, but i had to drill a new hole on the motherboard tray and add a standoff to be able to handle an ECC workstation board...It's the only difference compared to E-ATX:

Specs?

For the new system:
Dual Xeon 10 core E5 2680 v2 CPU's, so 20 cores and 40 threads with hyperthreading.
4 AMD r9 290's.
Asus dual socket motherboard, and a ton of water cooling...:lol:

Looks nice shadow, I really dig those fittings.

That's a small fortune for the CPUs alone.

What else besides gaming and benchmarking do you plan to use it for?

Thanks for the update dude, now get back to finishing it!:lol:

Nice work btw.

Thanks.....

Yup, about 4000$ alone for the cpu's and I do some 3d rendering, encoding and decoding videos, both of wich love lots of cpu cores to speed things up.

I'm working on the flow path within the case, and modifying the cooling since the R9 290's use more power, so the top most radiator( among other modifications) is a 6 fan 360mm double thick radiator in push/pull rather than a 240mm unit with 4 fans, so things are getting beefed up for the GPU's.

You should send me your previous PC, I do a bunch of 3D work but I certainly lack the punch you've got there. :lol: Nice rig.

The funny part is that I checked the prices on those old xeon's I bought 3 years ago and they still sell for about 1000$ each, and that old board is still on sale at evga after all this time, while still packing 24 GB of corsair dominator GT memory, and the HD7970's are the prices they are because of all the bitcoin mining craze going on, never mind the water blocks they have.

I might have enough parts left over to get the old system running again and maybe join the mining craze....LOL.

This is the bottom portion:





We can see the 2 power supplies since 1 simply can't handle the load( I learned it the hard way), we also see the small 120 mm radiator in between the PSU's in a push/pull fan arrangement with a small hose that's connected to a pair of pumps( not visible), as well as the larger front radiator( we see mainly the fittings really), and in front of the radiator are 2 cages for hard drives that as of right now contain 6 SSD's( 240 GB each) and three 2 terabyte hard drives....Basically the cages are packed as there's only 1 more opening left.


Leave it to me to pack such a large case to the gills hardware wise....:lol:

So... Ordered a Corsair 900D. Think i'm going to do copper tubing with push to connect fittings.

Like these, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009PT3BR6

Latest with the new motherboard.

New fanless Thin-Mini-ITX HTPC.

Specs ? That looks sweet :)

I've seen some of those setups and while they do look amazing, but must also be an extreme pain in the ass to get the turns exactly right to line up the pipes.....Are you just going to use a regular metal pipe bender to make the turns?


Buy a lot of extra copper tubing....:lol:

Here's an initial pre-fitting with the top radiator installed and I kind you not when there's less than half an inch between the video card water blocks and the top radiator...Same goes for the hoses and fittings on the CPU loop and between the brown fan on the back and the radiator....I'm squeezing every last millimeter of space available in every direction...:lol:




Still have one more radiator on the other side to install( at the bottom level), and a truck load of wire management to do but i'm taking my time and getting it done right....

Cleaned up the wiring considerably since the new motherboard has 3 less 6 pin power connectors compared to the SR-2 motherboard and also added a few more fittings and a tubing....It's easy to visualise the routing on the 2 loops, the tubes are far shorter and 5 hoses will pass under the motherboard tray or below the 5 1/4 drive bays and can't be seen unless one disassembles half the case...Makes the system look much cleaner overall, but uses a ton of fittings....:D


Onto the led lighting and where to position them is next.

You mean the SR2 board? I can't find it anywhere anymore. But yeah those older xeons are still valued quite high.

Case: Akasa Euler
MB: ECS H87H3-TI (came with a mini-pcie wifi card)
CPU: Intel i3-4330
RAM: 8GB DDR3
HD: 256 GB 5200 RPM (had it laying around and will replace when SSD get cheaper)
KB/M: Logitech K400
PSU: 19.5V 4.62A power brick from old Dell laptop. (A lot of the Dell power bricks use the same connector and specs)

Oddly, the MB came with a mini-pcie wifi card that was totally unadvertised. The case also happened to have holes for antenna pigtails that were not advertised. Some people have reported that the case handles an i5 just fine. The standard i7 is too much for it. I can overheat the i3 by running prime95 for several hours, but that isn't very representative of normal use.

Because the Thin-Mini-ITX standard is very specific about the CPU location, they were able to just have a solid aluminum block between the CPU and case. Would be sweet if AMD could make an APU/MB combo that would work with cases like this.

They're still sold by EVGA directly on their online store.


Anyhow, after another 4 hours of work, the build is advancing nicely, with all the hoses now installed, all the connections to the motherboard done, as well as the top radiator fitted and except for the need to buy a lot of tie wraps, and installing the last radiator on the bottom right side for the CPU loop as well as bleeding, there isn't much left except installing touch screen fan controllers.




All the tubing is passed thru and thanks to the use of so many fittings, there isn't tubing going all over the place in a build this complex.




Top radiator says it all in terms of using all the available space between the video cards and the top case panel and also shows the LED's installed on the case frame on either side of the radiator using just double sided tape should I need to move them, but overall there's only a few millimeters left over...:lol:





But I kept the tubing as short as possible as one can see in the pictures where the video cards connect to that top radiator( there's 2 more radiators in that loop)....My fingers hurt like hell after tightening so many fittings....:p





General cleanup having so many SATA cables and power cables to tidy up that it isn't even funny anymore, hence the need for tie wraps and a lot of them, but It also shows the 90* elbow I added along with a drain plug to make it easier to empty the system( CPU loop has one too).

Leak testing that many fittings can't be fun. :runaway:

Indeed, but I keep it easy by powering up only the water pumps using a separate power supply and packing all the areas with kitchen tissue paper, wich interestingly enough, one can see leaks because the pattern on the paper gets erased even if it's had time to dry off.


So i'll leave it running a couple of days like that and check the water levels on the reservoirs....

It's moving along now to the wire management portion of the build, which considering the amount of hardware involved, is no cakewalk at all but here's a picture of the right side of the case that gives a good idea what I'm aiming for the rest of it, which I'm hoping I complete It this week....





All that's left here is adding the final radiator on the bottom right of the case and hooking up the fans to the fan controller, which are now 3 touch screen units...Should put on a nice show a night with the led lighting on top.....:D

With all that money spent, you think you could afford a camera better than a potato.

Did you purposely pick that color of tubing? Or is that stained from prior use?

:lol:
I just assumed it was beer he used for the coolant. :bleh:

Hey it's a cell phone camera, you do you expect?......I'll break out the real camera once everything is done, even though it has less pixels than the cell phone, it shows the difference the optics make.


Looks better than what the camera shows.....Kicks the camera :embarrassed:

mine wad taken with a cell phone camera to, how old is your phone :p
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost...&postcount=192

Is your phone also a potato?:lol:

Hey, it's a galaxy S4.....I don't think the issue is the phone since the images average about 2MB in size, but when uploaded they get compressed to really small sizes and much lower resolution than what they were taken at.


Mind you, a real dedicated camera is still far better.