My Watercooled Rig

[CraigWatson]

Bit of a hotch-potch of photos, but here's my main desktop rig:

Full Specs
CPU - Intel Core2Quad Q6600, overclocked from 2.4GHz to 3.8GHz
RAM - 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 PC2-8500 (1066MHz) - 4x2GB Sticks
Motherboard - ASUS P5Q-Pro (Intel P45 chipset)
GPU - Sapphire ATI HD4870 512MB
HDD - 1 x Samsung Spinpoint 320GB + 1 x Samsung Spinpoint 750GB (both SATA-II)
Optical - 1 x Sony DVD-RW + 1 x LG BluRay DVD-RW (both SATA-II)
Case - Coolermaster Cosmos S

Watercooling
Pump - Laing DDC-1T Pro
Tubing - XSPC 1/2" ID clear
Coolant - PrimoChill PURE UV Green (not in pics, new pics incoming!)
Waterblocks - EK Supreme (CPU), EK FC4870 full-cover (GPU), EK P45 motherboard blocks
Reservoir - XSPC 5.25" bay
Radiator - XSPC R-120T 320mm
Barbs - Feser 1/2" compression and EK 1/2" standard (GPU only)
Anti-Kink Coils - PrimoChill 3/4" OD Black (Blue in pics, black incoming)

Pics!

Case before the watercooling
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_01-Case-Before.jpg

Calm before the storm, ready to start watercooling
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_02-Gear-Before.jpg

GPU with waterblock
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_06-GPU-Finished.jpg

Motherboard, GPU and radiator
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_07-Day-1-Overview.jpg

Case, pump and reservoir
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_16-Pump-Res.jpg

Filled with coolant and running on a 16-hour leak test
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_20-Overall-1.jpg
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_21-Overall-2.jpg
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_32-Dark-2.jpg

Finished rig
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_38-Inside-Closeup.jpg
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2008-08-30-watercooling/normal_35-Finished-2.jpg

I'm in the process of doing a major overhaul of the internals (components stay the same, coolant is now UV-reactive green, I've had the case internals powder-coated satin black and had a re-run of all tubing.

Also I've braided all cables black (SATA, fans etc). Photos of the finished changes are incoming, I'm having to RMA the GPU due to a leak on the leak-test. Here are photos of the above rig being dismantled:

Setup before
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1007.jpg

System components stripped
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1013.jpg

Loop drained
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1014.jpg

Case empty
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1016.jpg

Watercooling parts
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1019.jpg

Case part-dismantled ("feet" and quick-release bays)
http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1022.jpg

[glennzo]

That's one sick, slick machine Craig! I haven't seen anything that kool since my bro-in-law showed me his stainless steel cased Dell XPS! Have you considered the impact on the household electric bill? :eek:

[CraigWatson]

That's one sick, slick machine Craig! I haven't seen anything that kool since my bro-in-law showed me his stainless steel cased Dell XPS! Have you considered the impact on the household electric bill? :eek:

:D Cheers - thankfully I'm living at home so parents pay for the electricity, and I'm moving back into university halls in September which are all-inclusive, so it'll be this time next year before I have to think about 'leccy bills :D

[leigh123linux]

I detest water cooling as it is a waste of time and money ( It's a gimmick ) and is less efficient than most air cooled systems.

[glennzo]

They're going to have to get second jobs just to keep the lights on :p I'm jealous of the rig. Very nice!

I haven't had a new computer here in 2 years, and that was this laptop with a Core 2 Duo. Everything else is desktops with AthlonXP's or Intels at around 2.8Ghz. They work just fine, so there's no real need to replace them, but it's sort of like owning a fleet of ageing cars that you can't afford to replace right now.

[CraigWatson]

I detest water cooling as it is a waste of time and money ( It's a gimmick ) and is less efficient than most air cooled systems.

I agree, most pre-made watercooling kits you can buy are absolute rubbish (Coolermaster Aquagate, Thermaltake BigWater and such) because they try to make watercooling something that it isn't - something for the every-day PC. If you're running at stock, watercooling is a complete waste of time.

However, if you take the time to design your loop and buy the right components, it's pretty amazing. Thermal dynamics of water are much higher than air, so if you're into overclocking and performance, you can push the hardware harder and faster than on air.

All of the gear in the rig was bought as separates from WatercoolingUK (http://www.watercoollinguk.co.uk) and tailored to my specific PC :)

[CraigWatson]

More pics, now that I've got my proper camera back and the UV lamps installed:

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1140.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1136.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1125.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1129.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1135.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1139.JPG

[Jake]

Wow, that looks really cluttered now! :eek:

But, if you set the fans up right in the case, you can cool a system much more.

[CraigWatson]

There's going to be two more intake fans, one at the rear and one on the bottom, taking the total to nine (six on the radiator at the top - three on each side. Top three "pull" air from the case, bottom three "push" - so it's a push-pull arrangement).

I need to find a 3-pin to Molex power connector for one of them though, I'm using the six channels on my fan controller for the radiator fans and I'm one short on the motherboard connectors!

The Cosmos S is a big 'ol case though. The antistatic bag and tissue paper is only temporary to stop the waterblock contacting with my ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card - £160 of card and I don't want it damaged! My 4870 should be back from RMA tomorrow so hopefully it's all done :) - personally I think it looks a lot neater this time round. The tubing runs are a lot neater and tighter, and all of the cables are braided black so they should be near enough invisible.

[Jake]

Why have fans, if you got water cooling? Isn't that the whole point of water cooling, to ditch the fans?

[CraigWatson]

lol nope. The advantage of watercooling is thermal capacity. Water has a higher thermal capacity than air, so it can shift more heat - which is great when you run an overclocked system which generates more heat than the average system.

Basically watercooling works on the same principle as car cooling. You have fans to draw air through a radiator. As the water runs through the radiator, the heat is carried away by the air flowing over the fins. My Q6600 CPU is overclocked up to 3.8GHz from 2.4GHz which generates a fair amount of heat both off the CPU itself and the northbridge and MOSFET chips (voltage regulators), plus I've got an ATI HD4870 which is runs pretty toasty.

You can get passive watercooling kits, though it's always a trade-off between noise and cooling ability :)

[Jake]

lol nope. The advantage of watercooling is thermal capacity. Water has a higher thermal capacity than air, so it can shift more heat - which is great when you run an overclocked system which generates more heat than the average system.

Basically watercooling works on the same principle as car cooling. You have fans to draw air through a radiator. As the water runs through the radiator, the heat is carried away by the air flowing over the fins. My Q6600 CPU is overclocked up to 3.8GHz from 2.4GHz which generates a fair amount of heat both off the CPU itself and the northbridge and MOSFET chips (voltage regulators), plus I've got an ATI HD4870 which is runs pretty toasty.

You can get passive watercooling kits, though it's always a trade-off between noise and cooling ability :)Oh ok.

BTW, you do realise over clocking a CPU kills it's life span right? meaning it won't last as long as it should.

[CraigWatson]

Oh ok.

BTW, you do realise over clocking a CPU kills it's life span right? meaning it won't last as long as it should.

It should only reduce the liftspan if it's inadequately cooled or volted too high. As long as you keep the volts to a minimum and cool it well enough, there's no reason to say that it won't last as long (or longer) than a non-OC'd chip - even with my pretty hefty OC, my CPU cores never hit 70C. In actual fact I've probably got a bit more OC'ing headroom there as they never really hit 60C. Highest I've seen is 65-66C :)

[Jake]

It should only reduce the liftspan if it's inadequately cooled or volted too high. As long as you keep the volts to a minimum and cool it well enough, there's no reason to say that it won't last as long (or longer) than a non-OC'd chip - even with my pretty hefty OC, my CPU cores never hit 70C. In actual fact I've probably got a bit more OC'ing headroom there as they never really hit 60C. Highest I've seen is 65-66C :)Hmm, well actually, your slightly wrong, you are right, about temperatures won't effect it yes, they won't they may not kill it.. But that "over voltage" thing might.

Basically, what your doing is the same as sticking NOS on a car, stick NOS on a car, it eventually burns the engine out quicker, same with a CPU. PS: Don't say "Well My CPU hasn't got NOS going into it :p"

Every time you overclock a CPU, you stick more voltage in it, than it's designed to handle, this actually damages the CPU.

Luckily, your rich, so if your CPU goes, no worry's :D PS: Intel now have tech that tells them if the reason the CPU is dead due to overclocking, they won't warranty it.

[CraigWatson]

As you said, volts will kill a CPU waaaay before temperatures will, though as long as you research the limits of the chip and motherboard (vCore, vNB, FSB Termination, PLL) and don't go into any of the danger zones unless you really know what you're doing, you're pretty safe.

I had my Q6600 OC'd to 3.0GHz on air with a fairly standard Arctic Freezer 7 Pro cooler. As long as you know what you're doing and you've researched it, you'll be fine - I certainly wouldn't suggest wandering into the BIOS and randomly bumping a few settings up!

You also need the right gear to OC, trying to OC on a budget mATX board and with generic RAM is bound to cause trouble as they're just not built for it. My performance standards, my PC is actually mid-range. I was 160th on the CustomPC benchmark leaderboard but I've probably slipped to 250th or something by now with the release of all the i7 chips :).

[steelaworkn]

Well Craig, I think your system rocks. I also checked out your web -site and portfolio. You do some nice work.

[timmyw3ar]

damn!!! I just built a new pc, but it does not compare to that MONSTER.
Will post pics soon.
Nice one, Craig

[CraigWatson]

Thanks for the comments guys. I'll be posting up new pics in a couple of weeks, as I need to order more UV dye for the coolant. I think I got a dud batch last time around, as although the PC is sat in a corner out of direct sunlight and has a hefty mesh on the side panel, the UV colouring has faded to almost nothing.

Still, two more syringes of UV green dye are on order :)

[sonoran]

Hey Craig-
Very cool rig :D . I haven't seen a case interior that clean in years - everything here gets an eighth-inch of dust within hours of cleaning.

Re: ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card - how do you like it? Does the Alsa driver work? I researched that card after you mentioned it in a previous post and will definitely be getting one. What brand/model headphones do you use with it, seemed to me that anything less than high-end would be pointless.

[CraigWatson]

The Essence STX works, but I needed to play with the drivers before it would work. The 2.6.30 kernel has the driver module pre-compiled into it, but it depends if you want to wait until 2.6.30 is released and incorporated into Fedora. What you would need to do is follow the instructions in the guide here: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-virtuoso. The snd-virtuoso module may be included in F11 by default though. Also, note that the modules.conf file has been changed to /etc/modprobe.d/dist.conf in Fedora :)

In terms of performance, it's an absolutely storming card - I will never, ever go back to on-board sound because of it. I use Sennheiser eH150 headphones, which are pretty low-end in comparison to the card, they're good enough to make the difference. Through speakers, my setup is Xonar --> Behringer Xenyx 802 mini-mixer --> Cambridge Audio A1 amp --> JVC bookshelf speakers. Again, far from high-end, but higher than most :D

Edit

You can also get the pre-compiled RPMs for alsa-driver-1.0.20 (32bit (http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/12480660/com/alsa-driver-1.0.20-78.fc10.i386.rpm.html) | 64bit (http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/12480668/com/alsa-driver-1.0.20-78.fc10.x86_64.rpm.html)) though I'm not sure how well they'd work as I haven't personally tested them :)

[sonoran]

Thanks for the info, and, as we say to the pioneers out here in the Wild West, thanks for taking the arrows. :)

[timmyw3ar]

Hey Craig, what are you going to be using this machine for? especially with those clockspeeds!!!

I just uploaded mine. It still needs a lot of rewiring and a couple of parts.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=223085

[CraigWatson]

Hey Craig, what are you going to be using this machine for? especially with those clockspeeds!!!

I just uploaded mine. It still needs a lot of rewiring and a couple of parts.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=223085

Nice rig!

Mine is used as a jack-of-all-trades really, video encoding, gaming, running VMs in VirtualBox. I've doubled up to 8GB of RAM as well.

I also built it with as much future-proofing as possible, so although I don't really game intensively, it should do me for anything I could want it to do for the next 4 years or so :)

[timmyw3ar]

Nice rig!

Mine is used as a jack-of-all-trades really, video encoding, gaming, running VMs in VirtualBox. I've doubled up to 8GB of RAM as well.

I also built it with as much future-proofing as possible, so although I don't really game intensively, it should do me for anything I could want it to do for the next 4 years or so :)

I tried to future proof mine as well, but I have a budget being a student and only working like 10 hours a week. :D

Yeah later on I might swap that E8400 for a Quad Core. Maybe two years...

Are you using Fedora on it? Windows?

[CraigWatson]

Yeah later on I might swap that E8400 for a Quad Core. Maybe two years...

The only problem with running the watercooling setup is the fact that the hosing is so tight that I can't get the CPU block off without draining the loop and dismantling, which I won't be doing for at least a year. The Q6600 is a pretty nice chip though, so the only upgrade I'd do is a move to X58/i7, which needs a new motherboard, RAM and CPU (as well as a new CPU waterblock and NB/chipset waterblocks), so it'll be almost a full rebuild anyway :)

Are you using Fedora on it? Windows?

It's running Vista 64bit and F11 64bit on a dual-boot, though I try to run F11 as much possible, although webcam support (or lack of) for Pidgin is a bit of a killer. It's the only thing stopping me going with F11 properly. At university it'll be folding 24/7 (GPU and CPU SMP clients) as I'm not paying for the power bills :D

[CraigWatson]

Few "arty" shots now that I've got the new batch of coolant colouring in:

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1231.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1226.JPG

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/albums/2009-03-30-new-watercooling/normal_IMG_1233.JPG