Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Changes!…. As the song goes.
cyph3r
Long time no update, it’s not like I haven’t been busy though. Instead i’ve almost completely re-thought my plans, although even now they’re far from set in stone.
First off, i’ve got pretty much all my watercooling gear! At the minute most of it’s cooling my current rig in my current case, but in the next couple of weeks it’ll be settled into it’s proper home.
This was the first batch to come (the kit thats in my rig now):
-EK Supreme (Now have a Plexi Top to put on it)
-XSPC 5.25″ Drive Bay Reservoir
-Laing DDC-1T Pro w/XSPC Delta Top
-2m Tygon R3603 1/2″ ID Tubing
-UV Red Feser 1+UV CCFL’s to set it off
-Barbs, wormdrive clips, PFTE tape, smartcoils, Arctic Silver 5
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Anywho, after a few weeks of not really doing anything major this is how my current machine is looking:
Nice, but not yet the Dream PC I….. err, dream of. Anywho, today the 2nd half of my watercooling came!
-3x Xilence Pro 120-TR Red LED fans
-Another 2m of Tygon R3603 1/2″
-UV Red Anti-Kink Smartcoils (I will beusing these ones)
-Y-Splitters, More barbs, UV Cable ties and Wormdrive clips
-2 Red LED’s (for the XSPC drive bay res and Plexi top Supreme)
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Not much I hear you say? Well theres more, the good stuff:
EK-FC88 G92 Full Cover Waterblock:
XSPC R120-T 360mm Radiator (With fans fitted):
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It’s not the dual loop setup I originally planned, but thats because theres been other changes, most of which you’ll hear about soon. Stay tuned guys and girls!
Rated: 93.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...So, whats the plan Stan?
cyph3r
Theres alot of options out there right now for a high end Dream PC, alot of very nice components and things to do with them. While I would love to completely make this machine my own by modding or building a case, it’s the things inside that I consider important and it’s those I want to spend my time and money on….
(plus i’m a complete perfectionist and just know i’d never be happy enough with the end result, not for a Dream PC anyways)
I’m almost completely set on my shopping list, but I have a month or 2 before I start ordering, so if something arrives in that time, i’ll have to make some changes. Basically, this is what I reckon i’m gonna go for:
Motherboard: Asus Maximus Extreme X38
Memory: 2GB CorsairTwinX XMS3, DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600)
PSU: 850W Silverstone ST85F
Case: Silverstone TJ07B-W w/ Silverstone SST-CFP51B Aluminum Bay converter
HDD’s: 2X 320 Gb Hitachi Deskstar T7K500
I’ll be teaming all this with a Quad Core Penryn once non-Extrem Editions show up and be keeping my 2900 until new GPU architecture arrives. The other things missing are cooling related, that because I have a completely different shopping list for that.
My plan is to have a dual loop setup cooling the CPU, Northbride, VRM’s and GPU, each complete with thier own pumps and reservoirs with different colour coolant for the wow factor. Essentially i’ll have the CPU and Northbridge on 1 loop, with the VRM’s and GPU on another, why this configuration I hear you ask? Well basically as I said, i’m waiting for brand new GPU’s arrive to upgrade. I dont want to watercool my current GPU and I figure, by time new GPU’s arrive and I can setup the 2nd loop, the first will be due a drain and flush anyways, so it’s all good!
As for the gear, well lets just say it’ll be a step up from the Thermaltake kit i’m using now. :p
1st Loop:
Laing DDC-1T Ultra w/XSPC Delta Top
EK Supreme Plexi Top CPU Block
Asus Fusion Block (on the motherboard already, score)
1/2″ ID Tygon R3603 Tubing
ThermoChill PA120.3 Radiator
XSPC Drive Bay Res.
2nd Loop:
Same pump, reservoir and radiator (albeit in it’s 240mm guise) but with appropiate VRM and GPU blocks.
This rig will cost considerably more than my previous, and i’m hoping it’ll still be considered powerful in a couple of years time. Either way, i’m going to start ordering in the next week or 2 (in bulk, via Scan’s excellent finance options), so expect many pictures and plog entries
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...The story so far.
cyph3r
I missed the goal with my current rig, theres no two ways about it. After paying a rediculous amount of money (of which i’m still paying every month) for a “Top of the line” HP from PC World almost 4 years ago I decided the next rig I own would be one I know I built myself. A machine I knew was worth the money I spent on it.
Addmitedly it took me around 2 years to learn what I needed to know to get into that mindset, but hey, I didn’t want to go diving in at the deep end. I started by first buying a new GPU to replace the poor excuse of a graphics card in the HP (X1800XT replacing an X600PRO), but being a complete novice I did’nt think to check the dimensions and ended up with a brand new, high end GPU that wouldn’t fit on the Asus board the HP was supplied with. After actually checking the size this time (I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice), I discovered that the motherboard in the HP was infact of the “miniATX” variety, and finding a decent looking miniATX board with everything I wanted was a tough job. In the end I decided to just scrap the HP case and go for a normal sized motherboard. I went for a Coolermaster Centurian 532 and some 915P Chispet MSI motherboard (both cheep and cheerful, seen as I demolished the warranty on the HP by now), this was when I built my first PC, where I first saw the light of LED fans and where I first discovered how much a bitch fitting a HSF can be.
By now the HP was long gone, and in it’s place was a faster, better looking, and somehow much cheaper, gaming PC. Not long after this the first Core 2 Duo reviews started cropping up and already I found myself hunting out hardware reviews and prices, putting together rigs in my head and on paper. It was also then that I first started reading about overclocking, something that seemed like some sort of black magic or voodoo dohickery back then, with huge risks, potentially dead hardware and days of utter frustration. In 12 months I felt I had learned enough and was confident enough to start buying parts for the best PC I could possibly build. I knew I was going Dual Core with Intel’s Core 2 Duo CPU’s and that i’d need a high end motherboard and RAM kit to take advantage of it. I planned to save cash by porting as much over from the current rig as possible, things like DVD drives, card reader, HDD’s and the X1800XT I got only a few weeks before.
6 Months later (I was buying a few components each month) I had pretty much everything I needed to again completely blow my previous rig out the water. This was the kit I had:
-Core 2 Duo E6600. I wanted the extra cache this model had over the lower end Core 2’s and didn’t see the price tag of the E6700 as worth it, especially as I was planning to OC.
-2GB GeIL PC2-6400. Back when I bought this 2GB kit DDR2 was still expensive. This kit costs as little as £30 today, I paid £117 for it a year ago.
-Asus Commando Mobo. P965 were the best to pair with Core 2’s in the beginning, the P5B Deluxe was the other option, but again I wanted as much performance as I could afford, so the price difference felt worth it.
-Enermax Noisetaker 535W. There was no way I was going to use the horrid unbranded, OEM PSU that came from the HP in this rig, no way at all.
-NZXT Lexa. I liked this case, the PC would be in the living room, so I didn’t want a crazy looking case with loads of crap on the front.
-Tuniq Tower 120. Read enough reviews to see that this was about the best air cooling you could get, so I did. 
-Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer. For the price this was a golden purchase. I listen to alot of music and play alot of games, never even come close to regretting this buy.
The build went fairly smooth, a few minor hiccups but nothing major. I took the time to research how exactly to build a PC from start to finish, from applying TIM to hooking up the front panel wires to the motherboard, things that are quite intimidating for a first time PC builder. Once XP had installed and updated, AV and spyware programs were installed and my internet connection was properly setup I got about to exploring the benifits of having a high end rig. I installed all my games and was absolutely blown away! Everything was just so much smoother, cleaner, prettier. For a couple of weeks I just couldn’t get off it, and when I was I was in glee. Of course nothing lasts forever and no matter how good your rig is and how much love, money and time you put into it theres always going to be something that arrives and makes it feel inferior….
Fast forward 3-4 months and we have Quad Core CPU’s, high speed DDR2 kits that are cheap as chips, much better chipsets and motherboards and DX10 GPU’s that can stomp all over mine.
“Back to the drawing board then” I thought. By now I was pretty clued up with hardware, I knew what worked, where to get it and how to make it run much faster than it should. I had also been doing hours and hours of research into watercooling, and decided that i’d take the plunge with the next rig. Obviously I wasn’t especially keen to spend hundreds of pounds of brand new hardware only to ruin it with my virgin watercooling exploits, so I decided upon watercooling my current rig (of which I updraded to join the DX10 party with a 2900 series GPU…. yeah, ATI, I know…). The sheer number of options available bewildered me to be honest, I knew the basics of watercooling (res, pump, waterblock, radiator, all connected by tubing), but I didn’t want to buy parts that I wasn’t sure were compatible with each other. In the end I looked at the low-end, all-in-kits that companies like Thermaltake and Gigibyte provide, but realised quickly that there was little chance of me fitting an entire waterloop inside my tiny Lexa (it would have, but it would have been hard work).
In the end I settled for a Thermaltake Kandalf LCS Tower Case with built-in watercooling. This collosal 20KG lump of steel appealed to me with it’s looks, sheer amount of space and relatively low price tag, aswell as the easy to setup watercooling kit inside. In the end it was all alot easier than I expected, I assembled the loop, leak tested overnight and installed the next day without a single hitch…. to be honest I felt a bit silly for worrying in the first place. :p
Anywho, that brings me here, tonight, writing this plog, in the same situation I was when the first Core 2 CPU’s were launched. I a want faster, more advanced. better looking rig, I want to feel what I felt when I built my first high-end super rig.
I want MY Dream PC.