Rated: 100% (3 votes)
Loading ...A Few More Things Checked Off The To-Do List
oneeyeuk
Okies.
Top panel is on and looks spiffy. 
Mirror is installed in base of case, can now appreciate the clear top on my GPU block. 
UV cathodes in place and setting off my tubing nicely also.
Here’s a vid and a few quick piccies.
Will take some more better ones another time.
Only done a basic job of cable tidying atm, need to spend some more time another day tidying, routing, extending and braiding.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Little Update
oneeyeuk
Little update.
Brought my top panel into work today to drill it, cut it and fit my rad grill.
Also, some other goodies came for me at work today.
My 12″ UV Cathodes and the acrylic mirror panel I ordered to fit in the bottom of my case.
Will post some more pics later when I’ve tinkered some more at home. 
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Loop Installed (BIG Post)
oneeyeuk
Had a good day yesterday.
Managed to mess about with my rig for about 10 hours in total.
First, stripped everything out of my chassis. This was also a good opportunity to give everything a quick clean.
Eclipse makes it soo easy with all the removable panels and motherboard tray.
Assembled my rads next so I could see how they were going to fit in the case.
After trying in the rads (the 120.1 fitted fine) I could see that I was going to have to cut a section out of the PSU tray for the barbs on the 120.2 rad to poke through.
Note the position for the HDD cage. The 120.1 rad occupies the space where the main HDD cage used to be.The drive cage I’m using is the optional HDD cage which comes attached inside the top of the case slung under the PSU tray. Most people remove it because it gets in the way of any decent CPU cooler.
After cutting, I tidied up the hole a bit with some edge trim.
The 120.2 rad in-situ.
And a close up of the barbs poking through the hole.
The rad actually rests on the edge trim, air flow isn’t badly impeded because of the hole that I cut for the barbs.
I was able to secure the other end of the rad with self tapping screws through the screw holes in one of the 5.25″ drive bays.
I need to find something to make a spacer for this one.
Next up, CPU block.
Forgot to take pics of installation of the optional back plate I used. But, once fitted the screw heads clashed on the motherboard tray. So I had to drill 4 holes to accomodate the screw heads.
The holes are a little untidy as I went straight from a 2mm pilot to a 10mm drill bit. If I hadn’t rushed and done it in a few more stages it would have looked a bit better.
I also decided to use the optional dedicated S775 mounting plate for the EK Supreme block.
Next up, fitting the GPU block, the EK-FC8800GTX.
Removed my Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800 cooler first and cleaned up with isopropyl alcohol.
Then it was ready for fitting.
The EK block comes with spacers for your barbs which you must use to stop the threads poking too far into the block.
Also, for a good thermal interface, apply a little TIM when you attach the aluminium MOSFET cooler to the main block.
Quick pic of the GFX installed.
Had to do a couple of small mods to make the drive cage fit before I could start putting everything back together and piping up.
First, had to cut off the bottom 2/3 of the black plastic cable tidy panel on the motherboard tray.
I would have removed it altogether, but the top 1/3 houses the speaker.
Then, I had to cut off the ‘lip’ that protrudes from one side of the drive cage.
The drive cage is held in place with velcro strips.
FIrst attempt at pump postition as I had originally planned.
Decided to relocate the pump as it would be in the way of the HDD’s.
New pump position and tube cut to size and installed.
Still had to move the pump 1/2″ further forward as it was clashing on the 220mm fan on my side panel.
Anti-kink coils fitted and tubes fixed in position with jubilee clips.
At this stage, the proper thing to do would be to flush the loop to get rid of any debris.
However, me being a little too eager I just went for it and dumped a load of acid green Feser One into it.
The loop took a whole litre bottle, plus nearly two fingers of a second litre bottle.
Bled the last remnants of air out of the system through the blled screw on the top 120.2 rad, which I was able to acces through the front panel.
Left the pump running all last night and no sign of any leakage.
Be very bad for my reputation if there was any leaks as I install industrial/commercial gas and water pipework for a living.
Here’s a few shots of the loop running with my fans on too.
Apologies for blurry ones. Will take some more using my tripod later.
Things left to do:
Install rest of hardware and check system still boots up.
Check how well the loop cools my CPU & GPU.
See if I can push my overclocks any further.
Sleeve and tidy cables.
Order, then install acylic mirror panel for bottom of my case.
Wait on back order of UV CCFL’s.
Wait on back order of mesh panel to make a rad grill in my top panel.
Stop buggering about with my PC and get back to playing COD4.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...w00t!! Package Arrived!!
oneeyeuk
It’s here!!
Beautifully packed too, almost a shame to unpack it.
The contents spread over a spare desk at work.
And a close up on the pump with the reservoir top.
It’s smaller than I expected, which is no bad thing as I’ll have even less trouble finding a home for it in my case.
Have to see if I can find time to do anything with it over the weekend, I’ve kind of half promised to go down and visit a mate in Hoddesdon and help him build his new pc.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Air Cooled Akasa to Water Cooled Akasa
oneeyeuk
After considerable deliberation and research, I have finally decided to give water cooling a shot.
Many thanks to WaterCoolingUK for their helpful forums, and thanks in particular to Marcus for phoning me to clear up my last few little queries.
I really didn’t want to have to resort to an external rad, and although others have been able to install 120.3 rads in Eclipse cases I figured out it wouldn’t really work for me.
So, I decided that I would mount a 120.2 rad in the top compartment of the Eclipse and a 120.1 rad inside on the front inlet.
Here is a quick sketch-up of how I plan to install my loop.
And this is a flow diagram.
I decided to go for a Laing DDC pump with an XSPC top and reservoir combined.
This simplifies my loop by removing a pipe run to a seperate reservoir.
My package is due to arrive at some point today, will post up some piccies of all the goodies as and when it turns up.
Rated: 93.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...8800GTX Cooler Mod 2
oneeyeuk
Well, I was fairly happy with 8800GTX Cooler Mod 1 until about 3 weeks ago.
It was a Friday and, as usual, I was bored at work and was window shopping at Scan, OcUK, KustomPCs, etc.
When I happened upon the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800 cooler at OcUK.
I’ve been a pretty big fan of Arctic Cooling, especially the GFX coolers, for years.
So, it was nearly all I could do not to buy it straight away but at least Google for a few reviews first.
The reviews were favourable and the pictures in the reviews actually made me salivate.
After giving my keyboard a quick wipe, I was on the verge of pressing the ‘Checkout Now’ button.
But I stopped, I’d had another inspiration.
As good as the Accelero Xtreme 8800 looked and performed, I felt I could make it more gooder.
So, after another quick browse, I found what I was looking for.
Akasa 80mm Freeflo Cool Blue Fan.
Or three of them to be exact.
Although the mounting holes are the same centres as a normal 80mm fan, the Freeflo fan has a 90mm rotor.
And nice blue LED lights too, to fit in with all the other shiny blue baubles already adorning my rig.
So, after adding the Freeflo fans to the basket I completed my order safe in the knowledge that it would arrive at work next working day, ie the Monday after the weekend.
And, sure enough, my bits were there Monday.
I, however, was not.
On the Saturday I fell off a wall walking backwards, quite sober too, showing off to my son.
Broke my shoulder, cracked a rib and dinged my head up pretty bad too.
Spent the night in an A&E Observation ward.
I’m still not able to drive even now, but hopefully not for much longer.
Fortunately, somebody from work was able to drop my package off on the Thursday but I didn’t regain enough use of my arm to do anything with the bits until the following Tuesday.
So, on Tuesday, I set to work.
First, I had to remove the existing modded Zalman cooler and memory sink.
The VF-1000 cooler came off straight away only being held on by 4 thumbscrews.
The memory sink was a different story, removing that was what took the longest.
It’s held in place by 5 thumbscrews, which undo easily enough, and adhesive thermal pads which were stuck on like s**t to the proverbial blanket.
I just had to keep working at it easing carefully away by levering it with an old blunt screwdriver.
Next up, a quick clean with Akasa TIM Clean to remove the left over bits of thermal pad and Arctic Silver 5.
After reading the installation instructions, I first installed the 4 supplied aluminium heatsinks onto the VRM’s. The heatsinks already had adhesive thermal tape applied, just needed to remove the backing and press into place.
The next thing was to apply the supplied adhesive thermal pads to the memory chips and the NVIO chip.
The first pad took me the longest as I didn’t figure out for a few minutes that they were only adhesive on one side and I was trying to peel off backing that wasn’t there on the other side.
I then removed the fan assembly from the heatsink, being careful not to smudge the pre-applied MX2 paste on the base of the cooler, and placed the heatsink in position on my GTX.
I then carefully turned it over and attached the heatsink to the card with the 6 screws supplied, tightening them alternately to get even pressure.
I now turned my attention to the problem of attaching the three Freeflo fans I’d ordered.
I had originally thought that I’d be able to modify the fan mounting assembly from the Accelero and attach the Freeflo fans to that.
But I soon binned that idea for 2 reasons:
1) The Freeflo fans were a bit too big to all fit on the existing fan mounting without overlapping.
2) I could always reuse the original fan mounting again in the future if I ever decided to sell my GTX
So I was still left with a problem of attaching the Freeflo fans.
I remembered that I still had some offcuts of the black aluminium hexx mesh that I’d modded my side panel with and started having a play with that.
One of the offcuts was plenty big enough to attach all three Freeflo fans, which I did using some cable ties.
I then cut the mesh to size around the attached fans and placed it onto the heatsink to see if I could figure out how I was going to attach the two together.
After a few minutes of puzzling, I pushed one cable tie between the heatsink fins at one end then pushed another through the fins about 1cm further down from the other side and connected the 2 together to make a loop.
I did this again in the middle and at the end of the heatsink so I now had 3 anchorpoints on each side to attach the mesh fan assembly to with yet more cable ties.
I also modified a 2-way fan splitter into a 3-way so I could run all 3 fans from one knob on my control panel, freeing up a fan controller for another case mod that I have in mind.
Next task was to see if it all actually worked so I popped it back in my rig and plugged everything in.
PC started, fans span, GFX was even cooler.
Result.
One last small job to complete.
Although bigger, the Accelero cooler is lighter than the Zalman and more rigid when attached to my GTX too.
But I still wanted to use my Card Keeper to give it more support.
So I had to spend about 5 minutes with a junior hacksaw blade cutting about 5-6mm off the bottom lip of the Card Keeper so it would still fit.
Then that was it, job done.
OK, so you all probably want to see some performance figures.
My GTX with the stock cooler and at stock clocks would idle in the mid 50’s and under load in RTHDRIBL would nearly hit 80°C
With my modded Zalman cooler, with fall 3 fans at max speed and at max overclock my GTX would idle at 45°C and hit 57-58°C under load in RTHDRIBL.
It was also quite loud.
With the fans on low speed, and acceptible volume, on the modded Zalman cooler and at my ‘everyday’ overclock my GTX idled at 47°C and rose to 61-62°C
With the modded Accelero, all fans on lowest speed and at my ‘everyday’ overclock the GTX now idles at 43°C and peaks at 58°C under load in RTHDRIBL.
And the fans still aren’t too loud, and I sleep in the room with my PC.
But when I set my max overclock and turn the fans up to 11 (in total moving more than 120cfm of air) the temps drop to 37°C at idle and 47-48°C under load, but your ears start to bleed…..
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Modded Side Panel and The Overclocking Bug
oneeyeuk
Ok, so after getting the overclocking bug I felt the need to improve the general airflow in my case.
My initial thoughts were to modify my original Eclipse side panel and install two 120mm fans on it but lower down than the fan on my thermally advanced side panel to feed more cool air to the GFX.
I was also aware that heat would build up in the top of my case without any way of removing it.
My idea to combat this was to modify my top panel by installing one of Antec’s 200mm fans, as used in the Antec 900 case.
Anyway, whilst I was still mulling over the possibilities, Akasa decided to release a 220mm Blue LED fan which set my mind off on other ideas.
After getting the 220mm fan dimensions from the Akasa website, I soon figured out it would be too big to install in my top panel without some serious butchery of my Eclipse’s chassis.
I was also aware that there were no ‘off the shelf’ fan grills that would fit the 220mm fan.
It would also be nice to view the inside of my PC illuminated by the blue glow from the LED’s.
So, I bought the Akasa 220mm fan, an Akasa windowed side panel for my eclipse and a 500mm x 500mm sheet of black aluminium hexx mesh.
I was still thinking at this stage of just cutting a hole in the acrylic window of the side panel for the 220mm fan and then trying to fabricate a grill for it from the mesh.
All the bits arrived at work and as I was bored I started having a closer look at the windowed side panel.
The acrylic window was secured in place by some black plastic rivets and screws, so I removed them all and took out the acrylic window.
I was now left with a perfect rectangular hole with screw holes already in place, so I offered up the mesh and it looked good.
I cut the mesh to size then offered it into place again and placed the 220mm fan onto it to see how it looked.
It looked good, in fact, this is what it looked like.
I was excited , this was absolutely going to work.
I managed to leave work a little early and head home via B&Q for a variety of M4 screws, nuts & washers and a few other bits and pieces I thought might be handy.
Firstly, I secured the mesh in place with 16 No M4 x 10mm screws and nuts each with 2 washers.
Then, using M4 x 40mm screws, nuts, washers and some soft rubber anti-vibration washers I fixed the 220mm fan to the mesh.
So, with a little excitement, I installed my modified side panel to see how it looked.
I was pleased with the result, and it certainly improved airflow.
As I said earlier I have now been somewhat bitten by the overclocking bug, and not having had my E6750 more than a couple of months Intel released the Wolfdale CPU’s.
I’m afraid the venom from the overclocking bug bite was too strong, and I lashed out on an E8400, a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme cooler, an Akasa 120mm blue LED fan and an Akasa fan control panel to control all these new fans.
I also decided to give Vista 64 bit a try, so ordered up another 2gig of Crucial Ballistix.
I even managed to tidy my cables a bit.
With the E8400 and the Ultra 120 installed I managed to overclock to 4GHz more or less straight away.
With a bit more tweaking I was able to get the CPU stable enough at around 4.3GHz to run CPC benchmarks and 3D Mark ‘06.
Still wanting to tinker further and improve the looks of my rig, I swapped out my SilenX 120mm case fans for Akasa blue LED jobbies.
I was also smitten by the sexeh new OCZ Reaper HPC memory, and bought a 2 x 2gig kit.
My mobo did have some issues with the OCZ memory, but it was swiftly resolved on OCZ’s support forums.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34714
And that was me done messing.
For a week or two at least, when I became aware of a new and better cooler for my 8800GTX.
And that is what I’ll tell you about in my next post.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...8800GTX Cooler Mod 1
oneeyeuk
Ok, so after I decided to make the move to a Core 2 system I spec’d up some new components.
I’d already recently upgraded my monitor and PSU so I ordered up an E6750 CPU, Freezer 7 cooler, P5KC mobo, 2×1gig Crucial Ballistix 8500, an Asus 8800GT and a couple of other sundry items.
Rebuilt my pc, reinstalled Windows and started to install drivers which is where my first problem happened.
No matter which version of Nvidia drivers I used for the 8800GT the Nvidia Sentinel would pop up on startup and tell me that the GFX was underpowered and it was going to throttle the performance to save damaging the GPU.
I found this a little odd as I have a 1000watt Akasa PSU.
Anyway, to progress things I packed the 8800GT back into it’s box and used one of the 7900GTO’s from my old setup which worked fine.
I then had another issue, my new system was randomly shutting down and blue screening.
After my previous experience with my old setup the first thing I did was run Memtest and sure enough it reported that the brand new Crucial memory was faulty.
Wanting to expedite the RMA process, I drove up to OcUK in Stoke and swapped the 8800GT for an OEM 8800GTX and RMA’d the memory.
The 8800GTX worked fine from the start. No Nvidia Sentinel.
Still had trouble with the memory, but a helpful guy at OcUK tech support told me I should manually set the memory timings and voltage in bios (which, this being my first Core 2 build, I was unaware of).
This helped, I’d also done some Googling and found out about the tempramental yellow memory slots on the P5KC so poppped the memory in the black slots.
Having now got a stable working system I set about OC’ing my CPU.
Managed to get a comfortable and stable OC at 3.4GHz and, although not stable, was able to do benchmarks at just over 3.8GHz.
My attention was next drawn to OC’ing my GFX.
So, after not much deliberation, I bought a Zalman VF-1000 cooler and the accompanying memory sink for 8800GTX/GTS cards.
Here’s a few pics from the installation process:
With the Zalman cooler installed I began overclocking my GFX.
I was pleased with OC results.
I managed to get 675 core, 1566 shader and 1161 memory.
Although I was a little disappointed that the GPU was still running about as hot as it did with the stock cooler and stock clocks.
So, I had a bit of a brainwave.
I’d just rebuilt my work PC and upgraded that to Core 2 also (E2180) so I had two reference coolers coolers doing nothing.
My brainwave was to remove the fans from the Intel reference coolers and strap them onto the Zalman cooler on my 8800GTX.
It wasn’t too pretty, but it worked.
Dropped the GPU core temp by about 15-18°C, and I was able to push the overclock even further to 686 core, 1782 shader and 1161 memory.
So, under load at the max overclock the GPU core temp was around 57°C
I also used a ‘Card Keeper’ to help support my GFX as without the metal bar that runs along the side of the stock cooler it was quite flimsy.
Here’s a few pics of the modded GFX cooler:
Even though I was using Akasa’s Thermally Advanced Side Panel on my Eclipse case (with a 120mm fan pre-installed), There didn’t seem to be too much cool fresh air getting into my now well overclocked system.
So, that led me onto my first proper case mod which I’ll tell you about in the next post.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...What I Did Next
oneeyeuk
As I was seriously getting into CS:S and had attended my first LAN event, i28 August ‘06, I was more of the opinion that fps mattered and felt that my Athlon64 3000+ wasn’t quite up to it.
Although it was a venice core, considered to be a good overclocker, I wasn’t confident enough at that time to try properly overclocking it.
So, when I spotted a 3800+ at a bargain price I snapped it up and bought an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro cooler.
Also, not long before the next LAN, i29 November ‘06, I decide to upgrade my gfx and went for an MSi 7900GTO. Cracking card, one of the best stock gfx coolers I’ve seen.
I considered a second 250gig Samsung HDD was in order to do a clean install of Windows, Steam and my games prior to the LAN with no antivirus or firewall (not needed as behind the LAN firewall) to maximise CPU available to increase fps.
Whilst at i29, my PC started playing up with occasional random shutdowns and sometimes it wouldn’t boot up.
It continued, and got worse, when I got back home.
Eventually I tracked the problem down to the crappy northbridge cooler fan.
Had a bit of email ping-pong with Asus support and they were supposed to be sending me an improved replacement cooler, still hasn’t arrived yet, so I ordered a Zalman passive cooler for my northbridge.
Unfortunately, the cooler on my gfx half obscured the northbridge so I had to cut some of the fins off the Zalman heatsink with a junior hacksaw so it would fit.
I was concerned whether this would be a problem.
Fortunately it wasn’t.
The mobo was rock solid stable and, indeed, still is in a PC I built for a friend’s girlfriend.
Before the i30 LAN in April ‘07 I bought the ‘thermally advanced side panel’ for my Akasa Eclipse 62 case with a 120mm fan and honecomb grill pre-fitted. (no pics that I can find yet)
Then, prior to i31 in August ‘07, I went SLi with an Asus A8N32SLi mobo and a second MSi 7900GTO. (no pics that I can find yet)
I also bought a 64X2 4400 dual core processor and a Creative X-Fi PCI-Ex soundcard.
A couple of months later I started having problems, random shutdowns, BSOD’s, terrible problems with all my Steam games, etc.
After a few weeks of messing about I eventually diagnosed dodgy memory, which Crucial have since replaced under their lifetime warranty BTW.
This got me thinking, and it didn’t take me long to be seduced by the idea of a complete system upgrade to Core2.
Which is where I’ll kick off in the next post.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...In The Beginning….
oneeyeuk
My first build was my work PC back in Jan ‘05.
It’s been upgraded a few times since, but it’s still going strong.
Funnily enough, when I built it, it turned out to be a decent gaming pc back in the day.
This plog isn’t about my work PC, but here are a few pics of it as it was back then when I built it.
Cable tidying was a low priority for me back then.
All I cared about was that it would actually work.
And it did.
So, when the time came for me to build a decent home PC for me to game on I was confident I wouldn’t mess it up.
That time came in Nov ‘05.
The original spec, as far as I can remember is as follows:
Akasa Eclipse 62 Case c/w 2 No 120mm SilenX fans
Akasa All-In-One control panel
Seasonic 500watt PSU
Asus A8N-E mobo
Athlon 64 3000+ Venice core
Arctic cooling Silencer 64 Ultra TC cooler
4 x 512MB Crucial Ballistix PC3200 memory
OEM 7800GT 256MB GFX C/w Arctic Cooling Silencer 5 Cooler
An Asus wireless card poached off my brother
Samsung 250gig SATAII HDD
NEC DVDRW
Black FDD
Samsung 19″ 4:3 monitor
Saitek Eclipse K/B
Logitech MX510 Mouse plus S&S Steelpad mouse mat
Logitech 2.1 speakers
Here’s a few piccies of my baby when it was first born.
Cable tidying was still more of a novelty, but I was improving and it all worked great.
I started playing CS:S too around this time.
Bought a headset, Plantronics USB one which was very nice, and joined a clan, GB-UK, where I’ve been ever since.
Of course, it wasn’t too long before I wanted to upgrade my system.
And I’ll fill you in more on that in the next post.