An abundance of progress was made on FTW over the weekend as more and more pieces come together.
Fittings aside all of the watercooling parts are from EK, all black acetal.
It didn't take long to get everything prepared and blocked, i've had an awful amount of practice over the last few months, so much so I didn't even take any PCB shots of the cards. Definitely unusual behavior for me, I love naked cards but like most 1080's they just seemed embarrassingly sparse.
Fresh from Taiwan no less than 60 Bitspower silver shining fittings.
There was no time to line up and name each fitting, quite a lot for a relatively simple build but all part of a cunning plan.
Next up was the 9 Noctua iPPC F12's each equipped with blue Chromax to match the build.
Then the two EK XE 360 rads were mounted to the base panel of the case, fans added and wires trimmed to length.
To ensure overkill on the cooling front a third XE 360 was decked out with 3 F12's. triple triple FTW.
The rotaries and C47's all fitted ready, the loose rad fits vertically at the front of the case with the ports at the bottom. Then a 90° formed acrylic tube on either side will join the outer ports of the horizontal rads to the front rad.
Next 4 of the 5 storage drives were prepared and fitted directly to the midwall of the case, two WD blacks and two Samsung 850's.
The reservoir brackets, motherboard and aquaero were also added completing the midwall assembly.
The subtle views of the drives look spectacular through the frosted midwall although the green PCB's may warrant some further attention, for now i'm loving the effect.
Through a hybrid of CAD and measuring the assembled parts a layout for the loop and midplate was drawn up, marked onto the piece and checked against the hardware. With everything double checked it was off to the workshop to try out my latest acrylic torture device.
Without a CNC mill/laser cutting 20mm holes in acrylic is always a fun task but I found just the right tool browsing RS, unlike most crude hole saws this was one solid piece with a central guide drill and it made for a very controlled cut teamed with a 490RPM pillar drill.
After drilling some smaller holes for the D5 REVO it was time to commence stage 2!
For this lots of fittings were required, but very worth it, first I cut the tubes (ofc measured from CAD) and then assembled each one with a C47 multi link adapter and a simple 90° extender at each end.
The it was easy to loosely assemble a pass through fitting in the 20mm hole, screw that into the 90°, tighten down the locking ring and put a C47 in the top side ready to go up to the res/pump/cpu/gpu.
I may have then just taken many photo's to make up for the fact these phenomenal little runs will be near on impossible to see in the finished build.
And finally looking down from above...
...and from underneath again <3
Can't wait to get on with the rest of the loop! Just need to make some special fan extensions for the lower radiators and it will be time to piece together all of these big pieces.
JR
post edited by JR 23 - 2016/10/19 14:31:17