Hey guys, it's been about 8 years since I first joined this forum and shared my first custom water cooled build on mods rigs. This place has always been full of members giving useful tips and tricks. So it gives me great pleasure to share another build powered by EVGA! At the heart of this machine I chose to go to with an EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 Hybrid just because I want the peace of mind and exceptional cooling it offers. I run a lot of GPU intensive applications mostly for research and design and sometimes those projects can run for 3 - 4 days on 100% GPU utilization. Overall, I felt this build went well with some challenges. I am going to point out some of the issues I ran into and some of the solutions. But first, here is the build:
Mods Rigs Entry: https://www.modsrigs.com/detail.aspx?BuildID=40029 Some interesting findings:- NZXT H500i was the case I chose merely for simplicity and minimalism. The case met all expectations for me, however it's a bit cramped and I had trouble getting my EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 Hybrid's radiator mounted in there along with the Kraken X62.
- Luckily I opted for the H500i which has a removable vertical GPU mounting bracket. I was able to remove the bracket and fit the GPU radiator through that space to mount it to the back of the case. So I have the radiator on the outside and the fan on the inside in push configuration. I was not able to mount the GPU radiator on the inside because the RAM module on my motherboard were obstructing by about 2-5mm. If the ram modules were located just a few millimeters closer to the front of the board I would have had enough clearance.
- Mounting the GPU radiator on the exterior left me unable to re-attach the removable vertical gpu mounting bracket because the hoses are in the way. I am ordering a spare bracket that I can modify and cut to make slots for clearing the hoses allowing me to reattach the bracket to keep out dust and close that large gap.
- The ASUS Prime x299 Deluxe board has only one USB 2.0 headers. Both the H500i's smart device and the kraken x62 require a connection to a USB 2.0 header so I bought an internal USB hub from NZXT that allows me to connect both devices to one usb header. This seems safe as the usb port is used only for data as power is provided from sata power connectors. (
https://www.nzxt.com/products/internal-usb-hub)
- The airflow on the H500i is negative pressure as previous reviews state but since I'm using a dual radiator at the front for the CPU (kraken x62) and a single fan radiator at the rear for GPU cooling, I end up affecting the efficiency of the negative pressure design. So to make up for airflow I ended up replacing the GPU radiator fan and the top exhaust fan with Corsair ML120's which offer a lot more airflow and static pressure.
- I'm a huge fan of EVGA graphics cards and I am extremely pleased with the GTX 1080 Ti SC2 Hybrid. However I did have two minor issues with this card in terms of quality control. First off the card was definitely in a factory sealed box and had a protective plastic wrap over the radiator so everything seemed pristine. I noticed a few bent fins on the radiator as soon as I took it out the box. It was easily fixed by using a small flat plastic tool to straighten them back carefully.
- After running the system for a while I started to hear this sound which seemed like the same kind of noise you would expect to hear from a liquid cooling pump with air bubbles inside. So my first instinct was to check the kraken x62 and the evga 1080 ti sc2 hybrid. It seems the noise was coming from the 1080 ti SC2's fan. I swapped this fan with a Corsair ML120 and I'm back in business with even better airflow and temps. Nevertheless, these small issues didn't affect the performance of the card but I wish they were not things I had to deal with.
Hope you all find these bits of info helpful. It's been a rather fun build and I'm happy with the performance. I'll be sharing some logs on how the mod goes with the vertical GPU mounting bracket, as well as some benchmarks and thermals.