Watercooling Case Mod

It's that time again.

The time when I get sufficently bored, and happends to lay my eyes on something moddable.

This time I was thinking about how to make the watercooling case mod, a bit moddier.

And I just happend to have a digital photoframe.

So I removed the front of the Watercooling case, (hereby known as Heart case.)

The white front on the photoframe might reflect light, So I decided to mask it with tape, and paint it dark.

The tape was used just in case it didnt turn out as good as expected, I could always just remove the paint and be back with a nice white frame again.

Here we can see the painted frame displaying a random picture.

Originaly i was going to dismantle the photoframe and just use the LCD screen, but it fit so good with the frame, that I decided to use the whole frame.

The USB connector didnt quite fit though, so I had to butcher the cable a bit to make it fit.

And then I glued it in place.

Testrun of the front.

The USB cable I had was very short, and I didnt have an extension cable around, so the thing ended up on the floor next to the PC until I go buy a longer cable.

I added some random art which is displayed on it.

The screen is powered by the USB and since its plugged in, It's quite easy to just upload new pictures to it without having to dismantle it again.

The software to update the pictures are located on the photoframe usb disk, so its just a matter of running it directly from the USB disk.

And here is the Finished results.

Not bad. =)

Heart watercooling build part 2

The build continues.

So I finaly got around to finish my watercooling build the way I intended it from the start.

Watercooling blocks for Graphics cards are not cheap.

So I figured I'd have a go at making my own block.

One good thing about this card is that it already have a good solid copper base.

Dismantling it reveals a big copper base, plastic fan, and a piece of aluminum to top it off.

The Card is a XFX Geforce 9600 GSO with 768MB ram.

The GSO line is more like an in-between of 9600 and 9800. (And there are ways of modding the BIOS so it turns into a 8800 GT 512MB)

Anyhow here's a picture or it never happened of the card in pieces.

So the First thing I had to do was make a way for water to flow over the copper base.

What I'm using here is a copper pipe 6mm (atleast I think its 6mm)

The copper pipe is tricky to bend, even with a tool, because the tool makes large bends, and I had to shape it smaller by hand. Something that can easily ruin the pipe, because if you bend the pipe too hard it will just fold.

This is what I finaly ended up with.

I was a bit worried that the hose connectors would be difficult to solder onto the pipe.

But it turned out to work just fine.

Next up was to solder the pipe onto the copper base.

It takes quite alot of heat to warm up the whole thing to the point where you can solder it. I used a small blowtorch, I'm not sure if a soldering iron might be enough on this much copper.

Here it is after that's all done and mounted back onto the card.

Next up is to dismantle the whole watercooling system and rebuild it with a few additions.

Here is a picture of the pump and water tank standing ontop of the Heart case.

The Heart case used to be an old printer server which I got from a friend, I've been saving it for a project like this. and you can also see the bigger radiator at the bottom of the picture.

I have the old fluid in the bottle there, and used that to top up the new liquid I bought.

oh yeah,, I should mention here that in order to ensure airflow in the Heart case, I unscrewed one of the 120mm fans and turned it around, so it will create an in-out flow in the case, as the Heart case does'nt have any air holes.

A Picture of the insides, before I remembered to mount the graphics card.

And here is the insides with the card mounted.

It turned out to be very very tight at the bottom with the hoses from the card.

Note to self, Next time, remember to angle the hoseconnectors sideways.

More pictures of the snakes nest of cables and hoses the insides of the PC has turned into.

Here is the inside of the Heart case after mounting the radiator and pump.

Notice the difference in color of the hoses, the realy green ones are new, and the yellowish one is a piece of the old hose. well , I say old, but it's only about 2 months old.

I have no idea what made it go Yellow, and it only affected the hoses on the outside of the case. the hoses inside of the case was still green. I got a UV LED inside the case, so it's probably not because of UV. Odd.

And Finaly after assembling the whole thing, Making a 2 powercable to power the fans and pump, and rebuilding the whole cooling system, here is the finished result.

Front and back pictures

I have to say that the Heart looks great. and looking at it like this I can realy see how ugly the PC case is.

It was alot of work , but in the end it was worth it.

And it works just Great!

I was worried that the copper pipe did'nt have enough coverage area on the copper block , but turns out to work just great. After running the system at MAX ,, with 100%CPU and Furmark to max out the card, The peak temp of the card was only 56C with the CPU at 54C. Not bad considering that the same water is used to cool both.

Before the build the graphics card easily hit peaks of over 76C, So a 20C difference is not bad at all for a first try DIY waterblock =) . And the Heart case looks great.

16 gigabytes of server on the wall

So, without any kind of explainations, here's my Server.

Geforce 8400 GS Mod

It's been a while since I posted any videocard mods here, So I guess it's time to show what I'm currently using.

I never got around to show what I did to the 6200 i had for a while, but maybe I will show that some other day.

Anyhow, I got myself an 8400 last summer, and since then I've done several tweaks and mods to it.

First of all, the factory cooling sucked, so the first mod I did was to swap the radiator from the old 6200 with the 8400 one. 

The problem now was that the 6200 radiator did'nt have a fan, and I was all out of superglue.

I had an old fan which once upon a time was used to cool an pentium CPU.

I dug around in my "loose screws" box, and finaly dug up one screw that fit rather ok'ish, and another screw that just did'nt fit at all. 

I managed to fasten the fan by simply screwing it ontop of the radiator, using the spaces in the radiator to hold the screws.

However, that did'nt quite work out, since the screw was poking out and made me unable to mount the card in the PC. 

After some tweaking of the placement of the screws I finaly managed to fit it, although the fan had to be mounted sort of sideways.

It's ugly as hell, but it works, which is good enough for me.

One thing I might mention here, is that normaly, fans are mounted so that they blow air onto the radiator, While modding other cards, I've found that mounting the fan to suck air from the radiator works better.

The next thing I did was to add a "box" around the card.

If you look at new cards, they pretty much all got boxes,which sucks air through a hole and blows it out of the computer.

My version works pretty much the same way, except it sucks air from the outside of the PC and blows it out through the hole.

This is much better, since the GPU will be chilled using fresh air from the outside, rather than using second hand, already warm, air from inside the PC case.

Another thing about this design is that the underpressure in the case, helps to suck air in aswell.

the old 6200 had a similar box, but no fan, all the airflow was sucked in by the casefan and the PSU fan, which greatly increased cooling, without adding an GPU fan.

Anyhow, the "box" I added, was made from an old box of ,, I think it was an energylamp or something like that, which was roughly the same size as the card.

After some cutting and ducttaping, this is what I ended up with.

As you can see, it's ugly as hell, which a huge screw sticking out.

The "box" is shaped so that I have a gap which is aproximately the size of the cardslot in the case, which I left open to left air in.

There is a hole for the fan to pass air out, and the whole thing is just held in place with duct tape.

Ugly, but it works.

When I got this card, It had a radiator made from cardboard with a tiny fan, all held in place with some grey chewing gum as cooling paste, and 2 tiny plastic things.

Well , atleast that's what it seemed like, because the cooling it did was horrible.

65°C at Idle!! , and over 80°C at load.

After My mods, it went down to around 45°C at idle. and 65°C at load.

Time to Overclock this thing!

I'm using Rivatuner to overclock this thing.

The GPU clock increases in 27mhz increments, so I've tried to overclock in 27mhz increments.

The default clockings for this card are..

Core clock = 459Mhz

Shader clock = 918Mhz

Memory clock = 400Mhz

For testing the preformance, and more importantly the temperatures of the card, I'm using Furmark, which is an OpenGL benchmark that will Realy make your card run hot. I have'nt seen anything else that can make the card run hotter.

The Furmark score for running the card at default settings is 850 http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/score.php?id=f2660010dd7880b9ddc05b13f03a75bf

I've managed to clock the card to ..

Core clock = 675Mhz

Shader clock = 1380Mhz (or 1404Mhz)

Memory clock = 486Mhz

I'm unsure about the shaderclock, because the Rivatuner only goes up to 1380, that reports the shader clock speed as being clocked 1404Mhz, however GPUZ reports 1380. I'm guessing the real speed is realy 1404Mhz because of clocking intervals, but I can't confirm this.

This gives me an Furmark score of 1241 http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/score.php?id=f2660010dd7880b9ddc05b13f03a75bf

here are the GpuZ details http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/dy53a/

The Temperatures of the card is 51°C in Idle , and 72°C at full load with Furmark for 15mins.

Which is quite acceptable considering that after gaming for hours, the GPU temp is usualy around 67°C.

Furmark is realy good at testing how hot a card will get.

This is the fastest, stable configuration I have managed to get, and I'm using it all the time for gaming and stuff.

Rivatuner lets me clock the Core clock up to 690Mhz, which gives the nearest interval at 702Mhz. However this gives some tiny artifacts while running Furmark, so I'm sticking to 675Mhz.

The memory can be increased in smaller intervalls, but will create havok with the apps over 500Mhz. (freezing, flickering and so on.), so i'm sticking to the 27Mhz interval of 486Mhz.

The speed of the video ram mostly affects how fast it can load textures and stuff, so its mostly affecting Loading times, with very little effect in benchmarks.

All in all , it's not bad for a card I spent about 33€ on =)

Game on