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.

Got me an new Graphics card to violate, so I figured I'd show everyone. (that being me and my cat, who is easily impressed), what I did to my old card.

The old card was an MSI FX5500 128mb
and it looked somewhat like this.
Except it doesn't have that extra port thingie.

The radiator is shaped like a MSI logo , which was fun to violate, before putting it back into the computer.


Anyhow , I started out a bit easy, by adding a fan to the thing.
The fan was some old crap that used to sit on an 486, got the job done though.

The fan initialy was screwed into place, but fell off after a while. Giving me an excuse for further violation.
A few drops of superglue later it's firmly stuck on top of the MSI logo.

If you look at the first picture, You might notice 2 tiny chips sticking out under the radiator on the right side of it.
That's 2 of the ram chips.
I decided that the RAM too needed a bit of love.
So I got 2 fans that initialy was used to cool the cpu's in laptops.
I love those little thingies.

So anyhow, I used some more superglue and got it firmly stuck in place, covering both chips with one fan.

This is hardly the best way to mount a fan on a chip, but there realy wasn't any other way to do it, other than removing the radiator, and would have left me without something on the GPU.


And another one on the other side of the card for the other 2 Ram chips.

I had to place some tape over a few places to insulate against potential shorts. that's the white corners sticking out under the fans.

It's not pretty, but what the hell, if it works it's good enough for me.
Well until I got me a new card anyhow.


The specs was a whooping 200 mega hurtz for the GPU and some amazing 400 mega hurtz for the ram.
This quickly turned into 300Mhz for the GPU and 500Mhz for the ram.
It did clock higher , but that produced artifacts.

In hindsight , the ram fans was a bit redundant.
I actualy tried to pry them loose, but they are eternaly stuck forever.
which is a bit sad since now I can't use those fans for my new card.
I'd mention what the new card is, but it's just some cheap crap.

Until next time I feel Blaggy, take care.