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welcome to the most overkill build guide
we have ever done this system with all the
peripherals that we're going to suggest might be appropriate for it is gonna
cost over six thousand dollars u.s so it
is not for the faint of heart however if you want nothing but the best of the
best i can stand pretty confidently behind
any of the recommendations on this table
so who is this system for exactly well number one is the components we've
chosen are optimized for gaming number two is they are optimized for
overclocking and number 3 is they are optimized for very very quiet operation
and we've also gone with a full custom liquid cooling setup in order to help us
achieve the goals of gaming overclocking and quiet operation all at the same time
now with that said our choices here today were not dictated by performance
per dollar or any kind of value metric really we're going for the best possible
performance that we can get and
that's it for our CPU and motherboard combo we've
gone with a 4770k unlocked processor
from Intel so this is on the lga 1150 platform and we've gone with the maxima
6 extreme motherboard from ASUS now you
might ask why didn't we go lga 2011 with this system the benefits of lga 2011 are
more cores more RAM as well as more pci express
lanes natively but because this is a gaming oriented system and not a
workstation we aren't going to benefit from those things as much as we'll
benefit from being able to use a fourth generation haswell architecture because
most games are lightly threaded workloads compared to a second
generation sandy bridge architecture which at the time of filming this is the
highest available on the lga 2011 platform next up is graphics cards we've
gone with two ASUS GeForce gtx titans
with coolants water blocks on them the reason we're water cooling them is that
you can get higher boost clocks if you keep these gpus very cool due to GPU
boost 2.0 and the reason we've gone with titans as opposed to gtx 690s or Radeon
7990s is that i personally find that the
best scaling and the best compatibility comes with two-way graphics card
configurations of no more than two cards now the reason to use two titans as
opposed to a single 690 is that you get a six gig frame buffer with gtx titan
that is not available on any other consumer grade gaming graphics card that
means particularly when running at high resolutions titan is going to deliver a
better gaming experience with large textures so now and in the future than
any other solution on the market storage is very personal but we've gone
with two Intel 520 series 240 gig ssds
for a total of almost 500 gigabytes of os fast raid 0 so accelerated SSD
goodness for our applications then we've gone with two western digital red series
three terabyte drives in raid 1 for redundancy now we could add more of
those drives in a more elaborate raid configuration but the most important
point i want to make here guys is for our os and applications and the things
that we can always reinstall if we lose them we're using raid 0 which is fast
but not safe and then to back up that SSD array on a nightly basis at least as
well as to archive important data we're using a safe raid 1 array on a raid
optimized drive such as the wd red
also in line with our gaming theme is the use of an ASUS zonar phoebus sound
card it's very similar to the zonar zentz that i've been using for quite a
while now except it's a little bit more gaming optimized so it has a front
control pod you can plug your headphone microphone into it uses all three and a
half millimeter connectors and it always gets the latest software updates from
ASUS for their gaming optimized features so my understanding is that their new
radar will be coming to it soon which is a visual indicator of where sounds are
coming from which is kind of neat we're using premo chill primo flex lrt
advanced tubing my personal favorite type of tubing it's awesome we're using
coolant's 3 8 inch id 5 8 inch od
compression fittings what i like about these is the fact that they can be
wrenched tight or hand tightened and they look outstanding we are also using
a phobia gold-plated reservoir which looks pretty la bling bling as well as a
coolant 380i CPU block which is one of the best performing CPU blocks on the
market the last couple water cooling components are a swiftech
mcp655 pump it's really the only one i recommend and a phobia gold-plated
reservoir for peripherals these are so
personalized but these are some pretty good general recommendations we've gone
with a logitech g710 plus it uses cherry
mx brown switches logitech's excellent software and even includes along with
the media keys and programmable g keys an o-ring mod on every single switch
making them even a little bit softer to type on we've also got a deathadder 2013
although a logitech g700s would be another great pairing for that
particular keyboard the thing people like about the death adder 2013 is it's
one of the highest sensitivity optical mice on the market as opposed to laser
mice so there's none of those weird acceleration issues finally for our
headphones we've gone with the custom one pro from bayer dynamic and we
recommend checking out the mod mic if you need something to go along with it
or perhaps something like a blue snowball which is an excellent desktop
microphone and last but not least the elephant in the room
right here the 900d pretty much the only case maybe not the only but one of the
only cases in existence capable of housing this type of a machine
especially all those radiators the first
step in any successful build endeavor is ensuring that you're at a static safe
workstation so i don't recommend working on carpet and in our case we're working
on a mod matte extreme i recommend using an anti-static wrist or ankle strap i
prefer to keep it on my ankle so it's out of my way and last but not least
you'll need a multi-bit screwdriver just a phillips head will work for most basic
builds but with this one things got a little bit crazy and we ended up needing
a power drill and some other things as well but you can do most of what you're
about to see with just the stuff i've outlined already
this step is really really important guys pay close attention particularly
with a liquid cooled build it is extremely important to build the system
outside of the box outside of the case just like we've done in the past on our
build guide so you can check that out there because the last thing you want is
to spend hours and hours putting it together only to have it not boot up
because something was dead on arrival particularly for graphics cards now we
liquid cooled these graphics cards in a separate video so you can check that out
but you don't want to install a water block on it only to find out that it is
defective so install it with an air cooler run the whole system do your
burn-in tests then it is time to
actually assemble the computer for the sake of keeping this video a little bit
shorter we're not going to do a step by step on it this time around though guys
so just check out one of our previous build guides for how to build it outside
of the case i recommend using your motherboard box as an anti-static
workstation for this step once you've done your safety build outside of the
case grab all the components that you need out of the motherboard box so that
you're not in and out of there all the time so all the SATA cables you need to
install all of your drives the i o shield which you'll need for the back of
your case as well as the wireless module that also acts as an ngff upgrade slot
and the antenna that goes with it this is a cool antenna it actually attaches
magnetically to your case or anything else that's nearby this piece is
optional this is ASUS oc panel it comes with the maximus 6 extreme it allows you
to access some tweaking options whether you mount it outside of the case or
orient it this way and mount it in a five and a quarter inch bay so that it
can sit and operate in a more basic mode from inside the case there's also a
custom cable that goes with that speaking of custom cables the last thing
we'll need is an sli bridge because we are going to be running two graphics
cards now it's time to install the CPU note
carefully the orientation of the golden triangle on the corner of the CPU as
well as the little plastic triangle on the socket cover you're going to want to
line those up when you're installing it next pull up the retention ARM you don't
need to remove the plastic cover yet position the CPU inside the socket
carefully give it a little wiggle to make sure it's in the correct spot then
all you have to do is let the ARM come
down slowly sliding the retention clip under the nut
then push down pull out and lock it
under the retention ARM the little plastic cover will pop off and then your
CPU is installed water cooling is all a little different
so follow the instructions that's really really important this particular block
comes with a large silicone isolating pad as well as a hefty metal back plate
if it's not oriented correctly on the back of the board you could have
problems later on so make sure that the cutout notch has the shape of the CPU
back plate sort of corresponding to it so just be careful is all i'm really
saying thermal compound application now i prefer ic diamond over other thermal
compounds but just for lulls i pulled out an ancient tube of ocz ultra five
plus just to show you the method just apply about the size of an uncooked
grain of rice in a line down the middle of the CPU and you're golden
now that back plate's on there but it's not secure at all in order to get it
firmed up take four plastic washers and put them over each of the four posts
followed by the four thumb nuts now these ones should go down
enough that they're quite tight because these are what's going to keep the posts
in place now that it's secure you can put the CPU block down on top of the CPU
followed by four more plastic washers four springs and finally the four large
thumb nuts now these ones you're going to want to tighten in a cross pattern
and don't wrench them tight don't go so tight that the board is flexing and the
CPU block is flexing it just has to be tight enough that it makes good contact
with the processor underneath finally put two of the compression fittings onto
the CPU block no need to put the top pieces on yet because we haven't
installed tubing yet and that's pretty much it for your CPU block RAM
installation not too complicated guys now do note that this particular board
the maximus 6 formula has tabs on only one side so i recommend putting the
non-tab side in first followed by pressing firmly on the tab side until it
locks into place we have four dimms so we're going to do this
four times
with the tool-less release in the back we can take off the windowed side panel
of the 900d as always i recommend stashing your side panels somewhere safe
preferably inside the box that your case came in with the foam in between so that
they don't get damaged in any way next up you can open up the basement by
pressing the little tab here and pulling it open that's where you'll find the box
with all the hardware that you need to install pretty much anything you could
possibly want to in the Corsair 900d
now the first thing we're actually going to install is our i o plate which as
with any case is installed simply by aligning it
with the hole at the back of the chassis and then popping
each of the four corners in individually
the mpcie combo 2 card acts as both a
wireless module this is wireless ac as well as an ngff expansion slot so you
can simply plug it in in the top of the board here
screw it in from the back then you're ready to mount the board
once that's done you'll see that the motherboard standoffs for our standard
atx size board are already applied so
all we need to do is take the appropriate screws out of the box of
screws and put nine screws through the board into the back of the motherboard
tray you know how your room kind of gets messier before it gets cleaner this is
the part where we actually have to disassemble things before we can
continue assembling them so we're going to take out the rear fan we're going to
take off the front aluminum plate and take off the front fans by undoing the
screws we are going to remove all three
of the existing triple drive cages that are in the 900d by removing the screws
at the back and finally we're even going to remove the screws that are holding in
the additional mount point for another one of those drive cages remember you
can get them optionally now we have a
clearer idea of what we're dealing with now this my friends is when things start
getting really serious business so just for the sake of knowing where it is so
we don't accidentally install any radiators that interfere with it we're
going to put the power supply in now so i recommend putting the power supply in
on the side of the case that is nearest to the motherboard tray the reason for
that is it's shorter runs to the components particularly up the back of
the tray however this case does support dual power supplies and you can put it
in whichever bay you prefer now mounting radiators most of the
radiator mounts in this case are native however there are two pieces of metal
that were hidden that we actually took the screws that hold them in place out
when we were removing the cage mounts on the bottom of the case one of them is
cleverly labeled down and the other is cleverly labeled up
these simply mount to the case using little
hooks as then and then screws to hold them in place permanently once they're
in these are what are going to allow us to mount that quad radiator that goes on
this side now we're ready to start physically planning the layout of our
loop in terms of where we want to install fittings radiators and tubing
this is the point in the build where you want to actually make sure all of your
carefully laid plans are even going to work take those radiators do quick test
fits make sure that you not only have room for the radiators and graphics
cards and other bulky components but also that you have room for the
associated cables and fittings and tubing that's going to go with them
because even the best laid plans well it is possible to make mistakes
once you've done your test fit it's a great idea to take some of the little
difficult hard to reach connectors and plug them in now before you put in your
graphics card and you have a bunch of tubing running all over the place and all that stuff so we've done some
rudimentary cable management with them here on the back panel then we're going
to plug in basically just the easy stuff front usb 3 front usb 2 front panel
audio as well as our front connectors
for our power switch reset switch and indicator leds
next up remove the five pci slot covers that correspond to where you want to
install your cards guys there's no shame in consulting the manual at this point
to find out which slots are most optimal for the kinds of cards you're installing
for that matter even for that last part where you're installing the front panel
connectors guys it's all in the manual usually in a little leaflet quick start
guide that you can consult so once we've pulled those off we're going to install
the sound card first just because that one's not in the way of anything else
we're doing then this is where things start to get a little bit tricky because
with our two graphics cards we're going to be using a special sli fitting that
allows us to put them very close together which you normally wouldn't be
able to do with fittings and tubing in between so once we've done that we're
going to rearrange all the other fittings according to the test fit we
did before and where we want pipes coming in and out of what is now a
single graphics card assembly we're going to take that whole thing install
it into the two slots then put the thumb
screws back in and our expansion cards are now done
the next thing i like to do is install the radiators where they're going to go
according to our overall design for flow
so the first thing you'll have to do is remove the top cover on the 900d there's
a little tab in here you basically put your thumb in there and then push
forward towards the front of the case and that comes off revealing the
radiator mount there we go
up there on the top then you're going to have to take each
of the radiators and plug all the extra holes that you do not need okay we're
going for slightly positive air pressure here guys so basically on the bottom
in the basement we're going to have air moving through towards the power
supplies intake and then out the other side then up in the top we're gonna have
three intake fans that are not on a radiator behind the drive cages pulling
air in we're gonna have our rear fan here pulling air in and then we're going
to have four fans up here on the top pushing air out so this should give us a
slightly more intake than we have exhaust allowing for slightly positive
pressure which usually results in less
dust buildup radiator mounting can be a bit of a bear
and a big part of the problem is that these guys can't all standardize on
something they've all got a different way they expect you to attach the fans
to the rad so alphacool includes two different lengths
of screws with their rads we're going to be using the shorter of the two now be
careful when you're mounting fans directly to the radiator that you orient
the labels correctly if that matters to you as well as the direction that the
wire leads are coming off for optimal cable management it's going to be
difficult to undo this later and redo it after the fact for our bottom quadruple
120 millimeter radiator what we did was we mounted all the fans directly to the
rad and then because alpha cool again that whole standards can't be
consolidated thing did not include short screws the good news is they use the
same threads as an optical drive so we were able to use some of the screws
included with our 900d to mount this rad down here in the bottom for our rear 120
millimeter again we weren't able to use the included screws so what we ended up
using was more of the case screws however we had to use a washer here
because the holes at the back of the case were so wide that the narrow heads
that were included with both the rad screws and the included case screws went
right through them because they're intended for fan screws then we used one
of the shorter length screws to mount the fan directly to the rad for our top
mounted radiator again we're going for a pull configuration here we used the
longer screws because now we're going all the way through a fan all the way
through the case and into the radiator in order to get them mounted now this is
again a spot where you're going to want to do any test fits that you think you
need to do for example here in the back we were not able to orient the 120 ml
rad in what i would consider to be the optimal orientation with the barbs up
this makes it easier to bleed the air out of it instead we had to turn it
around and it was still a very tight fit with our tubing to ensure that we were
actually going to be able to get water up to that top radiator removing the top
panel on the 900d is pretty simple once you get the hang of it just flip the tab
under here slide it off to the left hand side of the case if you're facing it
from the front and that's how you get access to mounting that top rad
and this goes to show you guys that no matter what you do there's bound to be a
minor oopsie we had to take our power supply out and the reason for this is
with it in we realized we couldn't access the fittings on the quad radiator
in the basement because it was too close so we weren't going to be able to
install tubing on it what we'll have to do instead is install our dual radiator
using the long screws washers and then going through a fan into the rad this
gives us a very natural airflow path in the bottom of the case here so you can
see we're pulling air through this way and then pulling it out this way so it's
all going in the same direction not fighting itself and then once we've done
that we can run all the tubing run all the fittings in the basement including
getting tubing installed on the pump which is going to go next to the dual
rad right down here then we can put our power supply back in
and start getting the cables hooked up part of getting the basement of the case
plumbed correctly is installing the reservoir which
actually is going to go up here by the pci slots now guys get a pen ready write
this down the order of your loop does not matter you go CPU block GPU block
radiator doesn't matter we're talking maybe a degree or two of
difference but what does matter is having the pump pulling water directly
from your reservoir that way it can never run dry now we used the flexible
fitting options on this particular phobia gold-plated res in order to make
sure that we were going to have clearance to install our tubing so it
has an inlet on the top which i would actually recommend using as a fill port
otherwise you're going to get trickling noise and then it has two different
fittings that come out at about sort of 70 degrees on the sides and two on the
bottoms it's important to use one on either side because there's a baffle in
the middle of the reservoir that keeps the cyclone effect from occurring
sucking air into your pump making it louder and less efficient
phobia ships a pretty robust mounting system with this particular res now we
could drill holes in fact later on in this build we are going to drill holes
and stuff but for this one it wasn't really necessary we were able to use
some of the vent holes at the back of the case in order to get our two c-clips
installed then all we had to do was put the plastic washer on then put on the
metal nut tighten it with a screwdriver and we were ready to snap our reservoir
into place now the one challenge here is that once you've already got all of your
expansion cards installed you're going to have to remove your reservoir to change them but you probably won't be
changing them that often so you might want to try and find a different place
to put the res this was the place that we found that made sense
when you're actually installing tubing some people believe in sort of putting
it in the spot and like measuring it and then cutting to measure i don't what i
usually do is i install one end of it so remember guys you've already got the
fitting component of your compression fitting screwed into whatever component
it happens to be whether it's a block or radiator so make sure before you put the
tubing on it you actually put the retention ring on top of the tubing
otherwise you're going to have to run it all the way in from the other end now go
ahead and install it on there tighten it down finger tight pretty much as far as
you can go remember that's holding it on and compressing it for a good seal then
line it up run it to where it needs to go and just mark it with your finger
then pull it out and cut it with either a tubing cutter or a very sharp pair of
scissors if you have dull scissors you might end up with an uneven cut which
can potentially cause leaks and particularly in cases where you're not
using compression fittings it can look cosmetically not very appealing now
some people do this some people don't i like the d5 pump or the mcp655 from
swiftech unfortunately it has half inch barbs integrated you can buy an
aftermarket top that you can change out the fittings on but i usually don't do
that what i do is i stretch my 3 8 tubing over the half inch barbs it does
require a little bit of elbow grease however there is a couple tricks that
you can use to make it easier number one is boil a cup of water then soak the
tubing in it for even about five seconds and then try and go at it if that then
doesn't work then soak it again stretch it in four
different directions using a pair of pliers soak it again and try one more
time now i can pretty much guarantee you'll be able to get it on there
there's one trick though guys remember no matter how hard you've stretched the
tubing i always recommend using a retention mechanism of some sort whether
it's a plastic clip a compression fitting or even a zip tie so make sure
that you put something on there to prevent leaks in the future
it should be noted that if the tubing routing in the basement looks a little
weird it's because i'm trying to have water go in the bottom and out the top
of radiators whenever possible it makes it much easier for the air to travel up
through it and then be driven out of it even though we don't have a super
powerful pump considering the fact that we have so many components in this
system now when it comes to wiring up the fans this is the point where i would
be doing it now you have a ton of different options there's advanced stuff
like the m-cubed t-balancer which is what i use in my own personal machine
allows advanced software curves and stuff like that it's expensive and it's
quite difficult to set up but for what we're doing here we're going for a much
simpler option we're using swiftex pwm splitter which can actually be used to
have pwm control on up to eight fans
with a single motherboard header and a single molex power connector very cool
little device but we're actually going to use it in an even simpler fashion so
rather than running the wires up to the motherboard or anything like that we're
just going to plug it in via molex and use the included low noise adapters that
come with our Noctua fans we'll be using extension cables as well as those
adapters to hook up the three front fans and the six that are on the radiators in
the basement all right so we jam that power supply
back in there it's a little bit tricky but she's in there no problem we've now
got modular cables to deal with and some implementations are better than others
so we have an aftermarket individually sleeved cable kit for this power supply
but that doesn't change the fact that i like the way they've done their modular cables in general so instead of just
giving you you know 10 connectors on the back of the power supply and 10 cables
and you can unplug or plug in as many as you want Corsair goes well they bought a
1200 watt power supply they're probably going to need most of the cables anyway
so instead they give you options in terms of what kinds of connectors you
want so for example the pci express connectors you can either have a single
to dual connector so that's specifically for running to a graphics card so that
you don't have to run two discrete cables or you can have a one-to-one
connector which is great for things like an auxiliary connector on a motherboard
or a six pin pci express connector on say for example a sound card like what
we've got so we can have the best of both worlds we don't have extra you know
plugs hanging off of things and we don't have to run extra wires we ran our 24
pin in pretty much the standard fashion it should be noted that this case has a
ton of cable management room so we were able to get away with crossing you know
connector harnesses in the back and we're still going to be able to close the side panel but if you have a case
that doesn't have quite so much room you're going to want to be careful to make sure everything's laying flat in
the back and use cable ties to tidy things up last but not least we
connected our 8-pin connector to the CPU up in the well not to the CPU to the
motherboard but it's the CPU connector and it should be noted we only plugged
in one eight pin CPU connector even though it has another spot for an
additional four pin that additional four pin is optional and it is my personal
belief that on an lga 1150 platform unless you go on liquid nitrogen there's
no way you're going to exceed the current that can be delivered by a single eight pin so we're going to leave
it at that and there you have it my friend that is
how you install five radiators in the 900d and still
have room for two hard drive cages giving you a total of four
three and a half inch drives or two and a half inch drives potentially so what
we had to do was we had to mark off a couple spots on the motherboard
tray so normally you wouldn't put a radiator there but we were like well we
want to put more radiators we want more drives no big deal so we marked off a
couple spots there discovered that that really wasn't strong enough to hold up
our radiator with the three Noctua fans loaded onto it of course in the optimal
configuration we've pre-installed all of our fittings and all of that good stuff
so we added a third mounting point just to the side of the drive cages we found
with three mounting points it was good enough but if we could get some other
more different custom brackets we could probably actually affix it to this
radiator on the top here as well and then we could get a really
really solid mount for it but guys honestly we're going to take this build
apart when we're done so you can come up with something a bit more elegant we
just used l brackets from home depot with some self-tapping screws to drill
into things as well as little washers for making fine adjustments to the fit
and finish to make sure that it's sitting there correctly we're wiring up
all the fans in the top of the system so the four on the top the one at the back
and the three in our motherboard tray radiator to the
motherboard itself so the ones in the bottom are all going to be static
according to how we installed them and the ones on the top will be able to be
controlled using ai suite just as a reminder guys we're running two Intel
520 series ssds in raid zero and we're running two wd three terabyte
red drives so these are nas or raid operation optimized drives in raid 1 for
safe storage because we have more bays we can either leave them for now and
expand our storage later or we could actually run up to four drives right off
the bat for our storage array in fact you could probably run six and just hide
these ssds somewhere if you wanted but for the sake of doing things by the book
which we haven't done until now we're going to install them in the actual
drive cages now you've got a couple of different options here for installation
so number one is the two different types of SATA cables that are included with
your board they're straight ones and right angle ones go with on an
individual drive basis whatever makes for the most natural run without kinking
the cable then for power we unfortunately don't have as many options
as i would like Corsair only includes
four port harnesses for SATA power i wouldn't have minded seeing them include
a couple of two port harnesses so you have the option to use those because
we're gonna use a single 4-port one to run to our drives here in the front of
the case then for our optical drive up in the top we're going to have to run a
full additional 4-port harness in order
to get power up there it should be noted once again that i do consider a blu-ray
drive highly optional in a modern computer but if you want to have it then
there you go we're going to show you how to install it here just like that
and finally my friends it is time for tubing we're close to the end when you
are sort of eyeballing out your runs and measuring them out don't cut extra it's
actually quite difficult to cut the last sort of three millimeters of extra
tubing that you have that makes it bulge out funny so you're better off to just
try to cut it as close as you possibly can and then
you know just kind of suck it up and use another piece if it ends up being too
short because odds are excellent that especially if you work from longest
pieces to shortest pieces that you'll be able to use that slightly too short
piece somewhere else so you're not wasting the entire length of it
so i did bring in 20 feet of tubing to do this but we managed to get this whole
thing plumbed up with less than 10 feet of tubing which is uh
kind of fantastic now there are a few things
needed that few things i want to point out about the tubing process while you
guys watch this accelerated video number one is go with the bend of the tubing
never try to fight it it's much more likely to kink if you go against the
natural bend that has been there since it was originally produced and put onto
a spool number two is that this is one of the things i've actually come to
really enjoy about the 900d is there's the space to do what we're doing here
you can actually run tubing behind the motherboard tray on this case
and get away with it there's enough space whoa it's heavy there we go oh
that was hard there's enough space to have tubing back here
and have wires and all that and you're still
going to be able to close that side panel which is pretty unique there's not
too many cases out there wow it's heavy though that are going to
be quite like that all right next thing i wanted to mention
is that yeah the way we did it is not really
that optimal buying all straight fittings and then just kind of going
with the flow and making it work it doesn't work necessarily as well as
buying things like angled fittings that's the way that you might be able to
get cleaner runs for example here around the CPU socket without having so many
unsightly bends but i think we did pretty well considering the lower cost
of straight fittings i mean bearing in mind we already spent about a thousand
dollars on the liquid cooling setup for this computer like do we need to spend
another couple hundred on fittings i don't know it's up to you but we went
with pretty basic fittings and uh
and then the fact as well that we don't have to do like a google sketchup model
of the system just to find out if the fittings are all going to actually work together the way that we intend
now before filling the system there are a couple of different schools of thought
for a couple of things number one is preparing the system so many people
believe in cleaning out the radiators with hot water and a mild vinegar
solution before you even assemble anything it is a good idea there can be
residue left over in them from manufacturing that is easy to remove if
you flush prior to building the other thing is which coolant to use i
personally am an advocate of colored tubing with clear distilled water simple
no dyes or anything fancy like that if you want to have a biocidal agent i
suggest putting a chunk of silver into your reservoir and just calling that a
day as opposed to using clear tubes and a bunch of dyes i've just seen them gunk
up too many times i'm sure there's good ones out there but that is my personal
approach this is just a random bottle from some professor coolant that i use
to put distilled water in you can get it at the grocery store it's pretty inexpensive what we can all agree on
however is the procedure of using a separate
power supply or unplugging your existing power supply from all the sensitive
components inside in order to prime the system so that is to say what
you'll do is you'll get like some kind of conductive piece of
something so i usually bend a paper clip you bridge the green pin
on your power supply and if you can't find which one's the
green pin on your power supply say for example if you have a custom sleeved one
like this then you can check out manuals online or diagrams online so you bridge
the green pin with any black pin on the power supply then you are able to easily
control the on off functionality with the switch
at the back it will automatically turn on any time you have the on switch on at
the back so what that means is you can plug this into just the pump and you it
allows you to do the quick cycles that you need in order to fill the loop so
basically what you'll do in this case i've taken an extra scrap piece of
tubing and i've attached another fitting to the top of my reservoir so that i can
fill it so you'll fill up your reservoir as much as you possibly can
just like this then cycle the power on so that all the
liquid comes out of the reservoir and is taken somewhere else in your loop your
pump should be gravity fed if you've set up your loop correctly it should be the
next component and nowhere for air bubbles to get trapped then what you do
is fill it up again cycle the power again and as soon as that res is empty
turn the power back off and rinse and repeat
rinse because water
near the end of your filling adventure you're going to get to a point where the
reservoir isn't full yet but the water cycles continuously
without the pump sounding like it's not working properly you never want your
pump to run dry that's really bad but once we get to this point what we can do
is we can actually leave the system running while we top up the reservoir
the rest of the way i recommend leaving it in this state without any of the
components actually powered on and risking getting shorted out and damaged
for at least 6 to 24 hours maybe even 48 hours if you
want to be super sure what you can do to prevent water from dripping under any
loose fittings or anything like that on your valuable components is use folded
up paper towel then come back and inspect it frequently to see if anything
is dripping water and leaking inside your system now we were careful to
install all of our SATA cables into the Intel chipset on this particular
motherboard the Intel chipset SATA ports they're all say to six with this
generation of products so you don't have to worry about which two of the Intel
ones to get the best speed out of your ssds for example setting up raid 0 is a
snap once you've got raid enabled within the BIOS all you do is press ctrl i to
enter the configuration utility where we can configure our ssds as raid 0 and our
hard drives as raid 1. from there we can install Windows off of a usb drive or
off of a cd and i've covered this topic before in the past
guys we're finally done here she is
was it worth all the work i guess it's up to you was it worth all
the money i guess that's up to you too is this the system i would build
personally the answer is no
but what was the benefit why did we put 17 Noctua fans running at low RPM well
here here's my microphone i'm going to point that at the system
you can't hear it over the refrigerator that's running like two meters to my
right that way it is extremely quiet it also runs extremely cool in spite of the
fact that we haven't even optimized this 900d for airflow by removing things like
these solid covering panels that are down on the bottom we have done
absolutely nothing to optimize the build and it still runs like a champ that gtx
titan has been running the combustor overclocking stress test for about 15
minutes now and the GPU is running at 40 degrees celsius
unfreaking believable so that is the point of a system like this it's totally
overkill it's totally unnecessary you
could get similar performance for half the price well maybe not half the price
but significantly less so for all of you in the comments saying oh he could have
done yes i know absolutely i know the point of this was we wanted to show you
guys the most overkill build we could so we put five radiators in a 900d we put
dual titans in a 900d we put a 4770k in
there we loaded it up with 32 gigs of 2400 megahertz memory but again
kind of unnecessary but it's for fun it's for looks i personally
think it looks awesome the only things i'd change probably about the appearance
are maybe i'd take out the optical drive and that was also the reason we didn't
install the oc panel from ASUS so that fits into a five and a quarter inch bay
you can run this externally as well so you can just sit it on your desk or or
you can install it in the five and a quarter inch bay if you don't mind that i would also probably add some bit
phoenix alchemy lighting strips i really like these the the defect rate on them
is very low compared to other led strips that i've used in the past where some of
the leds will start to fade very quickly we've had very good luck with the
alchemy ones so we definitely recommend them around here and uh man guys i'm
gonna just sort of ramble for a bit here well you can check out some glam footage
of the system here there were some challenges with this system anytime you
strive to do something that's really out of the ordinary you can expect there to
be some hiccups i wasn't actually expecting to get all five radiators in
it at first because i had kind of looked it up and i'd gone oh okay supports five
radiators didn't really think about it that much you know called up alphacool i
was like hey guys i need this this this and this and then i got it here and i
realized the triple in the front doesn't fit natively if you also have a
quadruple and a double in the bottom so that was where we came up with the idea
to mount it on the motherboard tray which actually is pretty effective
because it's going to be able to take in some of the intake air from those front
three 120 millimeter fans and it gives you still more radiator surface area we
also had some definite challenges with respect to
fittings and water cooling tubing and getting everything to fit just right
because it's uh it's pretty
tight in there but it was a lot of fun to build we actually didn't undo that
many things along the line and i'm extremely pleased with how effectively
we were able to fill up a 900d to the point where it doesn't look empty in
there which is what most of the 900d builds i see look like they just look
like the case is so big and there's not enough in there we were able to fill it
up with stuff that actually made sense like what i'd probably do as well is i'd
use all six of those front bays for hard drives and then i moved the ssds around
to the back of the motherboard tray where there is still tons of room
because there's just a ton of cable management room in this particular case
it's a very cool build but it's also extremely heavy to the point where i'm
not exactly some kind of muscle man so me saying i can't move it might not mean
anything to you but i would have a difficult time moving this system around
unaided it has five radiators hard drives heavy copper water blocks and it
has over two liters of coolant in it so it is
extremely extremely heavy thank you guys
very much for checking out our overkill build guide with the haswell 4770k
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