This video is brought to you by our trusted partner, Intel. For a limited
time only, with the purchase of any unlocked Core i5 or Core i7 Intel CPU,
get a free Intel beanie with a chance to win an Intel snowboard. Valid for
Canadian and US customers only. Some restrictions apply. For complete
details, visit intelgaming
promo.com. Welcome to a gaming build guide that we're doing here, guys. So,
we've got a Silverstone TJ10, a Silverstone Strider Gold Evolution 1000
watt with their sweet braided cables that are actually using like a nylon
rather than a plastic braid. So, they're absolutely perfect in terms of not being
able to see through to the cords. Extremely durable, all that kind of good
stuff. They look absolutely awesome. Uh, for liquid cooling, we're going to be
going with a Swifttech H220, but we're actually going to be expanding it. So,
we're going to add a liquid cooled GTX
670 as well as a Black Ice Extreme
single 120 mm radiator, giving us a total of 3x 120 mm rads, one of which is
a thick rad, as well as a liquid cooled
3770K and a liquid cooled GTX 660 in the
same loop. So, hm GTX 670. Sorry, I said
660, I meant 670. We're also going with a Gigabyte Thunderbolt ready board. This
is a Z77X UP5th. So, this is pretty much
state-of-the-art as far as features get. It actually has dual Thunderbolt ports.
For memory, we're going to go with 16 gigs of Corsair Dominator Platinum 2400
MHz memory. So, this is just I mean, honestly, this is a showcase piece. We
want it to look awesome. It's also got the blue light bars in it. So, this is
going to be a blue themed build. Hence the use of blue LED fans for our
radiators as well as ah yes two Samsung
840 Pro 256 gigs in RAID zero and of
course the centerpiece the Silverstone TJ10 and we're pretty much ready to go.
So this isn't going to be an exact step byep how to put CPU in socket that kind
of build guide but it's just going to be kind of following along with us as we
build up this sweet looking liquid cooled machine. Oh yeah, we're using
blue tubing as well. Now, one of the first things we're going to do because
we have to expand our Swifttech H220 is we're going to loosen there you go the
included hose clamps and we're actually going to drain the system completely and
swap out the fluid for something else. So, we're we're also going to swap out
the tubing because we don't have more of Swift black tubing on hand and for our
blue themed build, we wanted to use blue tubing anyway. So, step one is to loosen
there you go that clamp which holds the tubing in place. Now, you want if you're
going to reuse these clamps, you want to use 3/8 inch ID 5/8 inch OD tubing. So,
there you go. There's the Swifttech Hydrax water that's inside. So, we're
going to take the whole thing apart. Then, what we're going to do to simplify the filling procedure for ourselves is
we are going to put it back together with all the additional components in
the loop. We're going to kind of measure where the tubing's going to go and then
we're going to fill it. Then, we're going to put the whole assembled thing back into the system. This will allow us
to fill it as thoroughly as possible without trapping any air bubbles in it.
Now, the plastic brackets that allow for toolless installation of 120 mm fans
have to be removed from the top of the case. So, you just take out the eight
screws here, here, here, and here. And then you can just pull those brackets
out just like that. We're going to replace them with the rad support
bracket that is available as an add-on for the TJ9 and TJ10 case from
Silverstone. So, we've made some changes now. We've actually gone ahead, we
figured out that we can mount the rad
bracket directly to the fans rather than mounting it to the rad as it says in the
instructions. So, this gives us the ability to use the reservoir that's
built into the uh the H220, which means we don't have to preassemble the loop if
we don't want to because we'll be able to pull it out, top it up, and then put
it back in if the need should arise. So, we can just go ahead and show you guys
where this is going to go. So it screws in sort of here somewhere. Something
like that. There we go. Just like that. So it's going to sit in the top. Then
our thick rad is going to go back here. We've also installed the power supply.
I'm just going to pull this back out. So we've installed the power supply with
its sleing and we're trying to figure out what we're going to do in terms of cable management because this case is a
little bit dated and it doesn't have the best cable management out there. Oh
yeah, last thing. Right. So this is an important step uh at this stage in the
build. So you can see where the cables are running out of the fans. So you have
to plan for we're planning to plug all the fans into our motherboard. So this
one's going to go here. This one's going to go here. The pump is going to go to
the CPU fan. The rear fan is going to go to the bottom one here. And the front
fan's going to go here. That way we can use the motherboard's utility to control
all the fans in this system. So we ended up scrapping the Black Ice Extreme. And
I remember what I hated about these radiators, and that's that the mounting
holes are 120 mil, but the actual radiator is quite wide, so we weren't
able to fit it in our case. The bad news is that uh we had to use a thin radiator
to replace it. And it's a bit of a an older one, but I'm going to show you
guys my magic trick for fixing beat up radiators. And Sharpie marker. And
Sharpie marker. And Sharpie marker. It
actually works surprisingly well. You have to look at it pretty close to realize that it's been touched up with
with a permanent marker. So, there you go, guys. There's a line of tech tips
for you. Draw on your computer. If there's anything about it that you don't
like, it even works for little places where the fins are bent. You just throw
some Sharpie in there and it becomes a lot less noticeable. There you go. It
just like disappears like that. It's awesome. Uh, we've also mounted the
motherboard into the case. So, there you go. That's what it's going to look like.
Uh, this is for some kind of like server thing or something like that. Once we
get the black the black of the other side panel on there, it should look a little bit better. But I would have
preferred if Silverstone had stuck with the older revision, which didn't have
this hole in it. And I think that's pretty much our status update for now.
All right, so we're about to load our drives in, which is on these convenient
rails with padding for antiibration. However, we won't have to worry about
that cuz we're using 2 and 1/2 in drives on 3 and 1/2 in adapters. Don't mind the
OCZ adapters. The uh the drives are Samsung still. So there we go. Clicks in
just like that. Now, I'd also like to take a moment to show you guys our CPU
block installation. So, that's done. So, these three 3/8 in tubes are going to
route to this radiator, that radiator, and that GPU block. Also, the cable
management, although it's not perfect in this case because we're using
individually sleeved cables. We did manage to get the 8 pin behind the
motherboard and have it come up individually so it's nice and thin back
there and go behind the board. Also, the 24 pin is going to look pretty decent
right here, I think. And then we've got all of our front panel ones routed
behind the motherboard tray in a bit of a tricky way. So I'm going to go ahead
and flip this around so you guys can check it out. Oh, it's getting heavy
already. Wow. Okay, so there you go. So these have to come between this support
brace here and the motherboard tray. Then there's a little bit of room here
cuz this support brace actually prevents you from routing cables across it. I
would have liked for Silverstone to have somehow somehow improved that, but there
you go. So, we did manage to get most of our cable routing done. And of course, a
sleeved modular power supply makes a really big difference because we only
have to have these cables connected to it, which is going to keep the bottom
much tidier than it would have otherwise been. We've actually disconnected quite
a few of the cables here. So, uh, we're getting close to the end of our water
cooling adventure. As with any liquid cooled build, you can make whatever
plans you want, but a lot of the time you end up changing little things here
or there. So, we actually rotated the SwiftTech block. Uh, hold on. Which
side's threaded on here? There we go. That's the threaded side. Uh, we rotated
it 90 degrees so that we'd have our inlet on the top so that we could get uh
an easier run to the what will be the outlet on our reservoir. So, that's
going to go up above the dominators there. Then, that also gives us a nice
clean straight run from this guy to this guy. This one was really tight and was
kind of hard to get in there, but uh overall I think it's going to look
really, really sharp. So, here we are putting our hose clamps down on the very
base of the barb there. And then what we're going to do is we're going to grab
the Swift screws right here, and we're
going to clamp those babies down. So, those will look just black and stealthy
uh with the included fittings on the radiator as well as the pump. And then
we're using compressions on the other ones uh to make those ones look really
clean as well. And it looks like we actually haven't run that yet. Other
than that, oh yeah, so we've routed the cables for the video card itself. So
those are going to go here. Again, nice and stealth cables. We've also started
cable tying things down to make them a little bit more clean. And we're getting
really close to the end of this build here. The liquid cooling tubings have
been routed. So, you can see one of the things to be really careful of is when
you're using these clamp uh well, these clamp clamps, you want to make sure only
one side's threaded. So, you want to make sure that you're going to be able to access it with the screwdriver. So,
we had to take the dominators out to get at the ones on the CPU block/pump unit.
Um, we have some very tight runs here. I don't like to cross tubing in a liquid
cooling build. It's just one of those like it's one of those faux paw type
things where it doesn't quite look as clean. But I think overall it kind of
worked in here because we do have very very short runs which is part of what
makes a water cooling build look optimal as well. You want very very short short
runs. And I mean I think the only things that I could complain about with this
particular machine are maybe the short graphics card. I wish we had kind of a
longer graphics card so it looked a bit more a bit more beastly. But other than
that, I mean it's uh it's really really really sharp and I'm very very pleased
with it. So we're going to go ahead and fill it. Now, we did change our minds
about filling it uh first, then putting the whole thing in. And I'm glad we did
because that did make it a little bit easier to deal with overall. So, filling
it is just going to involve taking out this rad and then um setting up a power
cord here so that we can uh power cycle
in order to circulate water through the loop and then keep topping up the
radiator as we go. We also still have to run SATA cables, but other than that,
we're pretty much done. So, guys, this is it. This is where we reveal what this
project was actually for. Here's a little tour of our Steeler series themed
gaming den set. So, we're going to be doing some Steeler unboxings, as you can
probably tell from all the boxes that are here. So, we've got uh a bunch of
cool stuff we've never looked at before, like some variations of the Siberia V2s,
a new Sensei, as well as their Apex RAW.
That's something I'm actually really excited to check out. We saw that for the first time at CES. I've also hinted
on Twitter about this. So, we actually got
a Steeler vinyl wrapped custom gaming
desktop uh sort of table here that I think is absolutely stunning. You can
get this done for about 500 bucks to get a custom printed vinyl and then have it
wrapped around a table if you can find someone you know who does it, which I think is just freaking sick. And just,
you know, I mean, you don't have to put Steel Series logos on it, but you could put whatever you want. and it would just
kind of actually look it makes the overall desk look so much cooler. Uh so,
right, so our rig is done. I meant to mention this before, but we never
installed an optical drive because we intend to use an external optical drive
for our optical needs cuz we don't really use it all that often. And then
it's time to power it up. So, I want to add some more lighting effects still.
But, oh, I forgot to plug it in. But this is what it looks like for now just
with the Dominator light bars in there as well as some glow from the LED fans
that are uh that are around the edges there. Can you see that? Okay. Uh try
and get a little bit less less glare maybe from this angle a little bit. But
uh yeah, overall I'm extremely pleased with this build. It's a wicked looking
like gaming den build. And oh, is it
still charging though? It's still recording. I know. Oh lol. here. Why
don't we move that or Oh, we can't move it
much. Okay, that was all the moving it. All right, so that gives you guys a
pretty good look at what it looks like inside. We've also got a really sweet
glow coming out of the top grills here because those LED fans are right up
against the grills and the rads are on the inside. Uh, if you wanted to see the
finished insides, which I don't remember if I showed you in the last shot or not,
looks pretty good in there, too. I know I said a lot about how the cable
management of the TJ10 isn't really optimal, but I think you guys will find
that in spite of that, we ended up with a very, very clean looking interior,
aided in a big way by these sleeved cables here that are available as an
upgrade for the uh Strider 1000 Evolution. So, stunning build. Actually,
this is a really good angle, too, from slightly over more that way. There you
go. So, uh, big thanks to Silverstone for helping us with this TJ07 build.
And, uh, I'm looking forward to bringing you guys lots of cool videos from our
new Steel Series Gaming Den. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips
for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.