Personal Rig Update 2012 Part 3 - Water Cooling Maintenance & More Pondering Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,125 words · ~10 min read
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another in progress shot here guys so I've got almost everything torn out
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although I am actually going to take the case apart all the way um all the way
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down to the drive cages here the mid
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plate uh these back pieces I don't know if you guys have ever noticed this
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before but when I originally got the internals of my case powder coated you
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can see here this is a mountain mods black wrinkle finish uh when I
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originally got that done I forgot to send Ben from Mountain mods this piece
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this piece and this one so they've always still been the original silver uh
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aluminum color so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and find a local
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shop with a chemical bath strip down the
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powder coating off of my old Parts
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including my motherboard tray here as well and then I'm going to send him all
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the old Parts stripped down the parts that have never been done I'm going to
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RP the powder the factory powder coating off these uh antech 900 Drive cages and
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I'll send those down as well so that they will at least if they don't match
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this finish they'll at least match the interior finish cuz otherwise I don't
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really know what else to do with that you can see there's a lot of gunk in
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here that I'm going to have to clean off before I can even get the paint stripped
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off these are this is residue Left Behind from the uh cathod lights
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mounting so there's some up here as well
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I don't know if you guys can see that oo something up there whoops I forgot about
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those uh there you go now you can see it so there's lots of tapes and junk that's
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going to take me a while to clean out got to get these fans out of here I think I'm going to stick with the GED
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wings I like them for a couple reasons they undervolt really well plus the
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blades come right off so it means you can clean them out really easily and
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then uh just pop them back in there so
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that's awesome plus it's one of the few high quality fans that comes in 120 mil
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92 mil um and whatever other sizes you need I'm going to stick with air
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penetrators for the radiator in the bottom as well I don't see the point of
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uh spending money on fans if I already have good high quality ones that I can
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just clean up now Reservoir this is something that's a bit tricky this is my
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this is my most current one so this is my problem with the MCR micro it always
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gunks up because no Loop is 100% clean
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and to you know lesser or greater extents this one's epic so it's pretty
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uh yeah it's pretty pretty disgusting and it's impossible to clean um so I'm
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either going to go with a fresh MCR micro so here's a new one this is a red
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two so it's got the uh the fill port in the bottom I think yeah so it has the
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fill port in the bottom all those are rev ones um so I'm either going to do
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that or I'm going to go with uh the xspc
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acrylic tank reservoir for the Lang D5 cuz I don't have a ton of space in the
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basement down here once I put in that thick um 480 mm radiator and the power
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power supply I'm left with just a tiny bit of space here for cable routing and
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uh and for the pump and Reservoir so I might go that route remember the
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fittings for the radiator come out over here as well so it's very cramped in
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there um and since T tidying up the cabling is one of the goals for this
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build I'm going to have to figure out a smarter way to do that so the reservoir
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top goes on instead of this piece right here you just screw the pump unit into
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it and then it acts as both a pump top
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to theoretically improve performance of I don't really care about that as well
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as a reservoir so that's probably the route we're going to go for that one of
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the other things I'm sort of considering
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since I'm going to have to go to probably a plating shop anyway to get
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these uh to get these stripped is maybe plating the Copperheads cuz right now
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there's no way I'd consider using these in the build just because the color
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scheme is just I mean terrible you can't
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have silver remember this is like a true silver color silver gold and copper in
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the same build that simply will not fly
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but I do have two of these so I could potentially do uh one on each side of
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the memory in order to I mean it's going to be really busy tubing wise though so
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yeah I still got to think about that whether or not I want to water cool the
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RAM I know there's no performance benefit don't worry guys I know this
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isn't even real Copperhead memory this is just a this is just cheap memory with
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uh with the copperhead heat spreader look it's just DDR3 uh 1600 cl9 like
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there's nothing special about about it but I just wanted the copper head uh
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sink so that I focus focus Copperhead sink so that I
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could do uh so I could show them off in the ultimate water cooling guide so uh
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that was my whole motivation there uh what are other things that I
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that I want to sort of talk about I can show you guys more about the machine you
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can see how disgusting it gets with all the like cat hair and like look at that I
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can't even I can't even scrape this off I might even have to like pressure wash
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this thing I'm not really sure how I'm going to get it clean I thought about
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painting the case itself but I love the finish of the Silverstone tj07 um so I
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yeah I think I'd be doing a disservice to this particular case by by painting
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and it's really not in that bad shape this is a very durable finish that's on
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this particular case especially on here the side panels are not in nearly as
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good condition but painting is is an
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expenditure once again that I don't really need and with uh you know rotten
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creatures like that one over there um it's yeah likely to get scratched and
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all that so uh one other small problem I
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have is that my motherboard tray one of the you can see that the one right in
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the center of the frame that hole is actually bigger than the other two one
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of those is stripped so I've thought
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about whether or not I want to bother trying to get a new one from Silverstone
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or something like that I I don't know what to do about that I mean I could
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retap them all a different side and use like custom screws in order to hold in
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all my adding cards but once again it's kind of like do I want to go through the
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hassle because the thing that's going to be installed in there is going to be the
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graphics card which is going to have two screws in it anyhow so I'm not really
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that concerned about it um oh yeah the
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last thing I'm probably going to powder coat is the housing for this so since
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I'm sending it down to uh to Mountain mods I might as well have them deal with
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that as well and then I think that's it for for metal stuff I'm going to stick
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with my uh my shiny um shiny PCI slot covers I really
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like the look of these um you know goes
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with stuff like this sort of you can't really tell but this is also very mirror
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finish it's just Dusty yeah there we go
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okay so uh moving on to the next thing oh yeah along the the same note of the
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gunk that's built up and that uh that GTX 480 block that um caused my whole
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Loop to go all cloudy and murky I mean this is the state of the tubing that uh
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that was in my that was in my loop at the time I'm going to have to do
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something about my radiators because I'm not going to replace them because that's
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hold on I'm just going to turn off the auto white balance or rather turn it on
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uh just okay so we're in the bathroom here so yeah once again it's an
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expenditure I don't really need and uh
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you can't even you can't even really get
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a better radiator than the one I'm already using anyway the thermo one so
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what is the point I might as well do what I can in order to salvage it right
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um you know what I lost the tubing I was going to use give me a sec guys so this
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is not the best way to cleanse radiators so I got my thermal chill one uh to 4x1
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120 mil and I've got this is this is awesome this is my U Hardware Labs black
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ice Pro two this is the first radiator I ever bought it's in horrible shape all
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of these threads are stripped to hell
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but uh I hold on to it just because you know it's my one of it's one of the few
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things I have left although I still have my Appo my original swifttech Appo which
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was also in my first water cooling like custom water cooling Loop um so yeah I
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continue to use it cuz you can't really see it anyway so yeah uh here you can
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actually see I don't know if you guys can see that you see all the gunk in the
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water there you can see like dust in particulate matter um that's obviously
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part of the water cool now that it's uh
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got all those metal corrosion bits floating around in it so to cleanse
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these if I was a purist I would probably be using some kind of like filtration
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system or something like that but what I'm going to do since I'm just going to
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ghetto it is um just run water I might
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do hot water at first and then switch over to cold water and run it all night
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but I'm just going to hook these two radiators
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up I'm going to take this piece of tubing
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and I'm going to tape it into the
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faucet yeah how's that for a product placement right there got that taped on
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there and then I'm just going to run the water for a little bit
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here I know this is not the best way to
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do this just because of a couple things so one is the uh the metal ions that can
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exist in tap water so yeah that's going to leave a bit of a
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deposit here but I think the net result is still going to be better than what I
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had going on in there before uh it's a bit of a waste of water as well the good
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news is I live in British Columbia Canada where water costs almost nothing
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my cat's very curious about what the heck's going on in his sink this is sort
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of the cat bathroom cuz they have their food and their water in there um so yeah
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there I think that's pretty much the update for now cleaning up my water cooling stuff and uh still some
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decisions to be made got to send away some parts so it might be a little while
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before I have another update but uh will keep you guys posted don't forget to
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