>> Next next day

Alright the last sli connector came in finally! USPS guy came about two hours later than usual, I was so impatient. In fact so impatient that I put the sli connector behind the tubing, rather than hiding the tubing. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll be rebuilding again soon. It’s a real hassle to install sli connectors when the cards are in the slots. Next time I’ll just wait

Started to fill the loop and found out not one but two connectors was loose, water went everywhere 🙁 Tightened one up but had to cut the tube off the bitspower 90 degree rotary to get it tighter. After putting a new piece of tube on the pump just made a loud humming noise. I figured maybe the rotary was now too long a thread and was blocking the motherboard block (EK instructions say to use a gasket on long threaded fittings, but the gasket left no thread to screw in). Worried that the humming was a failing pump, I cut the tube off again and had the pump pump into a bowl. It worked just fine, so this time I tried blowing into the fittings to see if there was a blockage. It took a lot of pressure but I could hear stuff moving. So I guess the loop is just crazy restrictive. It didn’t help that there was still so much air in the loop and I think that was the problem, the pump would push and the air would just compress rather than push through and it didn’t have enough pressure to force the air through. So I performed a reverse fill by turning the rads upside down and filling through the drain port. This got 80% of the air out and enabled me to put the last section of tube in with more confidence it would this time. As one of the rotaries felt a little loose, I just swapped that section out for regular barbs, it should flow better anyway:

In this last shot you can really see the amount I hammered the side of the case to allow the door to close, it’s still not as flush as I’d like but at least it closes now.

I’ll leave it til saturday morning, running and hopefully drying out, fingers crossed.

>> Final Day of Phase 1

And I’m done…. for now

Computer was dry when I came back home :phew:, so I put in the five hard drives and raid card in the bottom slot and proceeded to try and get the indigo xtreme tim to do its thing. Indigo xtreme requires you to run your loop with the pump off so that the TIM will heat up and melt and fill in the gaps between the chip and the heatsink. Putting the case on it’s side is a major hassle. Unfortunately I forgot that you’re supposed to drop your overclock when you do this. So I couldn’t even boot into windows because the cpu would overheat. As I was concerned that this might be because of the leak, I turned the pump on and put the case back upright and figured the TIM wouldn’t melt yet because I wasn’t running a stress test. WRONG! The time melted and I saw a blob of solder like material coming out at the bottom of the heatsink. I powered off right away and after about ten minutes managed to remove it. I tried again this time with the case level, but I guess I’d already screwed it up as now the remaining solder type stuff leaked out the side. I gave up and took the block off, cleaned it, applied some old zalman stuff that is decent but not the best and put it all back together.

SO it works, but the extra restiction in the loop due to the motherboard block and 3 gpu’s in serial has really increased my loaded cpu temps by a bunch, I’m thinking ~10C +/-5C, I think I’m going to have to lower the clock until I make the next upgrades where hopefully I’ll put the gpu’s in parallel and add a ddc 3.25 in series with the xspc pump. I’ll also change the tim for shin etsu. If I get a good deal on an rx120, I might separate out the motherboard block onto it’s own loop as that is so restrictive. However that might have to wait for the larger case.