This got a bit boring after a while. Also my drill was starting to over heat. So... i cheated.

Yes. A pair of scissors. Yes. I know. But it worked rather well actually. The scissors had no problems cutting the thin
mild steel, and i got a pretty good cut out as a result. Now. back to the radiator.

Perfect fit. I used some closed cell packing foam to make a gasket to seal the rad to the case.

Not a bad fit. There are some gaps, but nothing a foam gasket cant fix.



Bingo. Foam gasket, plus two metal strips to guide and hold the radiator.

Two more metal strips hold the bottom of the radiator in. I cut these from old backing plates.



Final test. Radiator installed, and case leads inserted. A strip of duct tape provides the final seal around the wires.



Other side view. Front panel inserted, cables routed. Not a bad fit. Notice a fan on the back of the radiator. That will come
later on, but for now you have an idea of what i have done.



Final test fit of the current pipes i had set up. Its a bit iffy looking, and i ended up changing from this later on, but you
get an idea of where i was heading. Now the case and rad is set up, time for the actual watercooling components.

The Waterblock.
The wb is my own design and made copper block that i did a few years ago. I have finally used it! Here is a pic of it.

So the cpu was taken care of. I also planned on cooling both the northbridge, and video card core.
For this duty i used my copper blocks i manufactured out of sheet copper.

There they are hooked up for leak testing.

Here is a closer look. Its tarnished a bit, and i will clean it after this shot. But thats all that you really need to cool
video/northbrige. Even the hottest GPUs dont put out anywhere near the same amount of heat that a modern overclocked
cpu puts out, so even though these things look tiny, they worked PERFECTLY. As a teaser, according to hardware monitoring,
with an ambient temp of 25 degrees, this watercooling system keeps my gpu at 32 degrees, and my cpu at 35. Thats not
bad at all.

Here is the northbridge block all shinied up.

And this is what is inside those critters. A simple design to reduce back pressure.

So thats the cpu, nb and gpu blocks. Now the rest of the cooling equipment.

You can see the pump, the res (YES ITS A SPECIMEN BOTTLE. DONT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT)
The cpu, nb and gpu block, the hold down for the cpu block, the outlet manifold for the cpu block which takes the 4
outlets from the cpu block and takes them back to a 1/2 inch fitting. Also the additive i use in my systems. You only
need about 5 percent of this stuff to keep your system sparkling clean and free of crap, and because of its ratio
to water, it doesnt make the water thick/viscous like glycol based additives do. Also its not great, and it also means
that my water cooling system doesnt smell like a typical car system. And, the additive isnt as poisonous as glycol, so
if i happen to get any on my face from siphoning etc, im not going to like die or something.

The pump. This was later changed to a more powerful hydor.

And yes. the SPECIMEN JAR. Pee jar, stool jar, whatever you want to call it. Ok, its over with now. Stop laughing.
AND ITS NOT USED. I used this particular bit of equipment for three reasons.
1, its free.
2, Its clear, so i can see inside it.
3, due to necessity, when its sealed, its sealed TIGHT. NO LEAKS.
As you can see in the pic, i ahve already modified it with 1/2 inch fittings for my system. In this case, i used superglue
to do the sealing, hence the bit of clouding on the inside. Super glue will pick up any moisture on a surface, and its
great for revealing finger prints. The fumes are nasty. Ok, moving on.

The RADIATOR.
Picked up for a bargain at a radiator place. Its a heater core from some late model japanses car, so its thus very strong,
very small, and compact.

Not exactly normal fittings i know. Was fixed pretty quickly with 1/2 inch fittings which were glued in.

Size comparison with a 80 gig wd drive.

This rad has very finely spaced fins. Its got a huge surface area, but hell i knew i was going to have problems pushing
air through it.

Which brings me to the last, and the most fun of all things. The fan.

Design 1. Typical medium speed 120mm 12 volt fan mounted on a temporary cardboard frame work.

Status: FAIL. It just doesnt have the static pressure. Even at 18 volts from my desk top power supply, it made lots of noise,
but didnt move much air.
Next up. A squirrel cage blower.

Due to its design, it has a pretty good air flow, but also has a much better vacuum pressure, In otherwords it can suck pretty
well. I had to make a different plate to hold this fan on.

Looks good huh. As a bonus, this is a 24 volt fan out of a photocopier. But it would spin from 5 volts up, so i had plenty
of speeds to mess with. At 24 volts it was pretty damned loud, so i ran it at 17 volts. It worked... but later testing showed
that even at 17 volts, it was making to much noise, and not enough air flow.

So came the final design. This one was complicated and took about 2 hours to do. I remember it, because i watched
a james bond movie while i made it.
I had two matching blower fans from photocopiers. Same deal, 24 volts, but being matched, i could use two at once, and
drop the voltage down to reduce noise, but still keep the air flow up. It also gave me the advantage of much more control
over air flow.
Hence came the whole special design in itself, the DUAL BLOWER BOX.

And you can see it installed.

Its covered in black duct tape at the moment, painting will come one day when i can bear to have the computer of for
a whole day. I dont see it happening for a while.

Ok, so there you have the parts so far. The case, pump, res, blocks, radiator, and the fans.
All piping is done with black 1/2 inch high density poly irrigation pipe. It doesnt bend very well, so i will use angle pieces to
go around corners. Now i know its bad for flow, but im not that worried about flow to begin with. Im more worried about
design, and fitting the thing together. I cant afford tygon. Also, you will see with the large piping, i am just using cable
ties for all the joins. No watercooling system is going to pump thousands of PSI, especialyl mine, so im not going to use
cable clamps. They are serious overkill if you have a smaller pump like the hydor i ended up using.

Anyways.. time to put it all together.

First up, video card waterblock mount.

Now, northbrige mount. I did this with the board out of the case. You have to because you have to use mini bolts/screws
to hold it together.

I have used artic silver as thermal compound, and using a hacksaw, i sliced up some 3mm thick aluminum sheet i found
somewhere. Probably a road sign or something equally dubious. Using a file and drill, i have made the holes and rounded
the edges of and then used tiny M2 screws from DSE to thread through the board and onto the crossbar. Using some
closed cell foam under the bar to help reduce any mounting stress, i have just tighted the nuts up until the foam compressed
down to about 1 millimeter thick. Its a nice and tight mount, but still has give in it for any thermal expansion and the like.

On the other side of the board/card, i have used plastic washers to insulate the bolts from the board. This is to stop any
shorting out which could possibly happen.

Final detail on the northbridge.

And the CPU block install.

More detail, plus the mini sinks i put on the mosfets of the motherboard to increase stability.

So, what does it all look like?

The front of the case got some modding done as well, i put the 3 hard drives up high under the optical drives, and im
direct air cooling them.




Detail of the pump. Hydor seltz l25. Cost me 95 dollars, and by far is the MOST expensive item in this complete setup.

Here is a pic of the res.

As you can see, the concentration of the additive is very small.

Other random pics.

Here is one before the final design. The layout of the pipes is much cleared in this pic. Also you can see i had the
original blower fan on.

The fans are 24 volt, but they both run of 12 volts. I get nice and quiet, but still a fair amount of air flow.

The biggest problem im having with this system is the cat. Cat walks past the computer, and slowly but surely
cat hair is biulding up on the front of the radiator. So once every month or two, i take of the front, and clean the cat
hair of the radiator.

Well thats about it.

What has this gotten me?

A stable overclock from 333mhz fsb to 400mhz fsb. I had to increase the core voltage to 1.85 up from 1.65.

Temperatures :

Thats 27 degrees ambient from the motherboard temp sensor.
34 degree CPU. Thats the Onboard diode, not the thermistor in the socket.
Ambient temperature in the office here is about 24 degrees.
The hard drives also run very cool because they are fan forced.
And video card temps.

The ambient temp sensor as far as i can tell is measuring the video cards board temp.
I have no idea where this sensor actually is but im inclined to think its near either the power supply
section, or near the ram chips.
The core temp there is 30 degrees. Thats with that puny copper cooler.

The stock speeds of the 9800xt is 412mhz Core, and 365 mem.
I have got an absolute crap overclock on the ram. Im not really happy with that. Any higher and i get
artefacts. As for the core, from 412 to 470 is an IMMENSE overclock. Proves that you dont need
a massive cooling system for even a rather high end video card.

Well, thats it!!!

Thanks for reading, and the long loading images. I really wanted to show all the steps for this.

Cheers, Rainwulf 28/jan/05.