Part 10 - Project Blue Dragon – Water-cooling and Case Mod Build Log

Final Update

After a long journey my water cooling project is virtually complete apart from a couple of small items. I physically started my build project back in September, however my initial idea and plan go back as far as July when I received a salary increase with backdated pay (a bit of disposable you might say). The plan has changed slightly from my original due to advice given to me on various forums I visit and because of a few problems I have encountered during the build.

Prior to this project I had only marvelled at water cooling builds I had read about on a number of technical forums. I have been trawling these sites for a couple of years, ogling at different peoples build logs and galleries of high definition photographs and thinking "I'd like to have a go at that but I don't have the knowledge or courage to mix electronics and water".

But here I am with a working water cooled PC, with a couple of final mods to complete it fully; all I need to do to complete my project is install some fancy lighting which will be switch-on-and-offable, manufacture a filter mount for the bottom radiator and install a filter to prevent those horrible dust build-ups that that get on your shiny hardware.

Wrapping the Blu-Ray Drive:


In Part 8 I mentioned that I didn't like the colour of the Blu-Ray drive, this was because the drive enclosure is a horrible beige colour and the sides and the rear of the drive could be seen from inside the case through the windowed side panel . A suggestion was to spray the drive, this would mean stripping it down (too much of an effort) so a second suggestion was wrap it with some 3M Carbon Fibre Wrap, this turned out to be a bit tricky, I only had an A4 sized sheet so little error for mistakes. The stuff is not very flexible when you first take it off of its backing and its quite difficult to shape it round contours, the instructions advise applying heat with a hair dryer. However as soon as you heat it up a bit it becomes extremely flexible and floppy and I got in a bit of a mess and ended up with a couple of little creases on the top. It looks OK though.

3M Carbon Wrap

The tools needed, knife is missing

The wrapped drive

Cable Management

I've always been a bit anal about cable management, even when working as an engineer in my early career, this has now transferred to my computer builds. However, the Corsair Obsidian 800D case is very forgiving and provides ample space for obsessive cable management builders.

I have to get all of this and then some into the case and make it look neat, quite a task.

Some of this needs to go in the case

And all of this, and it must look neat

There are a lot of cables, some of which I have sleeved individually, which makes them take up more space, there are loads of fan cables from the fan-controller and there is a flow meter adapter to mount somewhere, not to mention the PSU cables for the motherboard and graphics cards, I just cant begin to imagine what it would be like cabling a quad SLI rig.

You will see in the next few photos that I haven't quite finished, that is because I want to install some UV lighting and I want this to be switchable. The little terminal block on the side of the bay is for this purpose, the red lump of insulating tape is the wiring for the reservoir LED lighting, this is a temporary rig up or bodge-up, whatever you want to call it, so I can see if they look OK, BTW they do.

At the moment I am in the process of soldering some wiring to three small Lamptron vandal resistant type push buttons which will be mounted in the top drive bay, I modified one of the cases removable bay covers to take these switches, you'll see a photo of what this looks like towards the end of this update.

You can just see the wrapped Blu-Ray 

Lighting connections need to be finished

The Koolance frequency adapter (top right)

Motherboard and GPU supply cables

I would estimate that I spent at least 12 hours on final cable management, sleeving the cables took much longer. I spent numerous evenings worming the braid onto each individual cable, I hate to think how many hours this took but I will say this was done over a period of a couple of weeks so probably took up approximately 15 to 20 hours of my time.

Final Shots of Completed Build:

In the first photo here you can see the three 16mm push switches for turning the lighting on and off, these are manufactured by Lamptron and are of the latching type, they have blue LED halos. This was quite an easy little mod and just involved drilling three 16mm holes in the front of one of the bay covers. You can also see here that all of the bubbles in the reservoir have finally disappeared, this is the Rev 1.3 version of the Koolance RP-452X2 and is fitted with two Laing D5 Vario pumps in series.

Front drive bay

The graphics cards are EVGA GTX580 SC setup in an SLI configuartion, I have the Koolance VID-NX580 water blocks setup in parallel.

Dual SLI Nvidia GTX580 Graphics

Bitspower Crystal Link Tubes

The graphics cards came pre fitted with the backplates, I think that they finish off the cards really nicely and give them a sleek look.

EVGA GTX580 with backplate

Sleeved GPU cables

Sleeved cable to GPU and Mobo

The CPU is cooled by the Koolance CPU-370 water block.

Koolance CPU-370

Under that block is an Intel i7 2600K

A bit of internal cable management

Graphics card power cables

Graphics and Mobo cabling

I think it looks OK

Flow meter and drain

Well that's about all apart from fitting of lighting and switches and a filter to stop those irritating dust build-ups coming through the bottom radiator.

Build log pages: 1..2..3..4..5..6..7..8..9..10

Thanks again for looking and as always comments are welcomed, you can leave comments below or on my Blog Home page, here.