This rig started off as a combined workstation and gaming rig. Here it is in it's current incarnation, read on for the full story of it's evolution from zero to hero!
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| Not the average Antec 300 |
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| PC by night |
Specs as it evolved
Initial build - 3/2010
i7-920 D0, asus p6t vanilla, 6gb corsair dominator gt 1600 CL7 (hypers), zalman 9900 cooler, evga 8800gt, lsi 9211-8i, 2 x25e 32gb in raid 0, 2xWD Black 1tb in raid 1, ocz 550W supply, windows xp
Linux rebuild - 9/2010
Upgraded to 980x, added 12gb of gskill 1600 CL9, dual booted redhat 5.5 and win 7 pro, added a c300 128gb drive for development work
GPU and watercooling upgrade - 2/2011
Added 2xgtx 460 in sli, jumped to water with a RX360 kit + another RX360 + razor full cover blocks for gpus. Extensive case mod work
2nd GPU Upgrade - 6/2011
Changed the monitor to a Dell U3011 (2560x1600 of awesomeness). One of the gtx 460's died, so I picked up 3xGTX480 with Koolance full cover blocks. Motherboard also died, changed out for a Rampage III Extreme with an EK full cover block. Swapped out the memory for 3x4gb of gskill trident + turbulence 2000-8-9-8.
Water cooling upgrade - 11/2011
XSPC 750 Pump and Res combo died, ordered a Koolance RP-452x2 reservoir with dual PMP-450s pumps. Also order the dual 24V pump controller and the serial kit.
The Build!
The initial build was somewhat rushed - I had little time to get it up and running while learning how to get my tools and obscure vpn system installed on linux. It was very much a case of slapping it in the box, hence the cable routing is awful:
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| Yuck! |
- there are no holes for cable routing, it will look messy and there's not much you can do
- it claims to be SSD ready because there is one mount point for an SSD at the bottom of the case. If you have two ssd's then you have to be creative. you can see the 2nd SSD attached to the outside of the 3.5" drive supports
- when cable routing is so bad, there's a lot to be said for modular power supplies
- although there is a fan filter on the 2x120mm on the front of the case, if you populate all the fan locations you'll have 2x120mm and 1x140mm + PSU fan (usually exhaust). In other words, dust will still come.
- only 3x5 1/4" bays - this may seem fine until you want to watercool, with such a small case you are most likely going to want to use a dual bay reservoir. That means you have nothing left after you add an optical drive.
Painting
I wanted to add a window, however the bare metal look really had to go. I stripped out the components and used my trusty jigsaw and drill to add some cable routing options. I then sanded the metal with 60 grit followed by 120 and then 220. I sprayed a coat of primer and then 2 coats of matte black:
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| Painted, not the extra gash along the bottom of where the motherboard mounts for easier cabling routing |
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| 3 of the 4 Potentiometers mounted viewed from underneath the top of the case |
Here we can see how the fan contoller mod looks from the top:
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| Fan controller mod nearly done |
I also went with XSPC for the GPU blocks, they were not only affordable buthad detachable vrm covers that could be removed to make them compatible with non reference cards like my super budget galaxy cards:
The VRM's already had a heatsink on them (thanks galaxy) - however for overclocking above 750MHz, they really needed some air moving over them, so it's handy to strap a 120mm fan to the end of the board.
Saddlebags
There is no room in the Antec 300 for a radiator if you want to use your PCI slots and your hard drive bays. Therefore I knew I had to mount the rads externally. I don't particularly like the look of radiators that sit on little extensions on the top of the case, or hanging off the back. I wanted something a little classier so decided to go with radiators attached to two steel bars that would sit across the top of the case. Like the case they were spray painted with primer and two coats of matte black. The gentle typhoon ap-15's did not have long enough wires, so I desoldered the existing wires and added new longer black wires that would reach inside the case:
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| Fan controller mod done, sattle bag radiators added |
This version was nearly complete. I decided I wanted to tame the dust, so I cut out the hex mesh on the fans and replaced them silverstone magnetic dust filters. Here's the system after a few months - you can see the tygon tubing was already discoloring:
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| A few months later, the tygon tubing was already discolored |
Rebuilding again
A few months later I had gotten the upgrade bug and moved to a i7-990x, Rampage III Extreme, AX1200 and tri sli GTX480. This demanded a window mod in order to show off all the good stuff.
I started by cutting out the window with my trusty jigsaw:
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| Side panel with hole cut for window |
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| Window looks perfect, C Channel strip being added |
I was nervous how bright the LED's would be and so I had a bright idea. I could use the fan controller as a dimmer for the LED's. At night the system still looked fairly bright even with the smoked window:
However the dimmer made it perfect. Once the last fitting came in I was able to start leak testing. I had a couple of issues with the motherboard block which requires very low profile threads on the barbs. My first barb cut off all the flow in the loop!
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| Leak testing |
Here's the system running:
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| This death star is fully operational |
- replacing the koolance LED's with red to match the asus ROG theme
- adding parallel sli fittings
- upgrading the pump - during filling it became very obvious how much the xspc 750 pump was struggling, I would have to suck water though the system myself as the pump wasn't strong enough to displace the air with water
Some more shots:
11/1/2011 - Update
- Ordered more SLI fittings
- Split out my linux workstation into a temporary rig
- XSPC pump died, 2xPMP-450s on the way with the 24V controller
- GTX480 backplate
Loop rebuilt and operational:
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| New Dual Pump Reservoir and dual 24V pump controller |
This build can also be found @OCN, @EVGA, @Anand, @XS, @bit-tech
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