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Here's what I ended up with. It's 30" wide, 24" tall and 22" deep.
Let's start at the beginning.
Hand cut sheet metal.
Asus KGPE-D16 and dual Koolance CPU-360 waterblocks over dual Opteron 7372 CPUs, 128GB RAM and a GeForce 590
The first rest fire. Worked great. Seasonic 1200w PSU in the background
Test fit of the motherboard into the future CPU tray.
Building the walls.
Cooling and Accessory bay.
Basic chassis assembled.
Future cooling towers. 15" automotive transmission coolers. (yes, aluminum, I know. They are electrically isolated, so it SHOULDN'T be an issue)
NZXT touch panel 5-way fan and temp module.
All disassembled and ready to install, plus flow meter, two temp sensors, two fans (not what I ended up using) and a MCP655 pump
GTX590 with XSPC waterblock, two WD Black 2TB drives, KGPE-d16/128GB/Dual Opteron 6372s, Seasonic 1200w PSU, an Agility SSD and the MIO audio card. for the Asus board.
I ended up going with different graphics, SSD and hard drives and dropped the RAID controller.
350 TEC and heat sync (fan was replaced with quieter unit), and a whole slew of fittings.
Hanging brackets for the cooling towers.
Test fit of cooling units in glass cylinders.
Filed divets into fins for o-rings to prevent the cooler from rattling against the glass.
O-ring in place.
And we have a cooling tower almost complete.
Test layout of accessory bay.
Cutting the holes and reinforcing the bay.
First test fit of cooling towers, reserviors, fan control and TEC.
Another angle of the same.
Test fit of motherboard on risers and copper tubing for cooling.
All laid out to restart work after a haitus from building.
Full copper loop in place. The first loop was parallel, and was dumb. Moved to running the cooling in series.
I also moved to black tubing after one too many "That's SO steampunk" comments. Not exactly what I was going for. Almost, but not quite.
Test boot.
Testing the TEC.
Lights and card bay cover being built.
Note the bypass outlets on the side. It allows me to purge, exchange or add fluid without having to breach the loop.
First full power on after lights, etc. There is one piece of flexible tubing, in place where the second GTX 980ti is going.
Custom rear panel IO. 3d printing is fun.
Hot-swap SATA bay. Did I mention 3d printing was fun?
The interior from the rear. The TEC is covered in insulation with the controller the grey block right next to it. The drives are on the upper right, the blue card is the fan controller. I'm sure you can figure out the rest.
Complete system. Typo corrected, second graphics card added, card bay complete, and running like a champ.
Still a couple of Opterons, though I swapped for 6308s as they have higher clock speed (fewer cores), the drives have changed to Samsung EVO and Seagate 7200rpm 2.5" hard drive.
I'll be upgrading to an Asus X99M WS mobo with 64GB DDR4 RAM (downgrade in quantity) and i7-5930K in short order. Everything else will remain the same for the next couple of years.
Let's start at the beginning.
Hand cut sheet metal.
Asus KGPE-D16 and dual Koolance CPU-360 waterblocks over dual Opteron 7372 CPUs, 128GB RAM and a GeForce 590
The first rest fire. Worked great. Seasonic 1200w PSU in the background
Test fit of the motherboard into the future CPU tray.
Building the walls.
Cooling and Accessory bay.
Basic chassis assembled.
Future cooling towers. 15" automotive transmission coolers. (yes, aluminum, I know. They are electrically isolated, so it SHOULDN'T be an issue)
NZXT touch panel 5-way fan and temp module.
All disassembled and ready to install, plus flow meter, two temp sensors, two fans (not what I ended up using) and a MCP655 pump
GTX590 with XSPC waterblock, two WD Black 2TB drives, KGPE-d16/128GB/Dual Opteron 6372s, Seasonic 1200w PSU, an Agility SSD and the MIO audio card. for the Asus board.
I ended up going with different graphics, SSD and hard drives and dropped the RAID controller.
350 TEC and heat sync (fan was replaced with quieter unit), and a whole slew of fittings.
Hanging brackets for the cooling towers.
Test fit of cooling units in glass cylinders.
Filed divets into fins for o-rings to prevent the cooler from rattling against the glass.
O-ring in place.
And we have a cooling tower almost complete.
Test layout of accessory bay.
Cutting the holes and reinforcing the bay.
First test fit of cooling towers, reserviors, fan control and TEC.
Another angle of the same.
Test fit of motherboard on risers and copper tubing for cooling.
All laid out to restart work after a haitus from building.
Full copper loop in place. The first loop was parallel, and was dumb. Moved to running the cooling in series.
I also moved to black tubing after one too many "That's SO steampunk" comments. Not exactly what I was going for. Almost, but not quite.
Test boot.
Testing the TEC.
Lights and card bay cover being built.
Note the bypass outlets on the side. It allows me to purge, exchange or add fluid without having to breach the loop.
First full power on after lights, etc. There is one piece of flexible tubing, in place where the second GTX 980ti is going.
Custom rear panel IO. 3d printing is fun.
Hot-swap SATA bay. Did I mention 3d printing was fun?
The interior from the rear. The TEC is covered in insulation with the controller the grey block right next to it. The drives are on the upper right, the blue card is the fan controller. I'm sure you can figure out the rest.
Complete system. Typo corrected, second graphics card added, card bay complete, and running like a champ.
Still a couple of Opterons, though I swapped for 6308s as they have higher clock speed (fewer cores), the drives have changed to Samsung EVO and Seagate 7200rpm 2.5" hard drive.
I'll be upgrading to an Asus X99M WS mobo with 64GB DDR4 RAM (downgrade in quantity) and i7-5930K in short order. Everything else will remain the same for the next couple of years.
