The making of STRYKER II

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[Redoing the waterloop

I decided to include waterblock for the northbridge in my loop. Lucky for me, the Swiftech MCW30 flow-restriction-free block was released, and I bought one immediately.

_CHIPSET BLOCK
Here's what it looks like:

And installed:

_COOLANT AND TUBING
The old coolant had stained the tubing like noones business and left residue inside the loop. A pic of the old tubing:

I cleaned the rad, pump, res, and blocks nicely. I also bought new tubing and a new coolant. Pics:

Installed and testrunning:

_SEALING THE RAD
I sealed the rad to the bottom of the case in order to prevent the radfans to suck air from inside the case over the rad. Easily solved using electrical tape:

 

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[Cooling the VGA card and RAM sticks

I put some large Zalman ramsinks on the 7800GTX as well as on the ramsticks to provide better cooling:

I also put a 80mm Panaflo fan blowing over the ramsticks:

Here are some final pics, after all modifications were done:

 

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[OC and Benchmark results

These modifications helped my temps and speeds quite a bit.

The new ram and new cooling helped me bump my CPU overclock from 2450Mhz up to 2700Mhz. I am running 270HTT, 10x multiplier, 1,425V, and a 1:1 RAm divider.
Thats a 700Mhz overclock on my 2000Mhz x2 3800+ CPU. Not bad, if you ask me.

I also bumped the 7800GTX OC from 520/1380 to 530/1390 without any artifacts. Not a major increase, but it bumped my 3DMark05 score up a few hundred points, to 9250.

My temps are a lot better. Here are some max load (2xPrime95 and 3DMark05 simultaneously) temps:
CPU: 48C
Northbridge: 38C
GPU core: 45C

Idle temps are something like this:
CPU: 38C
Northbridge: 35C
GPU core: 34C

Here is a little pic:

Thank you and good night!

 

[lame]

Good to see you addressing some of the issues from last fall. Looks like the first attempt was fairly disappointing, but nothing you can't fix.

 

[matt00926]

man your tower looks unstable on whatever its sitting on top, especially with wheels

 

[mateo]

love the worklog!! /subscribed
im basically doing the same setup only in a thermaltake case... definitely doesnt look as nice as yours does.
check your pm for me!

 

[dekard]

Terrific v2000 job. I've got a similiar setup, v2000 with a triple 120 on top and a pump and rad combo in a drive bay. Its made by Koolance and called the pc4-1036bk. I'm going to do a uv ccl + uv lighting mod soon, and i'm looking for info on a lighting controller and found this thread. How have your ccl's held up with the rheo controller you are using? I may get one similiar if yours are lasting.

Also, I love your tubing runs, much cleaner than mine. I'm going to take a look and see if I can do a similiar run with mine when I drain and refil for the uv job. Also, love the placement of the stickers and the dual 5.25 bay res. I was already thinking about the dual 5.25, how do you like it since you've now lived with it for some time? Have you experimented with uv lighting of it at all? I wanted a nice, sublte way to show off the fact I've wc'd and I think thats it.

Finally, great clean install... GJ!

 

[DirtyLude]

Very nice. Can't you turn the CPU block around, so that the out barb is at the top instead of the bottom? I don't know why, but it's driving me crazy looking at the pics that everything is so perfect, but the CPU out tube has to push around the feed tube to go up, also the chipset block hoses are on the opposite sides.

Actually now that I look closer, it looks like you are doing it to avoid the tight radius bends that would be needed to get to the VGA cooler. Bummer.

 

[Solarfall]

very nice jop, love that storm mounting plate, looks very cool.
sorry for the off topic. just wondering, are you from norway?

 

[CC_Pirate]

very nice jop, love that storm mounting plate, looks very cool.
sorry for the off topic. just wondering, are you from norway?

Thanks man. And yes indeed, I am from Norway!

 

[Solarfall]

cool we are neighbours, i'm from Finland. sweden sucks, the bastards allways win at ice hockey............... just kidding have a lot of cousins there and they will get pissed off at me for trashing sweden. ( sorry for offtopic)

did you know that those ram sink that you have on your memory, the gold ones. you probably would be better off with out them. usually they have poor contact with the actual stick. instead you should attach thouse zalman ram sinks to your memory,

 

[CC_Pirate]

cool we are neighbours, i'm from Finland. sweden sucks, the bastards allways win at ice hockey............... just kidding have a lot of cousins there and they will get pissed off at me for trashing sweden. ( sorry for offtopic)

did you know that those ram sink that you have on your memory, the gold ones. you probably would be better off with out them. usually they have poor contact with the actual stick. instead you should attach thouse zalman ram sinks to your memory,

Haha yeah you guys love hockey..

And about those RAM sinks, I checked out what you said. The gold sinks on the Ballistix are in 100% contact with the RAM chips, although it is using a rather quick thermal tape. I don't want to take it all off because it will void the warranty on the chips. Whether the "extra" RAMsinks I put on helps or not, I'm not too sure of. It looks cool though, and they do get a little hot, so some heat transfer is going on at least.

 

[CC_Pirate]

OK, I've upgraded all the hardware in this rig and once again redone the cooling system. It's been a while since the original build. I can't help but brag; this time I feel that I got the cooling system (or the whole rig for that matter) pretty darn close to perfection.

Specs are in sig. Temps are nice and low now, with the 4 core temps ranging from 35-42C when idling, and getting up to high 60s during load. It is possible that I could push the CPU a little higher with a more recent BIOS release, but I have not had the time to deal with that lately. During the initial trial and error, I found 3.78Ghz to be absolutely stable, although I could boot at 4.1Ghz no problem.
All the other WCed components (northbridge, southbridge, 8800GTX ++) lie stable at cool temps. I get about 14,300 3DMarks.

Below are a few pics of this recent upgrade/mod session, as well as some pics of how it all turned out. Enjoy!

 

[CC_Pirate]

Here (at the top of the v2000) is where I wanted a new radiator for a second loop.

So I went ahead and installed one:

Leak testing:

New pump & rad:

You can see party of my flushing system on the left:

4xReapers with custom cooling solution:

 

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[ddb120]

That made me lol

 

[CLock3]

Haha, sick Rambo poster. Really good job on the system though man. Looks like a complete overhaul almost with all that new gear. I like it though, looks really clean, nice, and simple, like you were going for originally.