New PC Pimping - Water cooling FTW

[Drew]

this my 2nd time water cooling. First time was a swiftech kit. I had a bad experience (read: leaky fitting that turned out to be defective) where I lost my ATI 9700 pro (to give you an idea of when I was last water cooling) and Swiftech said they had a batch of defective fittings and credited my bank account with the full price I paid for my 9700. Big props to them for that.

Fast forward to today. My i7 is running about 1ghz overclocked and was using a thermalrite ultra extreme cooler. It did pretty good but the 120mm fan on it was LOUD to keep the temps sane.

I've been wanting to go back to water for a while now due to how quiet and efficient it is but all the kits I priced from dangerden or other sites, etc were all $250~$350. Not worth it IMO.

Then just out of nowhere a google ad for watercooling was in the side bar of my browser advertising a $150 complete kit so I checked it out and was incredibly impressed with what all was offered for the money.

This is the kit

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/11743/ex-wat-159/XSPC_Rasa_750_RS240_Universal_CPU_Water_Cooling_Kit_-HOT.html?tl=g30

The biggest problem though for me was that my case (a Lian Li PC-V1000B) while absolutely amazing simply doesn't have the space inside to accommodate liquid cooling so budgeting in the price of a new case was also an issue.

I've been drooling HARD over the corsair obsidian cases. I've yet to read a single negative thing about them so I said that if I was going to ditch the Lian Li, it had to be replaced by something that was the same caliber of exceptional build quality, elegant and not gaudy looks and most of all be functional and easily accommodate a liquid cooling kit with room to upgrade more liquid cooling components in the future.

Seeing as to how cheap the water cooling kit costs, I decided that the Obsidian 650D would be mine.


OK on to the build!!

The case in a word is astonishing. Absolutely amazing build quality, every single inch of space in the case has been carefully laid out to offer exceptional wire management, cable routing and water cooling.

SATA cable routing

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070033.jpg

Rear facing cables for the harddrives. I'm considering swapping these for right angle plug cables.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070053.jpg


The massive array of cabling :eek: There is about a half inch of space between the back of the chassis and the side panel so the panel fits on without any problems despite this huge mess.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070052.jpg


Nicely lapped water block. about as good as I can ask for for the price I paid. My thermalrite ultra heatsink wasn't even remotely this good and ended up having to hand lap it for an hour to get it to a mirror shine.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070040.jpg


Water block mounted


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070042.jpg

Dual 120mm radiator mounted with noctua fans. I didn't use the fans that came with it despite them being nice yate loons as I think the noctuas perform better.

This kit has the slim radiator. I ended up having to get this due to clearance issues with the motherboard connectors. It was either get the thicker rad and mount the fans on the top outside of the case (ghetto) or get the thinner one to keep the fans in the case.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070038.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070039.jpg


And probably my favorite part of this kit is the 2 in 1 pump/reservoir. I attache the tubing with enough slack in it to be able to slide out the reservoir enough that I can refill it. You basically fill the tank up, power up the system, let it start pumping it through the loop and simply keep filling up the tank until there's about a half inch of empty space in the reservoir.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-1070048.jpg


Filled up, leak testing letting the air bubbles work their way out and the finished product!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-2238.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-2237.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-2235.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-2233.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-2229.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fastredponycar/Computer/Obsidian/untitled-2231.jpg



My impressions overall are incredibly positive. I think that the case is a work of art both inside and out. I love the understated exterior, the simplicity of it. The little flip down panel above the bluray drive has 2 usb 2.0 ports, 2 usb 3.0 ports, firewire, audio ports and on the top is a sliding panel that reveals a hot swap SATA harddrive dock :)

The large front grille pushes in and clicks out for easy removal/cleaning of the front fan mesh filter. The filter on the bottom of the case under the power supply fan simply clicks and slides straight out from the back. I seriously cannot find ONE thing I dislike about this case. Every computer I've built, I've used a top of the line enthusiast case (coolermaster wave master, lian li and now this) and until this case, I've had to live with one or two minor little inconveniences and accepted those compromises but with this, there simply are none. NONE. I think the only thing that any reviewer has found negative about the case is the fact that the front USB3.0 header cable has to plug into the motherboard's rear usb3.0 port instead of connecting to a header connection on the motherboard itself.

Since my motherboard doens't have usb 3.0 :( That's not an issue for me.


The cooling kit performs on par with my huge heatsink cooler but is SO quiet. Amazingly quiet.

I'm planning on adding a rear 120mm radiator to the setup soon though simply because my load temperatures are still pretty high (high 90's *C) and I do a lot of video encoding on this machine which essentially pushes every core to 100% use for up to an hour or 2 and I don't really want it at that high of a temp for that long (despite it already having been doing this for over 2 years now with zero problems)

Anyways... that's that.

[Jess]

eh, its nice and all but I still prefer eMachines.

[AlmosN8kd]

Looks badass, but, I have no idea at what I'm looking at. I'm still air cooled.

[TylerW]

Nice build! Do I spy an SSD? I've been wanting to get one for awhile but I've been holding off due to a lot of reports of unreliable SSDs coming out recently.

What video cards are you running there in Crossfire mode?

I have an AMD quad core but I haven't even tried to overclock it yet. Haven't really seen a need to. My video card will probably need to be overclocked before my processor. How is your water cooling doing for your video cards? Have you tried overclocking them yet?

[Drew]

the SSD is a Crucial RealSSD C300. It's got a ton of good reviews and the only real negative is that (unless some firmware has fixed it) RAID0 doesn't play well with them. Since I don't run it in any raid setup, it was irrelevant to me.

the vid cards are GTX470's clocked to 480 speeds with msi afterburner. I'm not running any liquid cooling to them since I want to get a 580 maybe around the end of the year depending how these run Skyrim and battlefield 3. I hate that GPU waterblocks are ONLY for specific models. They're not universal like the CPU blocks so dropping $300 for a pair of 470 blocks when I don't plan to keep them that much longer was going to be a waste.

[Grider]

Noctuas are AWESEOME. I bought one to use with an external AC/DC power supply as a cabinet cooler in Lauren's office desk. I will be buying more of those just as 120mm replacements as needed; so flippin quiet and great flow.

[TylerW]

the SSD is a Crucial RealSSD C300. It's got a ton of good reviews and the only real negative is that (unless some firmware has fixed it) RAID0 doesn't play well with them. Since I don't run it in any raid setup, it was irrelevant to me.

the vid cards are GTX470's clocked to 480 speeds with msi afterburner. I'm not running any liquid cooling to them since I want to get a 580 maybe around the end of the year depending how these run Skyrim and battlefield 3. I hate that GPU waterblocks are ONLY for specific models. They're not universal like the CPU blocks so dropping $300 for a pair of 470 blocks when I don't plan to keep them that much longer was going to be a waste.

I have a GTX450 with MSI afterburner. No clue why I got an nvidia video card to go with my AMD processor. :P Based on some research I've done, I've found one uber powerful video card to outperform most dual-card setups. My comp is the first one I ever built and it is doing well as a budget gamer. I don't ever intend to spend more than $200 on a video card. Crysis be damned!