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Water Cooled Cube

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Hi minihack
what are overall pcb dimensions of this riser card and where did You get it?
Cheers
 
Hi minihack
what are overall pcb dimensions of this riser card and where did You get it?
Cheers

I got it from Lin-ITX in the UK and I think it originates from mini box in the US. Here are the links:

http://linitx.com/product/pci-express-x16-riser-right-facing/12050

and

http://www.mini-box.com/PCI-Express-x16-Riser-Card?sc=8&category=18

I am not 100% certain these are the same product, but to find one you need to make sure it says it is "right facing" or "folds over motherboard" if you are going for a rigid riser like this.
 
I got it from Lin-ITX in the UK and I think it originates from mini box in the US. Here are the links:

http://linitx.com/product/pci-express-x16-riser-right-facing/12050

and

http://www.mini-box.com/PCI-Express-x16-Riser-Card?sc=8&category=18

I am not 100% certain these are the same product, but to find one you need to make sure it says it is "right facing" or "folds over motherboard" if you are going for a rigid riser like this.

Riser from mini-box looks diffrent than the one from your pics, could you measure yours for me?
 
Riser from mini-box looks diffrent than the one from your pics, could you measure yours for me?

Measurements appear to be exactly the same as the Mini-box one (even though the PCB does look a bit different to the pic).
 
Long time no post….

This got put to one side, but was not forgotten.

One reason for delay was to obtain a power supply that could deliver enough Watts to drive this Cube with graphics card, 3770K etc with it all water cooled.

Naturally there is nowhere in the Cube to put a powerful enough supply, so I need a power brick that can give over 200W at 12volts.

So I bought one of these
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from eBay which claims 250W at 12volts and is £25.

I did not want to use it as supplied though for a few reasons. First, it was fitted with a small noisy fan; second I wanted to cool it better (and quietly) and third I did not like the idea of having all the terminals exposed and potential risk of high voltage shock.

So when it arrived I took it from the original case and found a plastic case that was used for electrical junction boxes and made what you see below. It uses heatsinks recycled from old G5 power supplies, a slim 120mm (one of the fans I used earlier in the project as part of a push/pull cooling for the radiator), an IEC plug inlet for safety and a pair of insulated speaker binding posts as the DC output.

I settled on the speaker type posts because I can use very high gauge wires, but also so I can use this supply as a bench supply for 12v for all my projects. The ones I bought are not the cheapest type as I wanted to be able to fully isolate against accidental short circuits.

The box for this may be large, but the advantage is it can be kept out of sight and very quietly.

My next post on this will be the details of how I use my picopsu and an auxiliary supply on board in the Cube to give the juice to the components.



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So some progress, good news and bad news.

The good stuff is that the new plate on the back looks absolutely great as you can see from these couple of pictures. The plate was out of steel, and then bonded to the bottom of the Cube with good old JB with lots of rubbing back to blend it in.

The steel plate change and some new supports means it will all fit nicely into the original metal can surround of the Cube.

Bad news is that the power supply arrangements internally took up a lot of time and design effort and in the end I have actually abandoned the idea of an "auxiliary" PSU. All looked to be going well, and in theory it could have worked as in my mind it should have been like using a multi-rail PSU supply and as long as you obey the rules for power rails then it could have all been okay.

I "thought" that the CPU power supply socket would be a separate rail supply, however as I found that connecting the auxiliary supply up to it also made the fans spin it seems that this isn't the case…..effectively the separate CPU connection seems to just be a helper connection to get enough current to the processor and it is not isolated at all from the general 12v supplied to the rest of the board. So as I do not want to have power supply voltages competing, a sense of caution has made me decide not to risk an expensive CPU, board and GPU combination.

So it is back to just the 160w picopsu doing the power supply work - although now at least the power brick I have made does have a lot of headroom to fully supply any peak requirements!

Anyway, the pic.s show the testing of the new water loop and getting rid of air locks. Remarkably easy to do with this radiator combination and the loop runs silently now.

I rigged everything up yesterday and after a while figuring out DSDT etc for the 7750 and Zotac it is all running and my WATT-O-METER (not sure what it is really called!) tells me that the Cube at idle pulls around 30W from the wall - a lot less than I expected! Stress testing the CPU (this is a i7 3770K remember) - at no over clock - shows peaks at about 95W. Running Unigine Heaven 3.0 benchmarks - with CPU not being stress tested at the same time - seems to show peaks at around 80W.

I did briefly decide to run Geekbench stress tests at the same time as Unigine Heaven and at that point I hit peaks of about 130w. I did not run that for more than a couple of minutes though at this stage as it is time again to double check the water loop.

Temperatures for all of this are stunning.

I have not yet put this back into the shell of the Cube yet, but indications are good at the moment. Idle temp.s are around 24C, heavy stress testing takes the CPU temp up to the 50C or so. I am not sure if HW monitor is measuring GPU temps for me as the temps on it seem to be too low at a peak of 28C - so I suspect the GPU2 temp it tells me about is the die of the integrated graphics.

The Noctua PWM fan does a great job of cooling the radiator quietly. It is the only fan in the system and as soon as stress testing stops, the fan spins down and temps. settle back down to the mid 20's again.

I need now to see how this all changes over time but so far, so good….

Later this week I'll put the Cube back inside the acrylic stand and we'll see how it all works out.
 

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All done now except the beauty shots.

This afternoon I wired up the touch sensor, checked water (again!) then put it into the cut down acrylic case.

After running for a while I gave it a mild turbo boost and then took some benchmarks. Here they are attached, along with the HW monitor windows etc (high point on the graphs are for geekbench runningwhere you see peak temperature at 54C, at CPU freq of 4.148 GHz, with the CPU drawing 62W. Geekbench at that is shown in the screenshot.

All these tests are with the Cube inside the acrylic, but I am not using the metal case (as I like the way it looks without it!).

I'll try and do some nice finished shots of the Cube and will post soon.
 

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MiniHack, anyone who isn't impressed with this mod should take up basket weaving. :lol:

The presentation is spectacular, and the performance results are nothing short of stellar.


Excellent job. Nobody but you could have pulled this off with such precision. 10 out of 10... :thumbup:




Ersterhernd
 
MiniHack, anyone who isn't impressed with this mod should take up basket weaving. :lol:

The presentation is spectacular, and the performance results are nothing short of stellar.


Excellent job. Nobody but you could have pulled this off with such precision. 10 out of 10... :thumbup:




Ersterhernd

Thanks so much E. for the positive comments.

For sure this has been an adventure, especially with that power supply issue being a dead end (must blank off that back panel switch and take the unused board out of the Cube…).

I honestly cannot see how any more performance can be sensibly squeezed into this little Cube using a Pico 160W, so I think this has found the limits. Gratifying that it is so quiet and the temp.s are so good and properly useable.

I think my next Cube adventure (once you start it is not possible to stop is it?) is likely to be taking advantage of my now high power external brick and will use this supply: http://linitx.com/product/m4atxhv-2...ar-psu/13033?gclid=CKDgxe_397oCFSTmwgodrQ4Ajw to full advantage. But that will definitely need to wait a while as I have other unfinished mod.s to button up in the meantime!
 
Just as a follow up, you have I hope notice my completed mod post for this, just check out my sig. for that one.

Also, I have been re-reading and re-testing some elements and think that HWMonitor is actually reporting the temp.s correctly of my little Sapphire HD7750. So the water loop keeps temp.s on that down well below what the normal heatsink would do as reported by this thread:

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sapphire_7750_lp/4.htm

and seemingly at full load the water cooling is staggeringly better than the stock fan/heatsink for keeping temp.s of the GPU down. It really makes me sad that in the end in this build I am limited to keeping max system power down to the 150W or so level, as it is clear that it'd be fun to be able to try over clocking the tiny GPU (and CPU) in the same way they do in the oveclockersclub thread to see how this little Cube build could fly if the settings were tweaked.

Still, that is probably best left for another build and thread as I am too pleased with this Cube to tear it back down again.

:rolleyes:
 
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