My plan is coming together... Nicely... *taps fingers together*
The paint on some pieces will be done Friday night, the other part needs to be sanded some more (this is exhausting, but here's the beginning of my labors):
Finished the mesh pieces, absolutely beautiful:
I forgot/didn't notice the mesh on the bottom sides... :shadedshu So I painted them and here they are (yes, the case is upside down, lol):
Forgot how much I hated sleeving, lol. These came undone since the last build due to my terrible sleeving skills:
Don't worry, I redid them so they'll stay in place. Discovered a technique that actually works (consistently too).
IT LIVES:
That's professional cable management on the rear
I also finished painting my EX240 rad after about 3 or 4 tries
Redoing my sleeving on the new Corsair HX1000
Here's two firsts I've seen, the orange/black camo Paracord and braided cables!
Quick note, I have been redoing that sleeving with a better braid
I'll take pictures once I have all the cables I want braided done
Here's a quick top secret preview
Replacing the labels on my Corsair HX 1000 with some better colored choices
(Ignore the peeling sticker, I superglued it and its flat now. My fingers were mad though
)
Huge update, brace yourselves.
Goodbye air setup (especially that stock Intel cooler, ugh).
Gotta love when you already have rads installed but you have to remove them anyways -_-
You're coming out too.
Let the mobo dissection begin! This is the stock cooler removed. (Look at the AS5 on the CPU from the Intel cooler, gross)
Now we place our thermal pads in the appropriate areas
Thermal paste
Absolutely sexy
My first FB block, always wanted one, never had the money.
Card #1. Powercolor 7950. (I'll be writing a review for the whole block and installation in the coming days once I get my A/C fixed - 82F is not comfortable, that's part of the reason I'm awake at 4AM - so I can use normal ambient temps for better comparisons)
They are getting really cheap on these coolers
No heatsink for anything besides the die? I think it might touch the RAM, but that's not even thermal pads, just some weird plastic material.
Naked
Gross.
That's much better
Thermal pads and paste applied
Gotta prepare the backplate with a thermal pad for the rear of the VRMs
So sexy.
Just put on my gloss black painted single-slot bracket
Card #2. Sapphire 7950. They were almost identical to disassemble.
Sapphire is much better about thermal paste
Just as awesome as the first one
Some barbs.
Finally get off the stock cooler
The first tube to be installed
Here's the bridge installed with the FC-Links. I had to make a trip to Lowe's to get appropriately sized screws because I bought the bridge used and he didn't include screws :shadedshu
Big thanks to Kortwa for getting these stop fittings and the pump top out to me at the perfect time
First bridge I've used, looks way better in person
(weighs an unbelievable ton though
)
Got the board back in, got the 360 back in with tubes (extra slack) attached so I could actually clamp it down
Not going to lie. I made a huge mistake going with the 250MM res and D5. They were not going to fit at all with push/pull on the 240 at the bottom. I ended up sacrificing one of the top fans and both of the bottoms
Not to mention the filling, oh boy.
No res.
Res
Just like magic.
Now its gone again
This is not an optical illusion. I leaned the reservoir outward, undid the stop fitting, attached a barb (do not use 90* to fill, absolutely worthless, trust me), put tubing on and funneled in. Again, poor idea of the huge res/pump, but they worked out in the end.
Leak test!
Nothing was seen for 8 hours, so that was good enough for me, wired it all up.
Here's some more close-up views of everything in it's current state.
So the liquid is done, but there is more to come
*NOTE* I've been asked this a few times in PMs actually. "How did you mount the res?" Well, I took the normal mounts FrozenQ provides (they gave me normal and extended, wasn't sure what I needed), put those on to have proper spacing. I then put three zipties together, and wrapped it around the res at each end by the acetal (blends really well
) and looped them through the wire grommets. Also, the pump keeps it pushed up and it keeps the pump from bursting forth (it was a nightmare with that crazy angle I have down there), gotta love symbiotic relationships
*NOTE*
And, after many painstaking soldering sessions (I mean literal pain, burning/cuts... ), I have achieved my goal (part of it, the finer points will be taken care of later
)