Welcome to AMDScooters project page. Please excuse the long single page format, I'll break it into pages when time permits. Today I am going through the process of taking my existing Dually AMD XP2100 desktop system and migrating it into a new Koolance water cooling setup. My main purpose was to save my hearing for a few more years. The two Coolermaster HCC-001 heatsinks equipped with 7k fans in my system were driving me nuts. While their performance is very good, it got tiresome to have to step out of my home office to use the phone. After reviewing many water cooling setups, I made the decision to go for a pre-fab instead of a DIY. Time is an issue for me as the mods. are being done to my desktop workstation. For that reason I chose the Koolance PC2-601 with a side window. It used the same Chieftech/Antec SX1030 case that I was already using and like very much. These run about $270 retail plus shipping. To compliment the case I picked up the 2ea. 200GCpu water blocks, the GPU and chipset water blocks along with a single HD cooling plate. For those of you looking for a DIY setup and possibly using pelts., I highly recommend having a look at what DangerDen has to offer.
While mulling over which water cooling setup to go with I noticed Gigabyte had released a new Dually MOBO, the GA-7DPXDW+. Hmmmm... looked sweet. Working USB and onboard IDE RAID. I liked the added touch of the 32bit slot between the two 64bit slots too. Well why not, as long as I'm tearing things apart.
So off I went to the local retailer, two days later I had all the parts I needed in hand and was ready to start rippin. First I did a backup of my current data to a separate 100GB HD and DLT. I'd REALLY hate to loose my collection of apps. and utilities.
The old Antec SX1030 home:
Old Tyan Tiger MPX with HCC-001's installed:
To start off I needed to get my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ready for the water block and ramsinks. Removing the stock heatsink and fan setup was typical of most GPU's. Push the smaller center pin up from the rear then compress the outer rear pin and the small springs on the front do the rest for you. I recommend a gentile twisting action to separate the heatsink from the core as the stock TIM will offer some resistance even after the pins are removed. This is what you will hopefully end up with:
AA little Isopropanol and lint free cloth cleans the GPU core off nicely. For those who may be interested here are the core markings:
Board# PIN109-94200-11
ATI
R300
215R8CBGA13F
G24673.1
02311AA
Taiwan
I forgot to get the numbers off the BGA RAM before I installed the ramsinks :(. As you can see my 9700 has the metal GPU core spacer installed. I thought this may be an issue but after a few quick checks I found that:
1) My GPU water block fits inside the diameter of the core spacer.
2) As shown in the picture below, using a steel rule across the spacer it is at the same height as the core. I tested this across both the X and Y plane and saw no air gap at all. This may not be true for all cores but I'm willing to bet that they are all pretty darn close.
So I continue with the operation. Clean the BGA RAM off with a lil isopropanol and mix up a small batch of Artic Silver thermal adhesive. The bottoms of the Tweakmonster Ramsinks were far from perfectly flat. If you look carefully in the picture below you can see the "grooves" on the bottom of the sinks. I would have lapped them down but the chrome finish prevented me from doing it so I used them as is.
Here is what it looked like with the ramsinks installed and the water block resting on the core inside the spacer:
Next up was preparing the Seagate X15-36LP hard drive for the water block. This took a leap of faith on my part but it worked out fine. The HD block comes with a 2 part thermal compound that you install over the PCB and spindle area. After thoroughly mixing the parts you slap the goop as evenly as possible in the areas indicated by the instructions. I found the quantity of material a bit lacking to fill the void between the block and PCB as described in the instructions. So I did the best I could with what I had where I thought it would do the most good. The spindle area, RAM buffer chips and chipset.
Now to start installing the MOBO and stuff in the case. I'll start with a few pictures of the inside.
Fitting MOBO and water lines:
At this point I'm thinking, maybe I should have gotten the full tower:). I was not up to taking pictures of me crimping hoses so here is what it looks like minus a ton of wire, cable and tube dressing. I would recommend anyone else trying this put the water circuit thru a 24hr. leak test prior to installing the hardware.
Filling the reservoir and heat exchanger is done simply by turning the whole setup upside down and unscrewing the filler cap located on the bottom between the two front case feet. Fill the reservoir with the soloution/distilled water as described in the instructions. Use the jumper provided by Koolance on the ATX power connector and power up the circuit. Continue to fill as necessary to fill the circuit and bleed all the air out. In a vertical case like this you will need to lay the case flat on its side to get all the air out of the water blocks as it gets trapped if you leave it vertical.
More to come in page 2... read about my trials and tribulations installing both Win2k andWinXP on this system. Any comments about the current content is greatly appreciated. Feel free to mail me at amdscooter@gmail.com.
Thanks
Scoot