[Build Log] purple sunken lead [56K warning] - Page 3

First and foremost, you guys are probably right about the sealing effect of that tape stuff. It's not clogging my loop though, that much I can safely say. I've opened the CPU block today and there was nothing of the stuff to be seen, just some hair like black stuff which is probably machining debris from some delrin parts. The CPU kinda needs the voltage to reach 4.9Ghz, at least as far as earlier stability tests showed. The temps also didn't get any better so I guess this is it. If my CPU gets roasted this way, well then so be it.
Today I opened the little bugger after the guys from Aqua told me I could as well take a look inside. There was nothing unusual so I reassembled it and its still making that noise. I could just put it into the loop and let it run for a week or something but I dunno. This noise is getting freaking me out and at this point the loop is pretty much finished now. I'll give it a thought overnight

Anyway, lets get some small updates out the door

The mailman dropped some things today so I could go and rebuild the loop to route the tubing more nicely. I'm not quite sure who packed this stuff...

...but they sure were out of small boxes. They shipped me some rotaries and some stuff for making a drain port. To do this I had to drain this thing of course. Guess there's draining the smart way and...

... the hard way. After moving the rig onto the balcony I just opened up the reservoir and just let it flow. The lower front of the case is empty anyway so nothing could get damaged. It sure was a royal pain though.

Well the rest of the evening was eaten up by rebuilding the loop and whatnot. Its too dark to get a proper picture of the fountain effect right now but it is pretty and I like it a lot. The mailman also dropped some UV cathodes. I've just thrown them in the case to see what happens to the tubing, lo and behold.

It looks a little weird and kind of ... erm... not quite manly but the more I look at the effect, the more I like it. Gotta find some place for those cathodes later.

Heh yeah, you're right the temps are good and I should stop making them sound bad right now. Somehow I'm still back in E6600 land where 71°C was some sort of magical barrier that should not be trespassed.

The mailman dropped some more shiny today

But as you can see, I first got some serious cleaning up to do. In case anyone is wondering, earlier pictures showed the aquaero LT which I can't really sensibly mount anywhere except in the topmost 5.25 bay. Since I don't want to half ass this build I decided to return that one and go all the way to the XT.

PS: no, under the bubble wrap is yet more random stuff ....

I decided to give the flow meter another chance and put it in the loop again. It's merrily clicking away but I'll just let it run for some days to see what happens then. Maybe the issue will solve itself. Thank you for sharing your experience

Refilling also is pretty easy with the help of this little guy

If anyone is attempting this, be sure to close off the top hole before you start up your pump. Water goes up the central pillar for the fountain effect via your return line. I'll leave it up for your imagination what exactly will happen if the hole is open. My guess is, it won't be pretty.

Here's the promised detail shot of the fountain effect a little bit prettied up with a flashlight.



At the top the water gently exits through eight nozzles and just falls down into the res. It makes pretty quiet.. erm... falling water sort of sound? (missing the right word)
This plexi plate down there in the res also works wonders for keeping the bubbles away from the suction line.

I'll just wander off to install that Aquaero now.

Actually I think the flow sensor is already quieting down a bit, hopefully it will quiet down even more.

The possibilities with the Aquaero are pretty much crazy. There's all sorts of things and custom curves and whatnot. I'm currently fighting to get the fill level sensor of the Aqualis to work via the Aquabus interface. It's a little tricky apparently but I hope things will work out. I'm posting on the AquaComputer forums currently to get this thing running.

This IR remote they shipped with the Aquaero is kinda handy for configuring the device without any PC. I could've sworn it was optional. No reason to complain about free candy, no?

It's supposedly also for controlling windows via IR. Maybe it can replace my Soundgraph IMon PAD in the long run but I doubt it somehow. I'll save the fiddling with the Harmony Remote software for later though.
To get this flow sensor connected some sacrifices were neccesary.

The innards of that thing were small enough so I could do this:

Which is kinda McGyver style and looks gruesome. I'll be ordering the right cable together with the black faceplate for the Aquaero later. The latter is on backorder for a month anyway and maybe the list of parts will grow larger by then.
The flow rate is 1.5GPM. Its a little less than the predicted values from martins spreadsheet but still very good I'd say

Speaking of gruesome, I amost gave up on getting that Aquaero to work. Initially it just plain wouldn't turn on any fans or external sensors at all. The display worked, the windows software worked, configuring worked but nothing would happen afterwards. Took me maybe two or three hours until finally one single thing popped into mind Guess what (Click to show)
I'll be gone for the weekend so I guess things will continue next week

That Molex thingy really was embarrassing!

1.5gpm really is plenty. The res is a stormy bubble bath but it calms down nicely after a little while. My pump probably can't be PWM'ed as yours though BorisTheSpider. I tried some potentiometer that worked nicely. Well, for the first 5 seconds that is. Then there was some magic smoke and things got a little hectic. I'd either need a stronger one or a PA2 from Aqua. Running the pump on 7V (red wire on +12V, black wire on +5V on a molex plug) kinda tames it down to moderate 0.9gpm. The quiet bubbly noise the res makes on 1.5gpm is pretty mind soothing though.

Isn't 0.2gpm rather low? Then again, your temps seem to work out alright.
The virtual sensors are really cool, yup. I was trying to get a delta for water temp on radiator exit vs air temp on radiator intake to control the fans via my old nemesis: PID controller aka set point controller. Back at university we had 2 semesters of control engineering which I happily forgot about afterwards... until now. Well, somehow the default parameters kinda sucked for this special case because the loop was slowly but happily oscillating around the target delta temperature. Rule of thumb says there's either too little P or too much I set, figuring out the right values might take a while though.

Speaking of things that didn't go too well, the fill level sensor in the res is one such thing. Basically the pressure in the loop is rising (or falling) with the water temperature and that sensor measures pressure. There is a plug with a membrane in the top of the res that should equalize the air pressure, leaving only the pressure by the water level in the res. If the pressure is different than outside air pressure, air should either enter or escape the res by that membrane which doesn't work all that well. The air would need to go through the holes in the top to reach the membrane but those holes are full of water for the fountain effect. This way the pressure rises and rises and the measured fill level just caps out at 100% at some point, although the real water level stays the same.
Right now I'm working around that by removing the top rubber gasket between the top and the glass tube. Air then escapes (or enters) through there and the fill level works, even without the membrane plug. Not really working as intended but IMHO as designed. For now it'll do. My guess is that they should've put the membrane plug somewhere off-center to make things work.

Over the last days the loop was rebuilt like 3 or 4 times and this is a state I'm rather happy with.


The dead-end tube in the lower part of the case is my drain hole. It really served me well during all those rebuilds!
Getting the color right in the shots was rather complicated though. These damn CMOS sensors have UV protection already built in so the raw images have the weirdest shades of blue. I'm still waiting for the Monsoon rotaries and hope they get some with LED options soon. Under normal daylight the tubing really is some nice deep purple but with UV it turns into piglet pink or something. I'd like the purple way more to be honest.

Also there's some cables in the mail to tidy up the HDD area. Luckily you can't see it that well but it's a mess of tangled power and yellow SATA cables.

Welcome aboard! Grab a beer and enjoy the show

The PID controller seems to work way better with more aggressive P-factors above 3000 for me. Right now I'm using the following values and it seems to work like a charm

I'll try to get some proper diagram with these values from the AQ5 later. Also the mailman dropped more stuff today. All for tidying up the HDD area.

These are Akasa Proslim SATA cables I think you found for your build cpachris. They're really small and flexible. Nothing compared to my old yellow bulky ones!

There were some issues though, the cables for the SSD's on top reached about this far...

So in an effort to hook up this stuff I opted for something unusual

This is the backyard of my case. It looks quite roomy but you have to be really careful not to stack cables too much or else there's no way the side panel will fit. The SSD's however are small enough and I sure do hope the double sided tape does hold on to them There was more to this decision though. The space between the topmost HDD and the radiator is pretty thin already. and the SSD tray would've barely fit in there at all. This way, things aren't cramped that much plus there's less visible cabling

The red ziptie needs to go as soon as I find something else that holds the tubing there. This one stray SATA power plug is kinda irritating too, maybe I should take care of that soon. Anyway, this is how it looks from the front now.


All that being said I just noticed I mounted my old DVD recorder instead of my BD recorder. Wherever I put that one just now...
Must... stop... building now.... head ... confused
Edited by mosi - 9/20/12 at 9:51am