My super PC project!
Machine configuration
Motherboard: ASUS P4PE
CPU: Intel P4 3.06
Memory: 2 512MB Corsair XMS 3500C2
Graphics: ATI Radeon 9700 pro
Sound: Soundblaster Audigy 2 platinum
Storage: 2 Maxtor 80 GB ATA 133
SY16XDVD Sony DVD
Sony floppy drive.
Still needed, sigh.
Power: Antec TruePower 550W power supply
OS: Windows XP pro
Case: Cooltechnica AquaExtreme
Thermal
monitor: Digital Doc 5
Water
block: Swift MCW5000P
Hose: Tygon
1/2" ID
Radiator: Chrome Extreme LE
Pump: Hydor L30
Fans: 120mm Vantec
ThermoFlow, 120mm Delta, 80mm Delta
Other
stuff: Blue Lazer LED, split looms, zip ties, tie
anchors, Molex Y adaptor, 120mm filter
Tools:
Screwdriver, clipper, aeroduster, razor blades, windex, Dremel with cutting wheel
and flextool extension, coping saw.
Suppliers:
Kragen Auto Parts
*
I recommend ComputerHQ, SpartanTech and CoolTechnica.
I’ve been building a PC by ordering everything off of the web. I don’t know if this is a great idea or not, since it is hard to swap stuff around and make changes if you have any problems, but so far it has worked out well, with only a few issues that were a pain to resolve.
This is a view from the side. It has a clear window and a very bright blue LED lamp and cold cathode black lights that make it into a glowing technology aquarium! All of the wiring is rounded and in split-looms to keep it tidy and to avoid disrupting the airflow.
Case
I started with a case and cooling system from Cooltechnica. These guys are great. They are very fast to respond to email and they have very good technical support. The case looks really nice, and I am very happy with the system. They shipped out the case right away, and when I later needed a small hose part they shipped it out in 2 day rush at no charge. The case was very easy to set up for the most part.
I changed a few things about the gTower. The one problem with it is the power supply shelf does not have enough of an opening for the intake fan. Cooltechnica says that the partial occlusion of the fan doesn’t make any difference, but I used a Dremel tool to cut a better opening, and it looks nice and fits well now. I put plastic wrap inside of the case before cutting to keep aluminum chips from getting everywhere. There is a good writeup of this issue and a review of the case here.
Motherboard
Gigabyte SINXP1394
I put in an Asus P4PE motherboard from MyInfinity.com. At first I ordered a P4G8X, but this was backordered for months. I gave up and changed to a P4PE, which has been available for a while. MyInfinity took a long time to ship it, and when I finally did get it it had problems. I had a problem (that others seem to have as well) where it will sometimes not succeed in a cold boot. You power it on and get nothing. Eventually it gets out of this state. I wrote MyInfinity, and they just gave me a curt reply:
"You will have to contact the manufacture if has passed seven business days from when you received the product."
It is essentially impossible to build a computer in seven days since the parts do not all ship in that time-window. So, I wrote Asus, and they said they were busy with Chinese Newyear. Finally, weeks later, I got this reply:
"Sorry it be late ,because of our mail server error . please change another power supply for a try ."
My power supply is fine. So I wrote back and they said:
"To your problem we recommend you to contact with your local reseller for a replacement ."
I am not very happy with Asus or MyInfinity and I don't recommend them. The Asusboards mailing list, (which is not run by Asus) was very helpful however. The booting issue now only shows up when I change something in the BIOS. This motherboard makes the CPU run hotter than normal, even at nominal clock rates and voltages. It also has an annoying RAID issue I describe later.
I pulled this motherboard and I put in a Gigabyte SINXP1394. This board is fantastic. It even comes with SIX DUAL MIRACLES or at least that is what the packaging says. Unfortunately, mine also seems to have a dead ethernet port. I took it back to ComputerHQ, and their tech guy was very helpful. On his workbench, the mobo works fine. On my machine, no LAN port. Mysterious.
As far as performance goes, it has been really good. It has cured all of the problems that were caused by the ASUS. I can now adjust all of the BIOS settings and not have crashing problems.
Cooling
Digital Doc is a temperature monitor and thermostat fan controller. It has quite a bird’s nest of wires, and I am only somewhat happy with it. It has illegible black-on-black lettering for the buttons, and its operation is confusing. It sometimes gets stuck in different modes, and I have to reboot it. It can read temps and run fans when the temps hit programmable levels, but it doesn’t have any buffer temperature. It is also pretty confusing to get it set up correctly.
It has one serious design flaw. It doesn't have any buffer zone, so if the temperature hits threshold it runs a fan. The fan soon cools it below threshold, so it turns of the fan. Then it gets hot again. This feedback loop makes an annoying on-of-on-of flipping.
It also only has provision for running fans at full blast or at off. Cooltechnica has a relay that converts this to a switch that flips the casefans between 7v and 12v if it gets hot. I had an idea for an improved relay. My idea is to make it use two fan sensors, one set for hot and one set for warm. When the hot one went on, the relay would be triggered. When the warm one went off, the relay would switch off. I wired up a relay to energize its own coil when it had power, so it would latch on if it was triggered. I plugged this into the Cooltechnica relay. My relay worked, but it couldn't quite flip the Cooltechnica relay in addition to its own coil. I need to work on my design a little.
My temperatures were hot, CPU 40c at idle, 58c when working hard. As an experiment, I put a massive 28 watt 120mm fan on top of the blowhole, and that only changes the CPU temperature by a couple of degrees. The water would get up to about 35c and hits thermal equilibrium. The mobo would stay around 35c, and the case is around 32c. I swapped motherboards and things improved dramatically. The CPU on the Gigabyte board always stays between 30c-40c, and the cooling system is running at idle with 31c water. Hot processors are one of the Asus issues that is listed on the message boards.
One exciting accident happened when the pump stopped on the hot Asus mobo. The pump plug was loose, and it wasn't getting any power. The CPU was snoozing around 40c without any water. I started using the machine and I saw the temperature start to go up to 70c, so I knew something was wrong. The waterblock was hot to the touch, so I checked the pump. Even though the hoses are clear, it is impossible to tell if the water is moving, and the pump is too quiet to hear. I really need some sort of flow checker and emergency shutoff. There is a relay that turns on the pump when the PC boots, but it would be nice if the PC could only boot if the pump was on. Maybe I can rig something to the CPU fan speed monitor.
Fans
Vantec Thermoflow, 120mm Delta
I took out the 120mm Delta blowhole fan and I
replaced it with a Vantec 120mm fan with a
speed-regulating temperature sensor. This is super quiet, and it ramps up in
speed as the radiator warms up. It has a single-wire speed monitoring cable,
but I am not sure how to get a good reading from one wire. I have a second Vantec fan I was going to use for the intake, but the
sensor will need to be cut from the fan and put on a lead to somewhere else. It
is on the fan it can only sense the air it is pulling in, not the temp inside
of the case.
I flipped the back blowout fan to be an intake, since the case already has an added 120mm blowout. I put a foam dust filter on the intake to keep it clean. It also has an 80mm intake as a HDD cooler. I want to filter it too. I moved the SINXP power regulator LED fan to the Northbridge, where it can show off more.
Since my case has a window, I added a
blue Lazer
LED to light up the innards. I used black split looms and florescent green
zip ties to make the wiring tidy. The blue makes the ties fluoresce. At night it
looks like a gizmo aquarium. I bought some UV dye at the auto supply store. This
makes the coolant lines glow, and it helps spot any coolant leaks. Glowing green
stuff was dripping from my radiator, since the barbs are not very good on that.
I had to double up the hose clamps to get a good seal. I added some black light
cold cathodes. These don't work all that well.
I made an acrylic post to support the graphic card which is heavily loaded with heat sinks and the water block.
Processors
Intel Pentium 4. Soundblaster Audigy 2. ATI 9700pro.
The CPU and power supply and add-in cards came from spartantech.com. I am very happy with their service. They were the first parts to ship, and they had the best prices. They have also been fast to respond when I had to make some changes in my order.
I wanted to put in a Geforce 4 FX board, but that has been vaporware for months on end, and now that it is starting to show up the reviews sound pretty mixed. It might be good if I hook it into the water system. One of the main complaints is that it has an extremely loud fan.
The Audigy card gave me a bunch of trouble. It was making terrible clicks and pops. I moved it from the slot near the AGP to a slot adjacent to the special blue slot, and that cured it. The Audigy also has a big ribbon cable that was tricky to make neat, but I foam tape mounted it flat to the case along side the motherboard, and now it is out of the way and invisible.
I also pasted a memory chip heatsink onto the ATI Radeon 9700pro graphic card's heat spreader. It has a spreader on top of some things that I think are power transistors, and that is the hottest part of the card other than the GPU, and the memory cooler fit perfectly, so I added it in. I put 4 ram sinks on the Radeon, and I plumbed the GPU with a Swift MCW50 water block. To remove the stock heatsink, pinch the ends of the plastic pins on the tips (the other side of the card from the heatsink) and they pop out. They are spring-loaded. I put a fairly large gob of thermal compound on the GPU, since there is a gap between the chip and the top rim of the shims that go around it.
Storage
I first ordered SATA drives, but they were backordered too long, so I changed to ATA133 Maxtor 80 GB drives. These have a problem with the P4PE raid configuration. Asus says they support ATA and they support RAID, but they don’t mention that RAID only works if at least one of the drives is on SATA.So I bought a pair of SATA adaptors. The machine complains about interupts for FastTrak when I boot, so it is having some sort of issue. I changed back to ATA for now, without RAID. I haven't tried to set this up with the Gigabyte board.
I hate floppies, but I had to put a drive in to get the BIOS utility included with the ASUS board to work.
Clocking
The P4PE didn't overclock well at all. After I switched to the Gigabyte board, I had much better luck. I dialed up the FSB to 145 and everything was happy at 3.33 GHz. I also overclocked the 9700pro by about 10%. If I go much higher with the graphic card, it starts to overheat the water and it flakes out it strange and interesting ways. In 3D games with too much overclock you can get blocks of flying garbage in the sky, the ground can tear apart into strips of blackness, it can start raining, or you can get bars of snow across the screen. I am running the memory at 6 2 2 2, and that seems to work fine. The SINXP has a quirk that makes the BIOS monitoring utility fail if Hyperthreading is turned on, so this makes it hard to check the CPU temperature.
OS
Windows XP is a big improvement over previous Windows versions, but it still has plenty of warts. It is almost impossible to keep it from getting bloated up with garbage that gets installed with software, so it needs to be frequently weeded. I use Ad Aware, which unplugs a lot of spy software that gets installed along side applications. Also, typing MSCONFIG in the RUN box pulls up the system configuration utility. From there you can disable a whole pile of garbage. The printer, for example, wanted to launch several tasks whenever the machine booted. I unplugged these and a bunch of other things to keep the machine booting quickly. A good guide to Windows tweaking is here.
Performance
All in all, the performance is excellent. It beats all of the commercially available machines, and it will probably keep its lead until Spring 2003. It is over 80% as fast as the fastest machine posted on the internet (22458 at the time of this project), and that one uses liquid nitrogen cooling! With the Asus mobo, the best I could do was 15,800 3DMarks. If I tried to overclock by much the machine wouldn't boot at all. The Gigabyte card has smooth performance, and with very light overclocking and no overvolting it can do 18,150 3Dmarks. My first machine I called Fireball, because it would overheat. The new machine I call DeepSea, because the water cooling system is bound to flood it.
Here is my graphics performance relative to commercially available machines. The units are 3dmark 2001 se.
Stuff I learned
Water cooling is easy to rig and the pump is dead silent. Watercooling impresses nerd pals.
Let me add a footnote to this. Watercooling is easy to set up once, but it makes it a huge project to tear down and rebuild the machine if you are having problems. Also, it is very tricky to make positively sure nothing is going to leak anywhere. One drip in the wrong place can kill the whole machine.
Shopping over the web makes
me feel like I am working without a safety net when stuff goes wrong with some
dealers, but some online places are great.
In designing a system, it is
hard to get stuff to arrive in the order of assembly. I was stuck waiting for a
motherboard.
You can’t do any overclocking if the machine isn’t stable to start with.
Fully drain the water system before you mess with the innards too much, or else risk deadly leaks.
Nice things about building
it yourself:
You get a complete
understanding of the machine.
You can choose the high
quality parts.
You know exactly how to
upgrade it.
You get a personalized
machine.
My wish-list for further
improvement:
Electronic flow meter
HDD block
nVidia Geforce FX or ATI R350
HP 300i DVD burner