Codename: Radar

 

Snazzy new black mem and chipset heatsinks, and the EK cpu block installed.

 

 

After getting the ST30 and Af140s installed in the case, I found the motherboard was hitting up against them. I tried fixing it by taking off the VRM heatsink from the mobo and filing about 5mm off the top of it, but then the I/O ports on the back were hitting. I wound up just tapping 2 holes in the top of the case and top mounting the rad. Not what I was planning originally, so I will have to go back in the future and install some nice 90 degree fittings and figure out something a bit more sturdy than exposed plastic tubing. 

 

 

 

Tubing installed! I hard ordered an EK dual parallel terminal block, but I mistakenly got the wrong spacing on it, live and learn. Thankfully I ordered extra fittings so I was able to keep working. 

 

 

All set up for leak testing, water in and pump on! Quickly found that one of the oval gaskets on the EK video block was not seated right, but thankfully the papertowels caught it all. After a quick drain and reseating of the gasket, everything was water tight. 

 

 

I couldn't wait to get some dye into it

 

 

And there she is, all up and running!

It came out a lot better than I expected, despite the few small setbacks I had. 

There is still some more work to be done, I have some 90 degree fittings on the way, I want to add in a fillport/drainport, and I am going to wrap the tubing in anti kink coils for the obvious anti kink reasons as well as the look. 

What I was most impressed with was the differences in temp. Before watercooling, the 290s would consistently hit 90c while gaming in crossfire, thus throttling the cards, getting loud as hell, and making the room unbearably hot. The corsair AIO watercooler would then have a hard time keep its temp low because of all the hot exhaust. Processor temps of 65/70c were not uncommon. 

Now after an hour of running Furmark, the cards were at 70 and 72 respectively, with the processor holding at 50c. Playing BF4 at full settings on a 1440 monitor temps were 55 on both cards and 50 on the processor. I was very worried that only using 2 240mm rads, one of them being 30mm thick, and using low static pressure 140mm fans would not be enough to cool the system, but turns out it's more that sufficient. The room stays significantly cooler now as well, as the system is not getting super hot and I think the radiators dissipate heat at a more even pace so the HVAC system can keep up with it.