# My Q9650 gets water - I get to practice.



## Yukikaze (Jan 7, 2010)

Okay. So here's the deal:

I got my hands on a rather shitty and old watercooling setup (A TT Bigwater 745), but it was really cheap (It was essentially a surplus from a store. There are no good watercooling parts for sale here, at all, and a second-hand dual rad from someone who ordered from abroad would cost over half the price of the whole TT setup. A pump would cover the other half and then some. Tubing is expensive, a waterblock would be expensive - Everything is expensive over here, since nothing is really available for sale).

Okay, now that I finished apologizing for the horrible (horrible, horrible) water setup you're going to see in this thread, we can get down to business 

The whole idea of this setup is to learn the basics of watercooling before my i7 975 goes under water as well, with a custom (and expensive...) setup ordered from abroad. If I kill something on this attempt, then at least I haven't spent hundreds of dollars on gear just to kill an i7 rig. I am not expecting any miracles with this list of parts, either. I really doubt it will cool as well as the current TRUE on my Q9650, but it isn't really the point - Everyone has to start somewhere.

So, here is the parts list (Pics to come later, my friend borrowed my camera, I should get it back before the weekend):
TT 120mmx2 Radiator.
TT 120mm Radiator.
3/8" Tubing.
Distilled water for coolant + Copper Sulfate Pentahydrate in a 5% solution (Essentially the equivalent of the PT-Nuke-Cu) as a biocide.
A 400l/h TT pump and a simple res.
The case this will go into is my Nzxt Tempest, and the specs on the Q9650 rig are in the specs tab.

Step 1: Cleaning the whole setup. Thankfully dad works at a bio lab, so obtaining Isopropyl Alcohol to wash the rads with is easy and we have a reverse osmosis system at home for an endless supply of distilled water.

Updates will follow tomorrow, with pics.

Edit: Oh well, the Volcano wouldn't fit. This means two things: Order for it canceled and I'll make do with the block from the kit itself. Well, even cheaper !

Edit 2: I had to drop one of the pushing fans on the dual rad - It is too close to the water block and would not fit. Still, there are two 140mm fans above it pulling air.


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## Yukikaze (Jan 9, 2010)

Okay. So here's the whole build in pics, in one go. In an afterthought, this isn't a bad cooling setup. It does better than my TRUE by about 4-5 degrees or so. Not really worth the money, but not a bad intro to water cooling.

Here's my Tempest stripped bare:






Here the rads are filled with alcohol to clean them prior to installation:





Leak testing for about 16 hours:





No leaks found, time to build the whole thing:





Here it is running:















Now for temps. This is on idle (Heh, now I know I have a pair of stuck sensors on my Q9650. Idle was never below the 36-37c mark, so I couldn't see them stuck):





Prime95 load:





LinPack (via the LinX GUI):





Overall, I am pretty happy with it. And it was a lot easier than I expected it to be.


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## Inioch (Jan 9, 2010)

Looking good, it's always nice to see other people with a Tempest. 

Just a few questions/comments.
Is the top rad mounted in the standard slots?
It's placed oddly, in my opinion, if you mount 2x120mm fans, they're blocked partially by the metal on the top.
Did you consider mounting the 120 rad in the front? If you only have two 5.25" slots in use, the rad would fit quite nicely on to the fant there.
Check out my thread, I mounted a 240 rad there.

Btw, your cabling is much nicer than mine, I find the Tempest quite bad to wire neatly.
There's just so little space behind the mobo tray and not enough holes.


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## Yukikaze (Jan 9, 2010)

Inioch said:


> Looking good, it's always nice to see other people with a Tempest.
> 
> Just a few questions/comments.
> Is the top rad mounted in the standard slots?
> ...



Yes, it is mounted oddly. Probably loses a tiny bit of cooling efficiency that way, but I wanted it top mounted. The twin 140mm fans up there pull air through it as well. I thought about mounting it in the front, but I use two 5.2" bays (One for the HDD via that adapter thingie the Tempest came with, the other for DVD-RW) and I plan to add a front panel fan controller and another HDD sometime soon, so I had to keep the lower HDD cage in place (I did pull out the top one, who the heck needs room for that many HDDs ?) for it, so the rad went on top.

Thanks on the cabling comment 

Since I took the whole thing apart, I used the space around the top 140mm fans to hide a bunch of cables. I daisy chained the fan cables for the top/rear fans in there and only placed a single cable down into the case itself. All excess cables there are ziptied together and hidden by the top panel. From my earlier build in here I found that those extremely long fan cables are the main problem. The PSU is modular, so the PSU cables are easy to organize.


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## Inioch (Jan 9, 2010)

Yukikaze said:


> I thought about mounting it in the front, but I use two 5.2" bays (One for the HDD via that adapter thingie the Tempest came with, the other for DVD-RW) and I plan to add a front panel fan controller and another HDD sometime soon, so I had to keep the lower HDD cage in place (I did pull out the top one, who the heck needs room for that many HDDs ?) for it, so the rad went on top.



If you keep the DVD and put the fan controller there, that's two 5.25" used. Use the lower cage for the drives, and you can sacrifice the third 5.25" slot for the rads tubing. That way You'll have everything inside the case. I prefer it that way.




Yukikaze said:


> Since I took the whole thing apart, I used the space around the top 140mm fans to hide a bunch of cables. I daisy chained the fan cables for the top/rear fans in there and only placed a single cable down into the case itself. All excess cables there are ziptied together and hidden by the top panel. From my earlier build in here I found that those extremely long fan cables are the main problem. The PSU is modular, so the PSU cables are easy to organize.



That sound very smart. I've got the top ones in one cable, but didn't think about the rear fan. Good point, thanks


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