With the leaky reservoir fixed, the final assembly has been completed.
I have to admit, I was very excited to find that the reservoir wasn't leaking anymore.
Probably took me only another hour to finish the assembly.
Well, let me walk through the rest of the build since the last update.
The case, interestingly enough appeared to have been built with a cable routing
"hole" in the bottom of the 5.25" drive mount area. So, I used this to route the
cables. It allowed me to keep them bundled together as necessary and tucked them
out of the way for air/flow and clutter reduction. It worked out well for what I
wanted. Please excuse the tape in the first image, it was put in place to
protect the paint while I put the cables and connectors through the hole.
After getting the cables in place, I figured it was time to route the water cooling
loop tubing. Since this was my first WC setup, the routing was a bit of an adventure.
A little experimentation taught some things about how the tubing responds and ways
to get it to do what you want it to do. The loop consists of a DTek Whitewater CPU
block, a Swiftech MCW20 chipset block and MCW50 gpu block. The pump is an MCP350 with
tach sensor wire. The reservoir and radiator are from DTEK.
Here is an image of it sans coolant...
with coolant...
This is a close-up of the gpu waterblock installed on the card. The fact that it
was angled towards the rear of the case actually caused very little problem. Which was
a relief given the other problems I had with the loop...I'll get to that in a moment.
As I mentioned above, I ended up having problems with the barb threads on the reservoir
leaking. In a last ditch effort to get it to stop leaking, I coated the threads of the
barbs with permatex rtv silicon. This stuff is automotive grade, used for creating gaskets.
Pretty stout stuff. I had a tube of the high temp red on hand, so that is what I used.
Actually, given the automotive inspiration of the case, it actually seemed appropriate to use it.
The water pump installation was straight forward enough, I mounted it in the
bottom of the 5.25" drive bay to the left of the cable routing hole.
Next to it, I placed the power distribution block and resistor circuitry
The dtek bay reservoir installed over the pump
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