To quote a Ferengi... Treachery, Faith and the Great River.

Well... not the Treachery part but the Faith definitely and perhaps the Great River in the form of my custom tubes and my liquid gold.

Nooo... not Kraft Mac-N-Cheese liquid gold, but this liquid gold - Mayhem's Sunset Yellow Concentrate.

BEHOLD!

(OK OK, it looks more like orange juice.)

If there was treachery involved in my PC build I'm sure I definitely would have went mad coupled with the burning of my hands and fingers like Anakin on Mustafar. Oh trust me, there was lots of fits of anger and four letter curse words in the early morning hours during the bending process.

The only treachery that would have occurred was if there was a leak in my loop, but I am happy to say that all was well.

CPU Loop; you can also see part of the GPU loop and part of the case pass thru on the top, right of the Aquacomputer Flow meter.

GPU Loop - the power supply compartment which houses the two 360mm radiators for the GPU loop; ready to handle a second GPU if I choose.

Some haters had some choice things to say about my loop stating it was messy or disorganized, but considering the placement of my hardware I don't really see any other option I would have had.

One person suggested that I buy two new reservoirs that has a pump attached to the bottom to minimize the need for more tubing; sorry but I'm not dropping more money to for improved aesthetics. Perhaps if I had a disposable income to buy two XSPC DDC Photon 170s and two Aqua Computer flow sensor with temperature I would.

Hint hint, if any companies want to sponsor a small time modder :)

Removing the Dark Side from my sound card

My not so dated Creative Labs Recon3D is a great sound card, with only one glaring issue... the horrible red LEDs. They are so bright that I'm convinced that if you stared directly at them you'd go blind. It glares red with the fury of a thousand suns, well OK not that bad.

It's bad enough that it interferes with anyone utilizing the RGB LEDs on their hardware and matching it to their system design with matching fluids and cable sleeving.

With some basic electronics / soldering skills I have removed the Dark side from my Recon3D.

The bends + tears + agony + sleep deprivation = neurotic PC modding

The title says it all. It's kind of like what Yoda told young Anakin in The Phantom Menace, except it translates into PC modding. You literally go through PC modding stages of grief (refer to the Kubler-Ross model in psychology).

After many hours of lost sleep, agony from burning my hands on the heat gun and fingers on the hot PETG tubes the bends in the component compartment was finally complete (kind of sounds like flaming inferno of Mustafar, right??). I pressed on and continued to work on the power supply compartment tubing but I eventually succumbed to my fatigue and was rendered unconscious on my couch, but only for a short while. I woke up one hour later enthralled like a tech consumed zombie working to get my PC functional; kind of like a sleep depraved Borg from Star Trek.

But I assimilated that bitch and completed the task! I was victorious!

To be continued...

Tis the season for... Threadripper 1950X

It wasn't too long ago when I performed the "sidegrade" surgery on my rig upgrading from the Blue team (Intel) Core-i7 4770K to the Red team (AMD) Ryzen 7 1800X.

The system I built four years ago was future proofed and it could have probably kept going strong for another four years but lets be realistic, the depreciation value would have made them worthless for resale at that one.

Since then excluding the above mentioned "sidegrade" there was only one major upgrade; moving from my Radeon 290X to a Geforce GTX 1070.

Jumping on the bandwagon I decided to stay with the Red team and go Threadripper. We know all the saying "bigger is better" right? Well in the case of Threadripper it definitely holds true.

Not only does it benefit from the new Ryzen architecture but blows away the competition in price-to-performance ratios and overall performance. While there is always bias when it comes to testing the 1950X still holds its owns.

If you're interested in the benchmarks there are plenty of sites to read up on or YouTube channels to read. I personally am a fan of Linus and JayzTwoCents.

I present you with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X processor. The unadulterated big brother of the Ryzen line processors.

I still can't get over how tech-sexy this chip is. Yep... I said it, tech-sexy. While you may say I feel that way because it's something shiny and new. Please keep in mind that this processor has been sitting on my desk for about two weeks.

On to the building...

So here is my rig fully disassembled down to the bare bones of the Case Labs M8 chassis. It was quite dusty and had some caked on fine dust which needed to be wiped down prior to rebuilding.

 You will notice the mark ups I made in this photo. These are double end threaded Bitspower Fillport/Pass-thru fittings. These are great for limiting the amount of tubing required to pass from one side of the case to the other. You can just plug in any fittings on either side but in my case Alphacool 1/2" OD hard line compression fittings. Not to mention they offer better support to hard line tubing than it just dangling through a pass hole.

I did make some minor changes on the path of my CPU loop from my previous build factoring in that  I was using hard line tubing this time around.

 After cleaning all my hardware; including the radiator and blocks I reinstalled/remounted everything. One obvious change was that I moved the Aquacomputer flow meter up top like I had original planned four years ago. The hard line tubing made the placement easier than using tygon which would have been sloppy and saggy.

Before I proceed to the next picture I will admit that I thought executing the bends for hard line tubing was much easier. This wasn't the case, I'm definitely glad that I purchased that extra 4-pack of tubing for the learning curve. It always seems so much easier watching tutorials on YouTube doesn't it?

Here is my first bend, this one wasn't difficult but there were some where I had one or two remakes in order to get the bends and lengths perfect. JayzTwoCents was definitely right about one thing in his YouTube tutorial, eyeballing your measurements and bends was much easier then actually trying to measure with a ruler; it really is an art form.

Long awaited upgrades, 52% IPC improvement!

I finally got around to some new upgrades for my rig. Yes... I jumped on the AMD bandwagon but they have finally released a processor worthy to succeed the Phenom-II 1090T (which in my opinion was their last great processor).

The Ryzen-7 1800X is what the Bulldozer FX-8150, Vishera FX-8350 and FX-9590 should have been six years ago back in 2011. But we all know the epic fail that was.

 The biggest draw back to me is that they still decided to go with a ZIF socket (pins) over a socket H3 type. With as many systems I have built over the years I am still nervous when it comes to dealing with processors and their pins!

The motherboards seem pretty straight forward and vanilla. The support from manufacturers has not been very great and all of the AMD4 X370 motherboards alll seem to follow the same cookie cutter mold with small varying differences . I hope that with a few months of the processors exposure more enthusiast models will become available.

 The $499 price tag is a steal for what you are getting considering the Broadwell-E class Intel processors start at $1000.

I've been thoroughly enjoying my processor and hope that some decent overclocking guides will be written soon so that I may start the overclocking fun!

For now I will leave you with this snapshot I took while I was rebuilding my rig.