My little friend that punches upward -- watercooled node 202

Kamiii

Caliper Novice
Original poster
Dec 20, 2017
28
17
Hi all!

Who needs more than 11L of space, puh.

So I built myself a watercooled Node 202 to upgrade from my laptop. I looked at a lot of peepz on the internet on how to do it, and kept the best ideas from all of them. First I made the hole between the two compartiments for the cables just big enough to fit the pump of the aio through. Then I made a square gap in the plastic of the case, behind the fan and the radiator. This way it pushes out air more easily. Since the metal that's over that plastic normally does not have a gap on that spot, i decided to go to a steelshop, and buy myself a perforated slab of 1mm thick stainless steel. It looks pretty awesome, but I still have to find a way to secure it. Another thing is that the gpu heatsink is 1mm too big for the fan to be fixed onto the radiator with screws. It sits there perfectly fine though for now, secured by the 8pin powercable of the gpu. A possible solution I'm thinking about is two rubber bands under the rad and over the fan to force it onto the rad, so that it can't move away from the rad. I have a feeling it does that slightly.

The cable management is now done, and yes, I did install the I/O shield eventually. This is actually my first ever build, and I thought like 4 months about everything before I pulled the trigger. But I forgot to install the I/O shield. Must be a classic.


Pics:
  • Overclocked the cpu to 3.95ghz on 1.36v. Runs cool as hell, only in prime95 it hits 70 degrees, and only when I'm stressing the gpu aswell. (Since the gpu and the radiator are in the same compartment...) I tried to post it on 4.1ghz on 1.45 for ***** and giggles, and it actually ran. I ran one cinebench test, and it got me 1853 on multicore, but when I stress tested it in p95 with small fft, it freezed almost immediately. This could very well be the vrm temps, and I was going to get the asus x370 board at first to get such speeds, but ah well, got a good deal on this board so i took it. 3.95ghz is really decent anyways. Haven't checked whether it was the vrm temp or not, since I do not want to run my chip at 1.45v on a 3phase anyways.

  • The gpu was a toaster at the start, always going to 80 degrees C and not sustaining boost mhz. I swapped out the thermal compound for the coolermaster maker, and it gained me 9-10 degrees C. I eventually removed the gpu shroud altogether, and placed the noctua ppc 2000rpm pwm fan in front of it, to force fresh air over the open heatsink. My theory is that it keeps on recycling the air in the case with the stock fan and shroud. If I need the warranty I can always swap the stock fan back on. I also flashed a gtx 1080 founders edition bios on this thing, to increase the powerlimit. Since I was sitting around 64C, I thought why not get real overclocked gtx 1080 performance, so that happened. It runs around 74-75C in furmark, 70C in games. The boost clock it maintains is around 2050mhz. Overclocked on stock bios the tdp stays maxes out on 189W. My powerdraw now stays around 200W.

  • I downclocked the ram to 3200mhz, xmp profile did run, but it didn't post or run stable with any tighter timings on 3600mhz. I'm now running the stilts "fast" timings for 3200mhz, and gained around 5% in framerates on the xmp 3600mhz profile.

  • The ssd is on the back of the mobo, so it hits 80C under load really fast and starts to throttle. I haven't actually found a solution for this yet so help me out on this. I'd reckon there is about 3 to 4 mm space behind the mobo for a heatsink, but alas, can't find any. I don't use it that intensly anyways atm. The case is made from metal though, so maybe some thermal glue on the ssd -> heatsink on thermal glue -> thermal paste/pads on the heatsink so it touches the case? Would that even improve temps?

  • Just something about this mouse. There's alot of bad press about it, but it actually suits fingertip really nicely for me. (19 by 8.5 cm hands) The sensor is insanely good! There's only two flaws, and that would be the too little glide feet -- but I already changed them out. And the cable is quite a disaster. I might change that for a paracord later on, but I debraided it, and it is kinda decent this way. Does void warranty though :/
Couple of benchmarks: - Cinebench r15: Multi: 1766, Single: 165 - FFXV bench -- 8300-8400ish every run (1080p high) - Witcher 3 -- 1440p, everything on ultra, hairworks on, 8x, hbao+: 65-70 fps - Timespy: Can't remember atm, gonna update that soon.
 
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