So my previous build finally died on me. So what happened?
The flimsy little pump wires on the DC-LT 2 pump broke, not a problem as I can easily solder them to repair but with this being so dense it meant draining and stripping the whole PC. After repairing the faulty pump I reassembled the PC only to discover there was a small leak on the CPU block (seems a small piece of the acrylic had chipped off), I tried tightening the fitting to stop the drip only to have the rotary fitting snap. This sent coolant spilling out everywhere. Luckily I use an external PSU to run the pump during filling so disassembled everything and ensured no coolant on any components then put it back on air cooling in the meantime. So what now?
Cue V2. I learned a lot of things from my previous build and these are things I am planning on improving in the V2 build. So let me detail a couple issues.
The flimsy little pump wires on the DC-LT 2 pump broke, not a problem as I can easily solder them to repair but with this being so dense it meant draining and stripping the whole PC. After repairing the faulty pump I reassembled the PC only to discover there was a small leak on the CPU block (seems a small piece of the acrylic had chipped off), I tried tightening the fitting to stop the drip only to have the rotary fitting snap. This sent coolant spilling out everywhere. Luckily I use an external PSU to run the pump during filling so disassembled everything and ensured no coolant on any components then put it back on air cooling in the meantime. So what now?
Cue V2. I learned a lot of things from my previous build and these are things I am planning on improving in the V2 build. So let me detail a couple issues.
- Cooling, the dual 92mm radiator is just not enough for a 300W system (fans always screaming at me), this will be upgraded to a 180mm XT rad. The size will make sense when seeing the layout image below.
- Hard Tubing, this was an absolute pain in the ass and made assembly of such a dense build an absolute nightmare. The new build will make use of 8mm pneumatic tubing and fittings.
- Distro plate, It looks cool and was an efficient way of connecting components in such a dense space but it was expensive to machine and is horrible to keep clean (also super unnecessary with pneumatic tubing). This will be swapped out for a CPU block/pump combo (Alphacool Eisbar solo lt).
- RGB hub, although the fabwerk 360 does not take up too much space it becomes unnecessary as the distro and cpu block rgb components have now been removed. The fan and GPU block will run straight from the mobo, I did use a temp probe which was connected to the Fabwerk 360 as my board does not have a temp sensor pin but this will be done using an ESP32 board.
- In addition to handling the temp prob the ESP32 board will also be used to operate the power button using a capacitive touch sensor as well as a future project connecting it to and external ESP32 E-Ink display for a wireless sense panel.
