Beta Orionis

Beta Orionis – Part X

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment
Build Log:

Building finally begins!

As I mentioned the tubing straightener shipped on October 31. It arrived November 4, so that was pretty quick, certainly sooner than I expected it to arrive. The tool was also a bit smaller than I thought it’d be.

And it works like a charm. It won’t get the tubing perfectly straight, but it gets it pretty close, about as straight as I could get the tubing with the bench vice-vice grips-mallet method, but without the noise and associated pain in my hand. I was able to start pulling and bending copper tubing to get part of the loop built. Now this is about the furthest I can make progress before having to tear apart everything out of the Zalman case and start moving everything over, something I’ve been eagerly anticipating for the last couple months – the first article on this build was a little over two months ago. That move will likely be more toward the weekend.

Now the drain on the front radiator on this side of the case had to be changed. The 90-degree fitting I originally had used to take the flow off the front radiator put the fittings too high for the radius of the tubing bender. So I took it off the 90-degree fitting and changed it to what you see. It’s a male-to-male rotary fitting into the 4-way block. The drain valve is on the 90-degree fitting I originally used so it’s pointing out to the side like the drain on the bottom radiator to the left of the pump.

The line going from the front radiator to the bulkhead fitting worked out perfectly, as did the line going from the 90-degree dual rotary fitting to the top radiator.

This small piece of tubing was a little interesting to place.

It should be easy to see what is going to be happening next. Everything will need to be taken out of the Zalman case and moved to the 750D. The CPU water block will be installed along with the memory water blocks. Tubing will be run from the memory water block to the CPU water block – a 15mm extension on the CPU block may be able to get two 90-degree fittings lined up for a straight run. Tubing will also be run from the 90-degree fitting just hanging out in the picture above to the memory water block – straight run plus a 90-degree bend is what I think it’ll take, but I’m not entirely sure on that.

I need to buy a miter box or something similar for cutting the short pieces of tubing for going between the graphics cards. I bought the hacksaw for that on my last trip to Harbor Freight. Unfortunately the only miter box they have comes with a saw, and as I’m not going to be hacking lumber any time soon, I don’t need the combo deal. I should be able to find just the miter box without the saw at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Once the graphics cards are in place, I’ll know what I’ll need to tube up from the lower radiator to the lower graphics card, and from the top graphics card to the CPU – that I expect to be most difficult run of the entire loop.

Like with Absinthe, once everything is put together, there will be an initial fill and leak test, along with a drain test followed by another leak test. All of that will be with distilled water. Once everything is fully tested, it’ll get filled up with coolant and bled again for the initial boot with the new cooling system.

Kenneth Ballard