mcbeen.com

Its been a busy afternoon. The parts came in today in boxes about 4x bigger than i expected. Little chance of this stuff getting broken in shipment.

I started by taking a complete inventory of all the kits and mapping out how everything would go together. I was happy to see the coolermaster kit came with USB pinouts and multiple temp sensors. I was troubled to see no driver discs or software instructions.

Hookups went well, although it would have been nice to have a funnel. I modified one of the bottles to let me fill without spilling water everywhere. The fittings that the kit came with are not as solid as i would have liked. they have a cheap feel to them, almost like they are chrome plated plastic. I may end up replacing them.

So far system temps are great, with CPU running around 38ºC with a 1 ghz over clock.

The water block for the ATI 4870 on the other hand was a failure. The card has some off-spec components that make it incompatible with the water block. It looks as though I will have to cool each part of the card individually…

Comming up… the water cooled DSL modem 🙂

After I connected up all my hoses and primed my lines I turned on the system, and was greeted by heavy fan noise I was not expecting. The Cooler Master controller was running the radiator fans at full speed, creating excessive noise. Since there are no controls on the box, I went ahead and looked on Cooler Master’s site for some kind of controller software. There was nothing. My work around for now has been hooking the fans up to my motherboard 4-pin connectors using extensions. They are temp controlled, so they only spin up as the system over heats. Its working well. From looking around, it appears the Cooler Master fan set points are only usable from an ESA motherboard. I’m still looking into it. Since it is USB, I imagine I should be able to find some way to tweak it myself.

I have the radiator setup in my window since its below freezing outside. I reversed the fans so they pull in the nice old outside air.