Northbridge on custom super-strong mounts.
Splitter installed. It's mounted through the back plate of the mobo with an 8/32" hex-cap bolt. And no, you're not seeing things, it's not vertical. I mounted it at an angle w\ 1 bolt instead of straight up w\ 2 bolts to prevent the tubing from kinking. I had less room between the top of the splitter and the bottom of the radiator fans than I thought. No problem, though. 6mm ID tubes leave the splitter and go to the northbridge, silenstar HDD cooler, and radeon 9800.
All my front-panel connections bound together and installed: 2x firewire and 2xUSB 2.0.
Twinplex on Radeon 9800 pro. The twinplex takes up less room and puts less stress on the video card than the old danger den block ever did.
Massive 3/4" Inlet barb. Yes, it's WHITE, I know. Wait till you see the night shots in the next update and you'll find out why.
Silentstar w\ full ultra160, power, and water plumbed in.
Drain hose for the reservior. Thanks for the plug-and-cool unions Knipex!
The bolts that hold the reservior in. They don't screw into anything, but the go in and press on the reservior to force it against the side of the drive cage. That and sitting on top of one of the optical drives keeps it quite secure, although it doesn't move, even if you do remove the optical drive.
Temperature sensor board for Speedfan (MAX1668 based) installed w\ probes for reservior, GPU temp.
Part IV: It was a dark and stormy night
Midway into leak testing the loop in my lab, I noticed that there was water on top of the northbridge block... I blamed this on a bad seal on the twinplex. I got out the metric allen wrenches and tightend the top down a bit. It still leaked. I tightend it some. it still leaked. Well WTF?? I put my finger up under the storm's universal mounting plate to find out that it was the STORM that was leaking, not the twinplex on the northbridge. WTF *@#*@(%* I said!
It turns out that the problem seems to be that the o-ring groove on the bottom part of the storm was milled too deep, or the supplied o-ring wasn't fat enough. See how the o-ring doesn't sit up above the groove at all? Well, that's bad.
Not having any other o-rings (save for the ones for my paintball gun) around, I pulled out the silicon-II and smeared it into the o-ring groove to build up a bit of a base so the o-ring had something to raise it up, and something to seal against on the bottom.
Half an hour later the stuff was non-tacky, and I reinstalled the o-ring. Now it sticks up! that's
GOOD. I reassembled the block, and have had no leaks since.
Part V: Overclocking again
Now that I'm done leak testing, I've begun stress testing my new 2.8C SL6WJ P4. Since I've still got my mobile 3.06 P4 to fall back on (which will do 3.56 GHz) I've decided to go whole-hog and break the 1.7V barrier on v-core. 1.9V set in bios yields 1.86 w\ less ripple than when it was set to 1.675. Seems the higher you set Vcore, the less it droops... This seems to be in line with the Vdroop mods for the IC7, wihch lessen the droop but raise Vcore. All of that leads to this:
That's all for this time, folks