He basically is!

Now that you mention it, it does look like a bypass machine. All in the name of geekiness though

I've had to send the motherboard back because when I powered the machine up after leak-testing it for 26 hours solid, I couldn't get a peep out of the graphics card. Spent the best part of 3 hours part-swapping between that and my old PC, and confirmed the fault to be on the motherboard.

Had the board collected on Tuesday, it supposedly arrived back at Dabs today, and after a very snotty email to their Customer Services department (I was under the impression that the courier was next-day, the actual delivery time was nowhere to be found on their site) I should have a replacement by the middle of next week.

In the unlikely event that the motherboard isn't the fault, I'll have to return the graphics card as well (to a different company, I split the original order). Fingers crossed it won't be that much of a hassle, they should just check it as faulty and send me another card. I hope.

What do the blue tubes actually do?

Circulate water and keep it cool.

...Seriously?

Yes, it's a water cooling system.

Well that's just fucking mental.

the ones where its submerged in oil are way cooler

What if it catches fire?

its just like some special oil they put and it has the same function as air would in a normal computer

Cum-Blaster 2000 wrote:What if it catches fire?

It won't ... I hope. That's why I've run the system for 26 hours soild without any live components inside to leak-test. If it doesn't leak in 26 hours of constant use then it's a pretty safe bet that it won't leak.

Right, watercooling 101 time.

The loop order is Reservoir --> Pump --> Radiator --> Processor --> Graphics card --> Northbridge (motherboard chip) --> MOSFET 1 (another motherboard chip) --> MOSFET 2 --> Reservoir. The northbrige and MOSFETs basically control how fast the processor goes and how much voltage it gets.

The general principle is that the water loops round the system, picking up heat from various components. It's then cooled by the radiator (works on the same principle as a car radiator, with fans pushing and pulling air through it) and sent round the system again.

If you overclock the processor (i.e. push it faster than it was originally) then you generate more heat, which you have to get rid of otherwise the processor overheats. Water has 15 times the thermal capacity of air, so it can move 15 times more heat, therefore you can push the processor further with watercooling, which is useful if you want the system to be just as competitive speed-wise in 4 years than it is now.

He was on about the oil...

Dian Wei wrote:He was on about the oil...

Ah. Oh well

Silly James.

Right, progress update:

I've had to return my motherboard to Dabs, which was stupidly drawn-out and took a stroppy email to get them to do it - I had no idea that their courier collections take 5 working days to reach them and only found out after I'd asked them why my motherboard was still in Basildon on Thursday when it'd been collected on Tuesday. Eventually it got to them on Friday, a new one sent out on Friday and delivered on Monday. All nice and speedy like it should be.

Plugged everything back into the new motherboard, still no joy. Turns out one of my two current RAM sticks has died, so I'm upgrading slightly earlier than I originally planned. I'll be sending the old sticks (total 2GB) back to eBuyer tomorrow, with the two new 2GB sticks (4GB total) arriving on Friday from another supplier, costing £95.

eBuyer are being stroppy gits with the return, so they're just shipping out new stuff instead of giving me a refund, which means I'll need to get rid of the new stuff they send me because I'll already have my new total of 4GB. After that, I'll need to reinstall the machine (or at least repartition it) to install a 64bit version of Linux (32bit systems can only cope with 3.5GB RAM, to see the last 512MB you need a 64bit system, slightly annoying but still).

Final system spec and configuration should look like this:

• CPU - Intel Core2Quad Q6600 (overclocked - not sure how far yet)
• RAM - 4GB Corsair XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500 DDR2 (1066MHz)
• Motherboard - ASUS P5Q Pro
• Hard Drives - 320GB Maxtor (operating systems) + 750GB Samsung (data)
• Graphics Card - Sapphire ATI HD4870 512MB
• Power Supply - BeQuiet! DarkPower 650W (modular)
• Monitors - 21.6" HannsG widescreen (HDMI) TFT @ 1680x1050 + 17" Hyundai 4:3 (VGA) TFT @ 1280x1024
• Cooling - full custom watercooling loop including CPU, GPU, Northbridge and MOSFET cooling, radiator with 6 x 12cm fans (3 pushing air from the bottom, 3 pulling air from the top)
• Optical Drives - BluRay DVD-RW + standard DVD-RW

The laser-etching on the side-panels will possibly be done around Easter next year, and depending on usage I may get another 4GB of RAM to take the total to 8GB, but I'll have to see if Vista 64bit and Fedora 64bit are stable and usable enough. I doubt if anyone has understood all of that but fuck it