Projects of the Past Issue.2 - The Über PC

The Über PC

Some of you may already be familiar with the Über PC project from back when I used to attend and hold LAN gaming parties, and the rest of you may have heard me referring to this project in previous posts and videos.

It started out back in early 2006 when I fell in love with the Bauhaus-esque looks of the Kandalf PC case from Thermaltake. Not only was this case a pioneer in case design, but it was one of the few cases of the time to be made completely from aluminium, triggering some chin rubbing in the heat dissipation department.

The Kandalf case was home to a couple of system builds based upon Gigabytes reasonably priced and relatively reliable motherboards, and as you can see in the picture below I had even developed my own makeshift drinks can cooler.

This drinks cooler was genuinely one of the first (if not the first) drinks cooler to ever be integrated into a PC and nothing at the time had been refined to this level despite it being so make shift. The drinks cooler in this build was the prototype for my later rapid single can cooler, which was to be included in the later stages of the Über PC project when I decided to turn things up to 11. This was also one of the first ever PCs to feature an integrated touchscreen and was the first Kandalf case to do so. You may have noticed I quite like Zhang Ziyi, and chose her as my desktop at the time.

During this period I played around with Thermaltake's various water cooling solutions, and took some time to run my own thermal dissipation and hydrodynamics tests, trying different pumps, water blocks, and loop configurations. At the time I was building hardcore gaming and home theater PCs to order, so there really wasn't a piece of hardware that I hadn't laid hands on.

A particular HTPC build I was working on spurred me on to order an additional Thermaltake Symphony HTPC cooling system for myself to play about with. This was used in conjunction with the Kandalf Gigabyte setup as I ran more tests.

It was September 2007 I decided it was about time I built something epic for myself, as in hind sight everyone else was rocking what I had made, and my poor PC looked like a hashed together test rig... which unfortunately, due to my constant testing and experiments, is exactly what it was, a test rig work horse. The picture to the right perfectly captures the cable chaos and thrown together nature of the beast.







The Shopping List...


Things now officially turned up to 11, nothing was going to be spared in this build. We needed power, we needed speed, we needed water cooling, and we needed THE BEST.

The ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard was to be the bedrock for this build, being one of the most high performance overclock-able motherboards available at the time. Packed full of features, including a 1333mhz FSB, NVIDIA nForce® 680i SLI™ chipset, Intel® Core™2 Extreme quad core processor support, Dual-channel DDR2 1200Mhz SLI-Ready RAM support, and a bios designed with the overclocker in mind. This would be fitted with EK water blocks (black acetyl and solid copper) on the north bridge, south bridge, and MOSFETS, with all lesser chips that people would usually forget about, being cooled with blue anodized aluminium Koolance heat sinks.

A rather special type of Mushkin RAM was chosen to provide the system with 2GB of short term memory. I surprised myself with this one, as this was going to be Kingston RAM. Kingston has always been very reliable and well performing brand in my experience, so to choose another brand like this was a big deal. So what made me choose it...? Well this particular RAM had a bit of a fluke. By over volting and underclocking it to 800Mhz it would stupidly reduce the latency on the RAM and would perform faster than anything else running at 1200Mhz. These dual 1GB stick were cooled by Koolance RAM-30 water jackets.

Two BFG NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTX OC2 768MB graphics cards would be putting the graphics in it's place, featuring a stage 2 factory overclock. These were to be run in SLI™, and slightly over volted for a slight performance gain, being responsible for essentially just the rendering. These were fitted with dedicated EK (black acetyl and solid copper) water blocks using arctic silver. The guys at Overclockers UK may be surprised to know these actually came from them.

To back up our graphics, I opted for the BFG Agia Phys-X PCI card. This was the first physics processing card on the market, and would be responsible for handling game physics, freeing up the graphics cards to mostly colour in. Now days this is intergrated with NVIDIA's graphics platform and comes standard on NVIDIA cards. This was cooled by a gold plated Koolance universal graphics solid copper water block as there were no dedicated coolers for this card, and had to be mounted on a custom bracket and riser ribbon cable to squeeze it in to the case, despite the case being so large. This card came packaged in a rather quirky triangular box off the shelf.

The Intel® Core™2 Extreme QX9650 3.0Ghz quad core processor was to be the brains behind the scenes, and I waited for what felt like forever... until November for this to be released. It featured a 1333Mhz FSB 12MB (2x6MB) L2 cache, and most importantly, an unlocked multiplier to allow overclocking. This was cooled via an EK (acrylic and solid copper) 3-way water block.

To reduce online lag, improve ping, and free up system resources when gaming, the Killer NIC PCI 1Gb Network card was chosen. This handled all network traffic, and was essentially a 400Mhz Linux pc looking after my internets... you could even hook up a hard drive via an on-board USB slot and use it as a file server or torrent handler. Bessides all that, the heat sink was off the hook, and was asking to be put on a chain around your neck. This was cooled by a gold plated Koolance universal graphics solid copper water block again, as there were no dedicated coolers for this card.

The storage naturally had to be my favorite and most reliable brand Western Digital, choosing two 150GB Raptor X drives, one for the operating system, and the second for games. These drives featured a clear window so that you could see all the moving parts, and operated at a blinding 10,000RPM, which was a whole 2800RPM faster than fast 7200RPM desktop drives (standard being 5200RPM). These would be later run in RAID 1 with an additional two identical WD Raptor X drives so that the system and game data drives had an identical mirrored backup to prevent data loss. Running a RAID 1 setup like this also reduced drive latency, as there were two of each drive that could be accessed, allowing the PC to choose the drive with the highest RPM and lowest load. These were all cooled by Koolance Hydra-pak hard drive coolers... these have always made me feel thirsty as they remind me of Capri Sun.

"If your reading Koolance, how dare you lure me in to this perpetual loop of torture with your ridiculously innovative, and awesomely effective hard drive cooler, that does nothing but remind me of the Capri Sun I do not currently have before me... I demand compensation... I demand Capri Sun..."

The AeroCool PowerWatch was to be part of the monitoring system for this PC, keeping tabs on key temperatures and RPMs whilst providing a multiple card reader and two high current USB sockets with 12 volt and 5 volt output. AeroCool would also be the choice for several of the systems 120mm fans, providing a nice chromed illuminated multi-finned turbine aesthetic. This was later melded with my own monitoring system that I had developed using a micro controller and C++/Linux, which was hardwired into a Thermaltake Toughpower PSU so that it could genuinely protect the PC in an emergency, cutting the power as needed.

The Tagan TurboJet TG1100-U95 1100W power supply, would be responsible for bringing everything to life. This was a beautifully made power supply, built with some high quality components, and presented nicely in it's own briefcase. I re-braided most of the cables and replaced the connectors on this power supply with blue UV reactive ones to tie in with the over all appearance of the build. Sadly this PSU didn't last very long at all, and dropped the 3.3v rail very early in. Further more Tagan were nowhere to be seen when it came to warranty time, and I still had years to go on the warranty. This left me both out of pocket and a bit disappointed to be honest, but thankfully companies like Cooler Master and Thermaltake make PSUs. These companies have saved my bacon on more than one occasion, so they are what I use now.

The ASUS PG221 22" gaming monitor was what I chose to look at and a late arrival to the build, being added a couple of years later. This sported a myriad of features that nothing like this had ever had before, like intergrated 3 port USB hub, 1.3MP webcam, component, composite, VGA, and DVI connections, a touch interface, a menu with optimized audio and video profiles, integrated 2.1 stereo speakers that actually sound good, a 2ms response time, and best of all, a partially aluminium construction that tied in with the Kandalf case.

This monitor was purchased from KustomPCS.co.uk at a nice discount due to my 3rd place prize winnings from KustomPCS' website design competition. Amazingly the pages related to this are still active, with the competition page being found HERE, and the winners page HERE.

Recently I fixed this monitor, after experiencing some on screen interference, and the project can be found HERE.

The Thermaltake Symphony was to be the cooling system of choice, but its guts had to go, and yet again I was about to create something else that was the first of its kind.

At the heart of my Symphony mod, I used two high flow pumps from Swiftech in a push pull configuration, with the veins of the system being 19mm translucent flexible tubing, and a set of new high flow radiators to provide the heat dissipation. These amongst many other fittings and a bucket load of genuine Jubilee clips were purchased from Caseking.de in Germany.
I wanted the system to remain detachable for ease of transportation (pretending that was still a thing after we had reached this sheer scale of hardware). So I managed to get my hands on some self sealing quick release connectors from the chemical treatment industry, and since the radiators were modified race car oil radiators, I decided to pick up some heavy duty silicon hosing from the race industry to use as my external coupling hoses.

It was a good job that I did use all high quality fittings as later on during some heavy overclocking I had the wise idea of temporarily replacing the two Swiftech pumps with two imported Hungarian pumps that produced a head pressure of 20'... yep you've read correctly twenty foot, giving more than enough pressure to run a decent power shower.

One LAN party for shits and giggles, we decided to kart it out into the near by parking lot on an extension lead and undo the case side filler cap. It was promptly nick named Moby Dick, and we found that we had to profusely dose the reservoir with deionized purified water to prevent it from instantly draining.

The case underwent a few mods of its own. The power button was originally built into a plastic fascia that surrounded a modular bay that could house a floppy drive, but as I did not need a floppy drive, I fitted the case with a key operated power isolation switch and an aluminium push button that sported an illuminating snowflake as the new start button. This came in particularly handy at LAN parties, especially with the reset button now being on the motherboard safe inside the case (LAN antics). The top of this case has always reminded me of the robot in the remake of Lost in Space starring Matt LeBlanc.

The rear of the case was drilled and cut for the installation of the water cooling quick connectors and for an array of illuminating round rocker switches that would soon operate the PC's UV CCFL lighting. There were 3 UV tubes in total, followed by a fourth blue under-case CCFL for that "Just been pimped" look. You can also see the SilverStone PSU fan silencer fitted to the Tagan Turbojet PSU.

The front surround behind the doors underwent an uplift, better integrating the touch screen panel, and creating a more polished look for the single can drinks cooler that I had developed from scratch. This seems to be one of the images I lack, but what is worth mentioning is the black paint on the inside of the case. This paint doesn't just look nice, it is actually designed to absorb IR radiation (aka heat), so with the lighter outer, combined with some gentle air flow, the entire case had been turned into a radiator.

This image better shows the custom braided cables, and the beginning of all the autistic, meticulous cable routing. These cables have yet to be tightly grouped together in a linear fashion, but you can see where things are going. You can also see a few of the blue anodized aluminium heatsinks mentioned previously.

Sadly I do not seem to have any pictures of the completed project, and after a few years, parts were eventually swapped out, sold, etc. For instance the graphics cards were swapped out when I was offered a nice amount for them both as BFG shut down and BitCoin mining became a thing.



So how did it turn out...

Pretty damn awesome is how it turned out, and I just wished I had some pictures of it in it's full finished glory to share with you.

After filling it with bottle after bottle of Feser one f1 UV blue cooling fluid, and playing around with the bios settings I had this thing well and truly over clocked at a hat tipping 4.66Ghz. With this cooling system, the processor never reached over 33 degrees Celsius even under load while overclocked. As some of you may know or have already read, this PC when benchmarked in 3Dmark, ranked 172nd out of all the PCs in the world at the time. Which was A-OK in my books, mission success!

Currently I have a new PC project underway on the side line, which relevant companies are starting to take an interest in, so hopefully that will be completed soon, and maybe even ready to display at insomnia in August??

I also have a second and much grander PC project down on paper, which I can promise will be nothing like anyone has seen, providing I get the support to build it!

Hope everyone has enjoyed reading this, and after all that, it's time to get the kettle on =D