Operation RedTide - The Buildlog of a Mineral Oil Subsurfaced PC

A

Akkerman

Member
Hello fellow-servicemen and future friends,

As some of you might know there's an ambitious project I've been wanting to start for quite some time now.
My old desktop PC which I customized and build myself with standard components back in 2007 has tired down the lasts of his electric circuits and has become an old fellow.
Playing games with high graphical standards like Arma 3 weren't playable on the old badboy anymore. This is the reason I had to leave my previous ArmA milsim unit, where I had been a dedicated member for years, acting as both nonco officer as officer.
I will not return to them however,  because I want a new gameplay experience. You can find more on this on my application thread.

And so, a new project idea started.

Now, this thread copied from another thread on a casebuilders forum, but I will be joining this unit soon - so I thought I'd share my build log with you.
It might also give you an idea on when I will finish my enlistment.

But most importantly, it gives me an excuse of getting to know all of you  :D

Because this is a copied thread however, the timestamps don't really fit in.
To save myself the hassle of changing all these dates an times, I've left them in.
Therefore, the timestamps might not make sense from time to time.
Please excuse me because of that!

I WILL however try to put an approximate correct time above each post, so it does feel more like an over-year project.

That's about it.

Cheers!
Akkerman
 
November 1st, 2015

The Idea
The idea is building a brand new PC, with no parts transferred from my old PC (believe me - it wouldn't work anyway).
This PC's price range is a little over €1000,- and would consist of mid-range to high-end parts.
Activities like gaming, video editing and rendering and recording gaming footage in 1080p at 60 FPS are the goals for this little baby badboy.
These criteria and a lot of research into modern computer parts by reading a lot of forums and having conversations with the few fellow PC geeks in my real life and the gaming community world friends (luckily the old badboy could still operate TeamSpeak  ^_^ ) - made the list of components for this new baby complete.
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As apparent from the image above, the skylake generation Intel processor and thus DDR4 memory along with a M.2 NVMe SSD as OS drive will make this baby insanely fast.


This however is not all... The project will include a custom made case!
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The case will be a aquarium with a acrylic glass lid attached to a acrylic glas plate - attached to the lid perpendicular vertically. On this plate the motherbord and
SSD drives will be attached.
The whole system will float in the aquarium, hanging from the lid, in a bath of mineral oil. (Copyright LinusTechTips for this preview picture)
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First Parts

Last Thursday, the first 2 parts arrived

The first one is the graphics card, a Nvidea GPU MSI GeForce GTX970 Gaming 4G with 4GB of GDDR5 graphical memory.
The second one is the motherbord, an Intel chipset MSI Z170A Gaming Pro with obviously the 6th generation LGA 1151 socket for the Skylake processor that will come later.

You can find a picture of both here still unboxed...
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...and here a fuzzy one out the box.
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That's it for now gents! I have to go.

I will update this thread regularly to keep you posted on the project and so you can follow the steps I'm taking to get back to gaming with the unit.

Hasta luego!
Akkerman
 
January 1st, 2016


There has been an awakening...
Have you felt it?

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The First Orders, are away...


Actually, these are the last orders.  :P
The last one is the ordering of the mineral oil.

See you on my new PC before the end of the month!
 
January 5th, 2016

Jay!

Today, the extra hardware arrived!
As of now, all the hardware is here.

The only stuff I'm expecting for delivery now are:
  • The aquarium
  • The de-mineralised oil
  • Aquarium showcasing like red gravel, a small castle and an airpump with a plastic tube with holes for bubbles.
I made a nice labeled sketch for those interested in the hardware:

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Later this week I will go to the alloys and plastics lab on the university to drill and cut the acrylic glass plates.
On to the drawing board!
 
January 14th, 2016
So, yesterday was a big day and a long day.

The morning started in de Plastics Lab at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, again...
(Sidenote: IDE doesn't really belong on a Technical University in my opinion. I mean, half the students there are girls! 50%GIRLS! on a Technical Uni! but yeah... Also - They're all hipsters).
But let's continue.

So, Plastics lab.

An IDE friend of mine helped me around the lab (although really, he was my ticket in).
We started drilling sunk-in holes for the screws that were to be attached to the power supply to the oil basin lid. The lid is a 10mm acrylic plate, so the small PC case screws weren't long enough - that's why the holes had to be sunken. First a small drill all the way through for the screw part, then a bigger drill up-to 3/4 through the plate for the screw's head.

After this drilling, bigger sections of the lid plate were to be cut out. These would be the I/O slots panels holes from the MoBo, Graphics card, LED controller and power buttons. I also custom made a little chip board with the I/O slots attached that you would normally find in the front of your PC case (audio jacks, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and SD-card reader).

This was going to be hard.. We asked the lab operators what the best method would be, for we though drilling the corners out and then saw it out with a lint-saw. But yeah, they were like 'hahaha, what! Why don't you boys use the laser?'
'Laser sir?'
'Yes! The LASER!'

As an aerospace engineer, I never use fancy hipster IDE stuff like 3D printers or lasercutters. Just give me the old screws, nails and especially rivets.
So yeah... We drew a quick CAD file with Catia and gave that and the plate to the operator.
Minds where blown.
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The result?
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So yeah, after that - we went home to see if all the parts fitted through the ports. This was the part I couldn't sleep of the past few days - seeing I would completely have missdrawn something on my building drawing.
But yeah, everything fitted except for one part...
You guessed it - the huge ass, motherf*ing Graphics card.

The card was the hardest part to measure, since it's slot placement depended on the accurcy of how far it would go in the PCI-e slot, which depended on the tightness of the motherboard screwed on the attachment acrylic plate, which placement depended on the accuracy of attachment of that plate to the lid plate. Quite immeasurable when doubt factors come in to play..
So, after a lot of normal-PCcase-backplate-slot-attachment bending on the GPU, it fitted.

Back to uni. At this point, the protection plaster could finally be removed from the acrylic plate - at least partially. The plates had to be attached!
First I thought acrylic glue would do the trick, but the attachment backplate for the motherboard was 4mm, which would be too thin to glue to the lid plate said the lab operator.
So, corner profiles and screws had to be used. After that, the screws that came through the 4mm plate had to be shortened, otherwise they would touch the back of the MoBo at a later point.
Your friend in need? The Dremel!  :D
A bit of washing benzine and fiber cloth to remove the never-to-be-reached-again fingerprints on the plate and the plates were attached.

At this point it was evening.
The actual building of the PC, began:
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So yeah, the day just went on and on.
Attaching the power supply, then the motherboard. The graphicscard (which was a thight fit again).
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At this point, one of my roommates joined me in building.
This is 2 hours later, with us attaching the cables to the power and reset buttons:
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Another hour and a half...


And then... after half a year of planning and saving:
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It was FINISHED!

So, as you can see - a bit of cable management was still needed.
Which I did.

This is the result after another hour:
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So, friends and viewers - the PC itself is finally complete and working.


Now the only thing left to do is making the basin with an airtube, a bit of red gravel and some aquarium ornaments.
After that, pouring the oil and dipping this PC in it.


The last part will be uploaded in the coming days.
See you then!  :)
 
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