I recently decided to find out how much cooling I could cram into my Prodigy m-ITX case. As it turns out, quite a lot! I now have a 200mm radiator up front and a 240mm radiator at the top, being fed by a modified D5 pump/res combo and cooling both the CPU (9900k) and my graphics card (Titan X Maxwell). It's a little bit of overkill, but it keeps my toasty chip within reasonable temperatures at 4.9GHz and the heavily overclocked Titan runs cool around 50° celsius. While the cooling is great, the aesthetics are poor. Cables everywhere, tubing all over the place and a pump/res combo that takes up a ridiculous amount of space. See pictures below. Soooo...long story short, I want to make it neater and cleaner when I tear it down next to replace the graphics card with a 2080 Ti. I have the following ideas: - replace the existing pump/res combo with the EK-XRES 100 DDC 3.2 PWM Elite (already ordered) to make more room. The pump unit itself is smaller and the res is only half the size. - switch from soft tubes to hard tubes to minimize the twists and curves around the case. I ordered the tubes, fittings and bending kit, and made some trial bends, but I am a total noob when it comes to hard tubes. Also, I have soft tub quick disconnects for my video card, because it is often in the way. So ideally I would like to run the hard tubes down to behind to where the pump/res is currently and hook up soft tubes at the back of the case to connect my video card. Not sure how this might work, though. - take out / shorten / hide all cables, maybe build a little metal cover to go in front of the 200mm rad as well as the PSU where I can hide the fan cables. - I also want to replace the PSU cables with blue cables to fit the color scheme of the liquid - maybe move the 2x120mm fans from the top radiator to the top/outside of the case and move the pump/res combo to hang horizontally below the 240mm rad. - the front rad is currently positioned with the fittings in the bottom where I connected my drain valve. That makes it very difficult to make the return loop from the gpu block. I also have a second spare 240mm rad, so if I need more room I could swith out the 200mm rad. But I would lose some cooling power. What would you guys do? And how? Any recommendations are welcome. Btw: my current loop setup is pump->cpu->240mm rad->gpu->200mm rad->res/pump
One thought I had was to mount the smaller pump/res combo onto the 200m fan. There are plenty of mounts for 120/140mm fans, but I cannot find anything to 200mm fans. Any ideas for a dyi mod? Another idea is to cut out the power bottun/usb bracket from the side panel and integrate it in the front panel. It's extremely tedious to have it in the side of panel and the chunky cable is always in the way. That would also allow me to put in a decent size side side window (3mm acrylic).
Short status update: The new pump/res arrived and I installed the new hard tube loop last night. It looks great but I have a leak at the pump‘s drain port. Tried a couple of different fittings so far with similar results. May have to send the pump back if I cannot resolve this. Im am really happy about the aesthetics of the hard tubes and the new res though. Much cleaner than the soft tube mess. New fitting, next leak test. 30 minutes in, no leak so far. Will let it run for the next couple of hours to make sure. Edit 2: after 8 hours of successful leak testing I finally assembled the system. After a couple of hours stress testing the leak reappeared. Not even sure if the leak is from the outlet or from the pump itself. Time to RMA the unit.
While I am RMAing the pump I have time to get the dremel out and do some mods. First off I have to shorten the IO shield for the new 2080ti. I ordered a triple slot design card and the shield doesn't fit my case. Dremel to the rescue: Side by side comparison of the new bracket vs the old Titan X bracket. Now cut down to size: Next stop: custom windowed side panels. They are actually a bit tricky because the space for the window is limited due to the psu tray in the bottom left corner of the case. The area around the psu is for stashing spare cables, so you want to keep this area covered up. For aesthetic reasons I wanted rounded corners. They were pretty difficult to achieve and it took me a while to get the hang of it. Not too happy with all of them but overall I am pleased with the result. Below are some pictures of the process. It's been the first time that I moded a side panel, so I reviewed a lot of how to videos beforehand. Using a dremel to cut a straight line is pretty straightforward as long as you take it slow. Luckily the acrylic glass is really cheap. I needed a couple tries to get the cuts right in size, but now it looks good from the outside. The inside is a bit more messy due to the sticky tape glueing the glass to the case wall. A cleaner option is to screw the window to the case, but that's just more to go wrong, so I decided not to do that this time. Let me know how you like the mods so far
Great, but if it was me, I would have used a cnc metal cutting machine to cut that. I love your modding. those blue tubes are turn offs, replace em with clear ones!
I wish I had access to a cnc machine, but sadly that's beyond what I am willing to spend on gear so far. The tubes are clear, it's the fluid that is blue. Aesthetics is always a matter of preference, but I like it. It comes together with the blue cabling and the blue lighting I am putting in.
After tinkering with the replacement DDC pump I am still not satisfied with the level of noise the pump emits. So I went back to the original D5 pump/combo design. Everything is reassembled and working as planned, except for the LEDs on the exhaust fan at the rear, which randomly lights up pink ever so often. Pushing down on the connector resolves the issue, but I am leaving it as it is for now and enjoy the rig. Here are some pictures of the final result. Much cleaner interior, despite more powerful hardware than at the beginning.
