Frosty-G

[alex5389]

Once that is all done I'll sit down with my heat gun, silicone rod, saws and sand paper to get the acrylic tubing going. This is more daunting than the acrylic work I did on the panels, even if it will be less work and less time. Good thing I bought nearly 8 feet of the stuff

Hope 8 will be enough for you.. I bought 12 and 4 is already gone to experimentation and failure...

[snef]

I dont know your loop, but maybe secure little bit more than 8 feet

Really easy to do mistake and you can use it anymore,

I just buy around 43 feet , bought 12 meter of Daz stock and already have some

Need to redo one build and my new build, want some spare
And im sure, at the end not so much will stay in my closet

[10e]

Hopefully it will suffice.

I also have a bunch of EK 12mm OD tubes and fittings if things go wrong. I think another 8 to 12 feet and another 16 fittings from Daz.

I should be ok, as I'm going to keep it simple and the Prodigy is not a large case.

[Hero1]

That rad looks sexy.

[10e]

The 8 feet of EK tubing I had was enough. Having done enough with acrylic to sort out most of my mistakes I had some success.

Some progress:

Fitting the beautiful BP waterblock on the mobo:




Wait? WTF all the way to the leak test:



Yup somehow I thought I had taken shots of my acrylic tubes "in production" but nope. Life has been busy and we just had our second son on Saturday, so my brain has been (mostly) AWOL.

I sleeved the pump, put the waterblock on the 780 HOF, put the panels together, added fans and rads, and assembled the loop. So far my work seems pretty solid. No leaks and the 3.1T pump is extremely quiet.

Sorry for the "chasm" in progress.

Next up is cable management, soldering wires onto the vandal on/off switch, and adding the WD2 1TB black drive, which will end up getting vinyl covered in white. This is a good idea due to the way the drive is constructed. It is basically a mechanical 1TB drive with a 128GB SSD on it. Kind of a funny config because the SSD's PCB is exposed on the top of the drive.

If you're wondering why the front radiator is "aqua blue" I painted it that way for two reasons: 1) Blue is my favorite color and 2) it matches the 24-pin PSU and 8-pin EPS connectors on the mobo.

Oh, and it looks cheesy.

[DazMode]

Bitspower did really good job with block! Looks great.

[10e]

Some almost final shots.

I went to a cool place called Sayal electronics near the west side of Markham, and they had some cool RGB flex strips similar to the NZXT Hue strips and I picked a few up. These are easy to use because you can just run them from a 12 volt power source and use the built-in interface pins to power red, green or blue (or all) LEDs at the same time.

Being a big fan of the color blue I decided to run the green and blue LEDs to give a nice "aqua" color. I retro-fitted an older Fractal Design fan controller and soldered some wires to a 3-pin connector and the other end to the green, blue and +12v connectors. I also drilled a quarter inch hole in the back of the case to get access to the power adjustment potentiometer of the fan controller to be able to manually change intensity. I then used the built-in double sided tape to secure the 12" light strip to the top acrylic panel. What small amount of light filters through the panel makes the led strip look like a green and blue snake, so it looks pretty cool from the outside too.




The other side while I was testing a Darkside dimmable lighting strip:



The front fans are NB-Eloop PWM 800-2000rpm and the tops are NB-Eloop 3-pin (non PWM) running at 800 rpm. All the fans, and the fan controller for the lighting are plugged into a Swiftech 8-port PWM "concentrator" and the fan speed signal wire is going into the CPU port of the P8Z77-I Deluxe.

GPU never exceeds 44 celsius on Furmark and the CPU is in the 50s but I think the combo CPU/VRM/Mobo water block is not great at pressing down on the CPU. We'll see what happens when I OC the CPU. Looking to go 4.6-4.8 ghz on this one which should be easily do-able.

Some lessons learned:

1) If punching holes in acrylic a proper bit with a drill press is 80% mandatory for accurate and straight holes, especially with 4.5mm and thicker acrylic
2) The Prodigy psu space is too small for a 160mm PSU with modular. Either go shorter or go 160mm and non-modular
3) Cable management in the Prodigy is a bit of a mess. I plan to cover the access holes to the PSU box with some nice translucent white acrylic to hide the clutter. Alternatively I could have sleeved and made shorter PCI-E and 24-pin cables to eliminate some of the extra slack of cabling underneath
4) Never, ever use a thicker than 45mm radiator on top of the Prodigy. It intrudes too much in the space. If you want a fat radiator, use it in the front.
5) Best to use a DDC pump with a "pump top" style rez for the Prodigy. I didn't but the pump is directly below of the radiator

My one issue was that my loop is a bit on the complex side. I may re-do the acrylic tubing in some runs to remove the intrusion into the working space. It is difficult fitting my chubby meat hooks in there

Some updates and better cam shots will be forthcoming at some point, but I have about 50 items to move from the old office (new son's impending room) down to the basement man-cave office, so we'll see when I get the time.

[Father Fuzzy]

nice effect on the front window 10e

thats what I did in the prodigy cut little acrylic pieces to fit in the psu area to hide the clutter and one side I put a lcd temp screen

[DazMode]

I also really like front! Great mod.

[alex5389]

white acrylic looks awesome. would like more pron please.

[10e]

white acrylic looks awesome. would like more pron please.

More incoming tonight. I put Modright fan filters in the front with aqua blue rings and while I hate that they hide the NB eloop fans more,they give them a slight "shimmery" appearance befitting the theme of "frost".

I also love this white acrylic. It is opaque enough to only let a little bit of light through, but it's strong and fairly light. I'm pretty sure I shed at least a pound of weight by doing away with the original heavy steel side panels. In addition this top panel is cut so that the original doors will fit nice and toight if I ever wanted to do a "slightly modded" Prodigy with no top handles. The front frame is translucent white 3mm and was cut to hide the white metal of the case behind the frosted 5.5 mm clear acrylic.

I soldered 1.5 Dazmode dimmable LED white strips together and mounted them on the right front, so there is a gradation in color inside the case from aqua to white from left to right. Lastly I will fold some acrylic strips in an L configuration and a "U" underside to slide onto the mobo tray, and mount them to the sides of the motherboard tray to hide the fan/lighting cables poking out through the holes and the black VRM module on the right side. I don't have to worry about scratching the windows with slightly wider acrylic on the side of the mobo tray because the windows are mounted to the outside of the side panels.

Too bad they didn't include some nice white grommets for the oval access holes. That would have been nice for asthetics.

I have overclocked the CPU to 4.6Ghz with 1.35v Vcore and it's sitting less than 70 celsius on Prime 95 extreme burn-in setting. I'm slowly trying to lower VCore. This is an average 2700K. It gets to 4.5-4.6 ghz easily but struggles with a large difference in voltage to hit 4.7 Ghz, but that's fine for me. By contrast the 3770K in the "Lil-bit" build is at 4.3Ghz undervolted by a -0.02 offset and generating far less heat and using nearly 70 watts less power!

The VRM cooling of the water block is excellent. I can feel the water block warm by the VRM modules and the VRM modules are nearly 5 celsius cooler than the "Lil-bit" build even though the CPU drinks more power. Nice job Bitspower! Too bad the VRM daughterboard hides it as it is stunning.

Next (and more importantly) is overclocking the GPU which boosts to 1.1Ghz at stock and never exceeds 44 celsius with the front fans at 1400 rpm and the tops at 800 rpm. I might switch the top NoiseBlocker Eloop fans to the other 800-2000 RPM PWM ones I also have to help airflow a bit on the top "white ice" rad. These fans are no good in a pull configuration because the blades are very close to the end of the frame, but with a fairly unobstructed intake are as quiet as Gentle Typhoons and Be Quiet Silent Wings 2 120mm versions with minimal PWM "click".