Lil' bit

[10e]

My son always says he wants a "lil' bit" of something. So I recently bought a Cooler Master Elite 110 case that I wanted to do a somewhat ambitious water cooled build in that would be called "lil' bit"

Nothing fancy, just a mini-ITX machine that I can game on at 40-60 fps at 1080p and with a low power CPU and GPU. No mods just a single 120mm radiator with water cooling the CPU and GPU. I figured a low power set-up under 200 watts of maximum power use from the wall would fit in the TDP of a thicker radiator with a good quality, quiet fan.

I decided on the following components:

1) Intel Core I5 4670T 45 watt TDP CPU
2) Gigabyte GA-Z87N-WiFi Mini ITX motherboard
3) Club 3D RoyalQueen R9 270 video card
4) 2 x 4GB of Samsung low profile, low power 1.35V RAM clocked at 1600mhz at 10-10-10-27 1T timings
5) One Seagate SSHD 1 TB 2.5" drive
6) Silverstone ST45SF-G SFX PSU (modular)
7) One Scythe GT15 1850 RPM 120mm fan
8) Cooler Master Elite 110 Mini ITX case

Water cooling components:

1) XSPC RX240 or EK WB XT 120 (I ended up using the EK rad due to clearance issues between the front mounted RX240 and the Swiftech water block ports)
2) Swiftech Apogee Drive II with Dazmode PWM DDC pump, MCW82 for GPU. Unfortunately I bought an EK7850 water block from Daz but EK's site was wrong and it didn't fit the Club3d R9 270 due to some different capacitor locations. I've informed EK of the mistake.
3) 3/8 ID 1/2" OD tygon silver infused Tygon tubing
4) Dazmode Protector
5) Distilled water
6) Various Bitspower rotary fittings, 2 for the CPU waterblock/pump, 2 for the GPU, 2 for the radiator (no reservoir)
7) Bitspower 3-way "T-type" fitting for a fill port and bleed port
8) One Bitspower temperature stop plug
9) One Bitspower black chrome stop plug
10) 2 XSPC Black chrome 90 degree rotary fittings, 1 45 degree rotary fitting


I tested the setup without the WC gear on an open test bed and gaming used around 170-185 watts. I tried various video cards that would fit within the 210-215mm space the case allows including an EVGA GTX 660 TI SC 3GB, Sapphire R9 270X, PNY GTX 650 TI Boost, and the Club3d RoyalQueen r9 270.

Without any overclocking the following power usage was measured from the wall while running Unigine Heaven or Metro benchmark (frontline):

1) With the R9 270 Royal Queen I got between 170-185 watts power usage at 67 FPS on Metro at 1080p with highest quality
2) With the R9 270X Sapphire Dual-X I got between 178-190 watts power usage at 72 FPS on Metro at 1080p with highest quality
3) With the EVGA GTX 660 TI 3GB SC I got between 180-195 watts power usage at 70 FPS on Metro at 1080p with highest quality
4) With the PNY GTX 650 TI Boost I got between 160-175 watts power usage at 60 FPS on Metro at 1080p with highest quality

It was a tough fight in my mind to go either with the GTX 650 TI boost or the Club3d R9 270 but I decided ultimately on the Club3d as a good in-between for performance and power usage. I figured TDP would be lower than power usage due to PSU efficiencies and I'd need to over clock the GX 650 TI Boost to reach the same performance levels, effectively reducing the power use advantage of the GTX 650 TI boost.

Satisfied with the choice of CPU/GPU etc... I built it on Sunday. The PWM pump was easy to adjust using the EZ Tune software and I was stoked with how quiet everything ended up.

Here's a quick photo of the build while testing:



I decided after bleeding the system sufficiently by tilting the case that I should really stress it using Prime95 on three cores and Furmark to slaughter the GPU. From the wall it was using around 220 watts. This is a worst case scenario that in regular use I will never reach, but I figured, why not?

I was extremely satisfied with the results. The CPU was in the 50 celsius range and the GPU under 50 celsius. I know this violates the golden rule of n+1 120mm fan placements per component, but using a quiet, fast Gentle Typhoon and a high quality 45 mm radiator I felt I could sneak in and get a half-decent Delta-T and I was right. I plan on monitoring the Delta-T later on with the temp stop plug plus Dazmode purchased temperature display I bought around 8 months ago

Here's a link to the screener with the CPU at 98% use and the GPU at 10% use: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2015.41.13.jpg

My only remaining tasks are adding a low speed 80mm or 120mm fan to the left side of the case to blow on the naked GPU components, and figuring out a way to properly seal the Scythe fan to the radiator. Cooler Master in all their esteemed wisdom decided to make the 140mm fan holes on this case bubbled out and they keep the radiator from sitting completely flush against the front of the chassis which causes air loss. That, couple with the somewhat restrictive front air filter causes the system to see raised temps by about 4 celsius which is too much. I've since removed the front air filter in the case but I'm still seeing some issues.

That plus the crappy m3 screws that EK uses to mount the rad are conspiring from me getting exactly what I want. I guess the next step is to try a gasket between the radiator and case. The screws should be barely long enough here. I don't understand why Cooler Master did this. Otherwise I'll just drill out the holes bubbling out. It's going to be a pain-in-the-butt to get the rad out enough to stick a gasket on it though, but hey it's a labour of love.

[Bartacus]

Very cool! Nice to see someone question the paradigm and see what a good 120 rad and good fan can do!

[alex5389]

I am having some serious difficulties squeezing a 240 rad in the corsair 250D right now! Leaving it with just the 140 in the front would be an easy solution for me. I see that your results are as good as some aircooled solutions so it works. Good job! I agree with Bart on this. Makes me wonder if I have become too much of a radiator whore in my time here because I have seriously been stressing over this 240rad situation of mine.

[10e]

Thanks guys,

I did some more work on it last night and this morning and it's looking even better at this point. Originally whenever I placed the front panel on the case the filter seemed to restrict airflow enough to raise the temperatures by about 3-4 celsius at this extreme load.

I took apart the front panel and removed the original 1mm foam filter that was between the plastic frame and front panel mesh, and replaced it with a less restrictive mesh filter from In win that I bought from Canada Computers a long time ago. I then removed the radiator and cut four thin strips of a black foam weather stripping and stuck them to the radiator to make somewhat of a gasket, to address the issue with the 140mm screw holes pushing the radiator 1-2mm off the inside of the metal chassis.

These two things changed the airflow enough that it's only about 1-2 celsius difference between running without the front panel on and off, so I am good to go here. Again this is running with an extreme load with the CPU at 98-99% and the GPU at 100% so in general I don't think I'll see even these temperatures 99.9% of the time.

Right now the CPU stabilized at 52 celsius at full load, and the GPU at around 49-50.

I'm going to grab a small 80mm quiet fan for the left side to just blow some air on the video card, and I've installed a 1TB SSHD as the main drive on the left side. All cables are running through the front panel and I've done some cable management on the PSU 6-pin PCI, 8 pin EPS and 24 pin ATX cables to tidy up the build. It's not a big deal as it's closed without window but I still like a somewhat tidy build to address my OCD tendencies

Once that's all done I'l solder the temperature sensor plug to the temperature display and place it somewhere where I can read it, likely inside the front panel or above the SFX PSU up top, so I can monitor the Delta-T on a regular basis.

It's nice to use all these things I bought from Daz over the past few months on a fun, tiny little rig.

The case itself has some shortcomings but space management for such a small box is excellent as long as component selection is correct. I still think the chassis should have been an inch deeper instead of having the PSU off-set out that extra inch. That inch would have allowed an RX120 to fit in there no problem. Also the EK radiator would be a lot better off using M4 or 6-32 mounting screws as the M3 screws really are far too easy to strip the threads on. I was thinking of using a 1/8 drill bit to drill new holes and tap 32 threads per inch to line up with 6-32 screws but I'm happy with how things are now.

I'm very happy with the performance-per-watt on this little box, as generally it's between 40-50 watts less on a regular basis than the extreme load experiment.

alex5389 I guess your only choice is to find some slim fans that have enough static pressure for your chosen rad. The 250D is a great case, but this was a bit of an oversight on Corsair's part making a case that's only really compatible with their H100/100i cooler. I watched the TastyPCTV review on it, and the radiator thickness and the overly long cables were seemingly the only issues with this amazing little case.

[alex5389]

alex5389 I guess your only choice is to find some slim fans that have enough static pressure for your chosen rad. The 250D is a great case, but this was a bit of an oversight on Corsair's part making a case that's only really compatible with their H100/100i cooler. I watched the TastyPCTV review on it, and the radiator thickness and the overly long cables were seemingly the only issues with this amazing little case.

I found some 15mm titans that will have to do.

I would say that a single inch bigger in every dimension would make it perfection. To me it really seems no one at corsair tried to build a custom loop in it untill it was too late :/ I had to buy some pretty obscure adapters to route the tubing to my 240 rad :/

[10e]

I can relate.

The botom of the SFX PSU in the Lil' bit build is about half a millimetre away from the dual rotating (Daz purchased) Bitspower rotary fitting, and if I didn't have 45 and 90 degree rotary fittings available I would have needed anti-kink coils for the vid card to CPU water block and radiator tubing in that build. I almost with I had just used acrylic tubing but that's another challenge I need to tackle at a later time.

It's tough working in these small cases. My knuckles are still paying the price and I get dry hands in the winter to boot, so I've needed some band-aids to keep the build and carpet from running red. Anyone ever use blood as coolant? Hehe that's a bit morbid.

Good luck! Those Titan 15mm fans look great with the cool double curved blades.

[10e]

Update:

I swapped in some new components based on some observations. The Gigabyte board was starting to have hard resets which might be attributed to the Swiftech Apogee Drive II pressing on some capacitors. I tried new ram and power supply and nothing was fixing the isue.

I changed the CPU and motherboard from an I5 4670T and the Gigabyte GA-Z87N-Wifi to my tried and true i7 3770K and P8Z77-I Deluxe/WD boards.

I also removed the EK XT120 with the stupid, stripped M3 screws and replaced it with an XSPC RX120 which uses 6-32 screws. The RX120 is a better radiator and due to the change to a new motherboard with more clearance to both the PCI-E slot and the radiator I was able to rotate the CPU water block and I can even do a push/pull configuration on it!

The video card has remained as the R9 270 from Club3d but I was able to mod the EK FC7850 water block to fit. Originally due to a misplaced/undocumented capacitor near the back of the board near the power connectors, I couldn't fit the water block on the video card.

Enter the fret saw I bought from Busy Bee Tools a while back and a couple extra blades (because I snapped one) I sawed off the back, sanded it flat/straight with 150 grit sandpaper "mounted" via double sided tape to a flat table and re-mounted it. This was just an empty part of the water block that was outside the o-ring so it was really a useless extra block of acrylic. Success!

This also drove down GPU temps by a good 4-5 degrees celsius versus the Swiftech MCW82 gpu-only water block. The water block looks stock still, just 4-5mm shorter. I was very happy I did this.

I've bled the system fully and now things are running nice. The change to a new CPU only added 20 watts pulled from the wall. Bleeding was a pain due to the fact that there is no reservoir and I had a number of bubbles caught in the video card water block and the pump, but they are now gone.

I also tried a Gentle Typhoon AP29 (3000 RPM) model and did the PWM modification to it (as it pulls power from molex) but for some reason I can't get the Asus motherboard to drive it less than 2000 rpm, and it's louder than the AP15 at 1850 rpm by a noticeable amount.

In this regard Gigabyte is far better now. They can modulate 3-pin fans off the CPU/OPT fan headers while the Asus can only do this with PWM fans. The Gigabyte also supports more detailed fan RPM to temperature mapping than the Asus. Easytune is way better than Fan XPert now IMHO.

I'll put some push/pull fans on it and see if this can balance noise versus temps and put up some new photos.

[bungwirez]

Pics or it never happened

[alex5389]

haha true especially of the modded gpu block!

[gdesmo]

It's very possible, but I would like to see the evidence as well.

[DazMode]

Pics or it never happened

Yesss.

[10e]

Here you go:

Pic of the build with a push/pull configuration:



Pic of the water block with the end 3-4mm cut off. If you look at the stock EK FC7850 water block on Dazmode.com you can see the last circles are a few millimetres away from the edge, but on this, they are basically slightly cut because of my mod.

Works great but I think it needs a backplate as the card has a slight bend to it and the VRMs don't fully contact the thermal pads.



Pics and it DID happen

[bungwirez]

huh... well there you go.

will a backplate fit in there against that rad? looks pretty tight.

[10e]

huh... well there you go.

will a backplate fit in there against that rad? looks pretty tight.

It should. The card has a slight bend to it from the pressure of the water block's screws, so I'd assume some of the bend would go away with a backplate.

I'll probably leave it for now, as I'm pretty happy with the temps versus noise on it as it is.

[alex5389]

Amazing it all fits!