Topcat's Other Misc Weird Build Thread

[370forlife]

Supermicro says Nocona or Irwindale only. These things are such a pain to install with the heatsink brackets I made anyway 😅.

I did figure out the bios flashing. I found a utility from AMI to do it. It flashed successfully. The version number is still the same, but the build date is about 2 years newer. Anyway, it didn't fix the issue with the sound card.

[Topcat]

If anyone remembers the C7X99 from THIS POST, keep that in mind for the next few weeks.....a build is developing! 🙊

Ok, I promised a build, and it's been a little slow this week in the shop, so I started it yesterday.

The case for this is going to be that XPS 630i that was dropped off. As mentioned before, it didn't have the water cooling option like the last one I got had. The water coolers for these are simply non-existent, you'll never find one; atleast the OEM one.... Since this isn't going back together in its original state, I'm not too worried about originality in a any way!!

...so let's begin!!





First up is to remove the HDD cages, they are being deleted. Came from a smoker's house. That dust is sticky, stinky, and corrosive!





The old guts. Works, but not being reused.



The corrosive nicotine sludged dust ate the paint off the front mesh....





We'll get back to the paint later....but for now, lets shift gears to my cooling idea. The cooler I chose was an Asetek 650LX, for skt2011/2066. These were used for servers in datacenters. Thick core radiator.



After trimming up the lower 120mm fan shroud, the radiator attached to it nicely





Spacers to shim the radiator out to the outer lip of the shroud.



...and attached!!






Very nice fit. Like it was born there....but now you know why the HDD cages were deleted.



Fan installed.





Now disassembly for cleaning.







Now for cleaning.... The best way to remove a COA....soaked in warm water for a good hour, it just falls off....otherwise you're poking & scraping....and frucking up the plastic..... This way, it just falls off....and a clean microfiber cloth with some mineral spirits on it to dissolve any remaining glue....and gone without a trace!





Now to touch up the mesh that the corrosive nicotine sludge dust ate up....





Like it never even happened.



Tested the lights....they work.










That's where I left off for today....and most of you probably think it's just a matter of reassembling...well, it's not!! More later!

[370forlife]

I remember seeing those Dell XPS and the similar Precision machines in MaximumPC back in the day and drooling over them. So cool looking.

[370forlife]

A new (to me) soundblaster PCI512 came in and it worked immediately, so there was some sort of weird low level incompatibility with the X-Fi and the X6DAL-TB2 motherboard.

I also designed and 3D printed a cowl for the two heatsinks to have a single 120mm fan pulling air through both at the same time. That fan ejects straight into the rear 120mm case fan, which I also upgraded to a 38mm thick Nidec TA450DC to help pull more air though the case and especially over the ram and northbridge. Keeping CPU temps around 75C at full chooch now which I am really happy with.

[sam_sam_sam]

Nice work

[Topcat]

I just thought I'd cap off the XPS build. Everything worked....but not without a weird quirk. I added 64gb of PC4-3200 and saw it's only running at 2400, which is stock speeds for a v4 e5-2600 series xeon. All attempts to bump the RAM clock up to 3200 failed; BIOS would not lock in the settings and I noticed the really good overclocking tabs in the UEFI were missing.... Board had the latest BIOS on it....so I emailed a contact I have at Supermicro. He reveals that when Xeon CPU's are used in this board, all overclocking abilities are disabled and can not be enabled. The only way I can get the overclocking functions is to swap the Xeon out for a skt2011 I-series.... I'm not going to do that, so I'll just live with the RAM not running at its capacity....

Anyway....



Flash off....



Super cool lighting....





My plan was to take the removable side panel and cut a window in it.....but some other stuff came up, so that got scrubbed for now....no idea when/if I'll ever get back to it....

Supermicro C7X99-OCE-F skt2011
Xeon E5-2687W v4 @ 3GHz 12C 24T
ASETEK 650LX Liquid cooler
64GB Gskill Ripjaws RAM
EVGA 1070TI GPU
Dell M.2 adapter w/ 1TB M.2
Win10 Enterprise