Custom Watercooled Desk PC 2013

Hello Fellow Modders!!

Matty from the UK here. This is my first ever post not only on TBCS but anywhere for modding :eek:

After seeing a few custom built desk PC's floating around the web I fell in love with the idea and couldn't resist having a crack at it myself. I've built PC's before but nothing on this scale.

So for the past 3 months I've been in CAD and came up with a few idea's before settling for my favorite and really going to town on it.

My idea was to have a wooden desk with 2 viewing area's in it for the m/board and for the HDD's. I would have a cabinet on one side which would house the radiator, PSU and cabling to make it as neat as possible. After mulling the idea over for a while I decided it would be a great idea to house the monitors in the desk as-well, sort of have them pop up when i wanted them and hide them away when I didn't.

Anyways it all looked good in theory but the idea was just in my head and in 2D drawings until that is I found Sketchup (No idea how I've missed it before), now I have a 3D model of it and though it looked good so thought why not post it on the forums and get other modders views on it.

So here are the picture so far

I'm really please with the results so decided to go ahead and get a prototype built. I'm not a woodworker and don't really have the space to do woodwork as I live in a flat, therefore i'm going to get the pieces cut on a CNC machine and assemble it elsewhere.

Luckily my mum works for a company with a wood CNC machine :D and they have agreed to cut the pieces for me for free out of scrap wood they have. EGGSCELLENT!!!

So the drawings went off today and hopefully I'll have the bits cut within a week.

There won't be many updates until then but I'm very keen to see what people think of the idea so let me know :)

Happy Modding!!

Matty C

Awesome hookup with the free material and CNC work.

Are you sure you want the monitors all on the same plane? I have three monitors and angle the side ones in a little bit. I know that eyefinity and Nvidia Surround assume they're on the same plane, but I just think it looks better and is easier to view.

In any case, welcome to the forums and I can't wait to see this thing put together.

Yeah the plan is to have the outer ones angled slightly so that in theory the screens will roughly be the same distance away from you. I wasn't sure how to show that in Sketchup :)

Once I get the prototype made out of scraps i'm going to play with the idea of having moveable vesa mounts that sort of slide on a rail so i can position the monitors pretty much wherever i want them.

Can't wait to finally have the wood so I can start assembling!!

Whilst I'm waiting for the prototype to be cut i'm going to take a good look at the water cooling.

This is my 1st watercooling project and have a reasonable idea of what I want it to look like but are there any real do's and don'ts when it comes to water cooling?

The water stays inside the tubes ;)

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Originally Posted by Stonerboy779

The water stays inside the tubes ;)

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Ahhh so that's where i've been going wrong :facepalm:

Haha nah seriously it depends on what you want to achieve. Now alot of this build will be looks with such large viewing areas. So you may even want to consider watercooling your mobo as well as your CPU and GPUs. When it comes to tubing you can do all sorts of things, clear with dye which is good when you have transperent tops to your waterblocks. You can use coloured tubing inculding UV reactive tubing which can be used to great effect. Another very slick thing that can be done is sleeving the tubes in techflex.

With fittings you will get the cleanest looks from compression fittings and make sure to pick a tubing size with a reletively thick wall, means its less likely to kink when bent. In terms of performance its best to have a single loop with adequate flow. With reletively high flow blocks and rads something like a single d5 pump will suffice especially if your loop will be, as it looks like it will be, largely in the horizontal plane.

When picking rads and fans I would suggest fatter rads with wider spaced fins. Something like the xspc rx rads. Then you can use a heap of reletively inexpensive yate loon fans at moderate speeds for great cooling but little noise. And that's bout all I got for you at the moment besides saying distilled water and a silver kill coil or drop of pt nuke is what you want in your loop.

Sorry been away for a feew days and not had chance to post :redface:

Thanks for the comments Stonerboy779, this build is definitely about the looks, I'm really looking for a wow factor when it's finished.

I had decided on the colour scheme as being green, so will be having custom green rad grills, each cable will be re-sleeved in green/black. Looking at some chrome compression fittings and clear water blocks.

Naturally the fluid will be green but the UV tubings also something to look at. With the UV tubing could I get away with clear fluid? Actually no because the clear blocks will want green fluid going through them :facepalm:

I have 4 x 140mm LED fans on the side ready for the rad but struggling to find a 280x280 rad anywhere so might have to have 2 280x140 rads instead.

The hardest thing at the moment is actually the watercooling for the 4 x 1 TB HDD's (RAID5) I'm going to have in the RHS view window. Can't figure out the best way to cool them.

Unfortunately my mums company has been quite busy so haven't got round to the cutting yet. Since i'm getting this bit done for free it feels very rude to chase them :-) I have however dropped a couple of hints i'd love to have it by the end of January.

In the meantime i'm going to work on designing my control panel to go on the cabinet front. This will house the anti-vandal push buttons for power, reset and up/down for the monitors. It will also house the optical drive, a blanking plate and pretty much anything else I can fit on it that I might need. I'll have a few pics of this out in the next couple of days.

Most people wouldn't but Thermal take did make a HDD watercooled no idea if you can still get suck things but check out frozencpu it'll probably your best bet on finding one.

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Originally Posted by Stonerboy779

Most people wouldn't but Thermal take did make a HDD watercooled no idea if you can still get suck things but check out frozencpu it'll probably your best bet on finding one.

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Yeah that's what I thought, would like to keep them cool if I can so will continue to shop around. If I can't find anything I see a custom acrylic block being made to house them :D

Wasn't sure how interested people would be in seeing the CAD drawings but thought I'd at least upload it for those who might want to see it.

Below is the layout I've sent to be cut. There are 6 sheets of 2440mm x 1220mm, 3 at 15mm deep, 1 at 18mm and 2 at 3mm. Each sheet has several of the pieces nested onto it to try and save as much wood as possible but as you can see there is loads of wood there :sigh:.

I've not really played with CAD much but I had so much fun doing this. When it came to doing it in Sketchup having the CAD drawing done it was actually a really good exercise to make sure all the pieces fitted. I had to make a couple of minor adjustments but everything was pretty much spot on.

Hey. Looks great. Similar to what I do with the laser cutter at school on a regular basis, only much bigger.

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Originally Posted by d_stilgar

Hey. Looks great. Similar to what I do with the laser cutter at school on a regular basis, only much bigger.

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Haha it's huuuuge but I was being greedy having 3 23" monitors so needed to be :D

Sorry guys it's been ges since I put an update on but the company cutting the wood for free were very busy and only got round to it last week.

So anyway I finally got all the parts delivered on Friday and spent Sunday drilling holes and assembling as much as I could.

Here are a few pics that I took.

Just some of the wood lying around, In this pic i've already manually routed length ways ready for my sliding doors.

Holes drilled for cam locks and dowels for all my side panels.

My Shelving and cabinet bases ready to be routed for the cam locks.

Assembly time!!!!

Right cabinet assembled and mounted

I got a bit too into the assembly at this point and and forgot to take more pictures lol but here is the main frame fully assembled. The long thin panel that sticks out at the back was too tight a fit so i'm going to shave 1mm off all around the edge to help it slot into place.

Left cabinet where the main components will be and the m/board will sit in the top bay.

Holes for the fans where my cooling will be.

Here you can see my sliding rear panels in action, ignore the hole going all the way through, i didn't put the smaller panel in place as i was running out of time.

Finally the left view with a fan hole for taking air out.

There still loads of work to do but I'm really pleased with it so far and extremely happy that other than a couple of small ajustments the whole thing went together easily.

Oh btw the glass you can see is on the desk at the moment is just some spare stuff my dad had in his garage that roughly fitted the slot so just put it there to get a rough idea of the end result.

Next I need to build the monitor housing and buy myself an actuator to lift it, should be fun so will update you when doing that.

Just a quick update to say I’ve got my actuator and linear rails ordered to raise the monitor housing :D

I've ordered a heavy duty 500mm Stroke actuator with manual controller (Which will be modified).

The rails I've ordered are also 500MM and will just guide the monitor housing when it's being raised/lowered.

Once it arrives in a few days I’ll create a little video of the actuator working.

Project on hold - Sorry

I don't know how I missed these updates. This is looking awesome! Too bad to see it on hold. Hopefully you'll be able to resume soon.