Project: Aquarius

[DeviceUnknown]

Well gang, another update. We're moving rather slowly on this. Definitely slower than we would have liked. Part of the delay was a promise by Gigabyte to provide motherboards for this ,then after jerking us around for weeks (after committing to it) changed their minds. The sponsorship really was no big deal, it was the waiting for weeks and having to resend a bunch of irrelevant information to several people. I can see why marketing positions are such high turnover. Seems every month we work with someone new in each company. Anyway, on to what we have gotten so far.

EKWB hooked us up on the blocks for the Zotac 670's we're using. We were apprehensive about the new "CSQ" design but once we had it in place, it actually flowed quite well with our design. Their circles are hardly noticeable.

As you can see we did NOT go with Gigabyte. Even if the color would have matched.

We did make some changed with the upper system. Our thought for the top system would be more of a NAS device, or low power server. So we went with the G630T Processor which is only 35 watts but more than enough performance to push what we need. I also decided to air cool it as adding a water cooling loops to such a basic system would have only increased the complexity of an already overblown system. I found the best CPU cooler to use too. REEVEN's ARCZIEL 12. I have no intentions of overclocking this upper system as it's more than powerful enough to run a Small Business server type setup. All while keeping the wattage under control. But.. With this cooler I am allowed the flexibility of upgrading to a larger processor down the road, especially since the board is 1155. The Arcziel is a fantastic CPU cooler to boot. Shame it's not available in the US yet (that i know of).
We did make one change to the CPU cooler though. We changed to a low profile 1200 RPM fan so that it would fit. We also changed the orientation so that it pulled up. Initial testing has shown us that it made little to no difference in cooling efficiency. We'll look more into it later.

We are using an external 120 watt PSU to power the upper system.

We ran into an issue needing some more internal USB headers and even some External USB headers Inside the case. Primairly for the USB Monitor we are using for the top system, which uses 2 external USB plugs. Plus we wanted to fit both systems with as much connectivity as possible. So we built our own USB "hubs" which includes several internal 4 pin plugs, and some external plugs.

Sorry for the fuzzy image. We are making more of them so I will have you some better pictures soon. Plus we intend to release the tutorial on our website for those who are not sure how to do it.

Now, I'm sorry this is such a small update. This mod really is not my priority in life right now but we know it needs to be done as we have other things to get started on. So hang in there. We should have more updates coming in faster now that we are in the assembly phase.

Thanks again for reading.

[Stonerboy779]

Good to see you back, being jerked around isn't good but hopefully some more progress soon..

[mDust]

Nice work on that USB hub! A tutorial would be awesome.

On that fan: It's going to draw most of its flow from the gap between the fan and HS. As it is now, the fan might as well not even be there. If you close that gap, the current orientation will work a lot better. Since it's a low power chip under that HS, it will probably be just peachy with its current ~90% passive, ~10% active cooling. Might want to test it with the fan unplugged to see how/if the temp reacts.

[Fuganater]

Dat is some bright green