"Captain Kangaroo"

So this is the genesis of my latest build, which I can start a log on now that the majority of the parts are here.
After a few incremental steps into my AM5 journey, I'd arrived at this. It's pretty awesome, but kinda boring too.
The 7900XTX vapor chamber has a flaw which gives many of them massive hotspot deltas. My Nitro+ was one of them. Apart from that, it's awesome .
My 9950X was struggling a little with a 280 AIO, so I moved it up to a 360, but still not totally happy. Nothing drastic but I do like shit to be . So a proper loop, and just for good measure I'm going to rip the lid off and run direct die .

So boring and hotter than I'd like. Obviously need a custom loop for that, haven't done one for a few years now anyway so yep, tick that box. But I've always wanted to build one in a desk drawer under glass too. Tick that one too. Oh shit this won't fit my desk. So I'ma gonna need to build a new desk too

So this has now pivoted from the pix below being the final product, to adding another 3 grand or so to the build .





Phillips 438P1 43" 4K IPS 75Hz
Corsair K70 keyboard
Corsair Ironclaw mouse
Edifier S360DB 2.1 speakers
Audio-Technica ATH-M70X phones
The case is a DeepCool CH360 Digital.

 

In this post I'll include videos of delidding my 9950X. Scary stuff, it's been years and the chips werent so damn expensive back then. Necessary when you are going direct die though.

Videos need a bit of editing yet, but heres a teaser...

 

The tentative 'Captain Kangaroo' name refers to the gold fittings and the vivid green coolant I'll be using. Fan LED's will only be active on the inner fans, and will be set as a white/blue white static colour most likely. I might stick a 'made in Australia' sticker in it just for kitsch.

So it's all coming together.
The loop will be

GPU (Sapphire Nitro+ 7900XTX 24GB)
CPU (Ryzen 9-9950X 16c/32t Zen5)
Temp/flow sensor (Barrow digital inline)(sensing HOT point after both heat sources consecutively)
pump (Freezemod DDC+ 100mm Res top)(with drain tap and hose on a T)
RAD (Freezemod 45mm x 360 full copper)
RAD (Alphacool XT45 X-Flow x 360 full copper)
RAD (Freezemod 45mm x 360 full copper)
pump (Freezemod DDC+ 100mm Res top)
Temp/flow sensor (Barrow digital inline) (sensing COLD point after all 3 rads consecutively)
then back to the GPU

The perspex forms a false floor under which cables will hide. A couple of access hatches will be created.
The pumps will be lowered, by cutting holes in the false floor, to ensure they are the lowest point of the loop. One of them has a tap and flexible hose on a T junction from the pump outlet, which will sit within the case but be able to push 40cm of hose through a hole in the bottom to allow easy draining.
All other plumbing is hard line.

The PSU, drives, IO etc will all sit at the front of the drawer. No external IO will be available, the case is a drawer after all, access is just pulling the drawer open a few inches
I've oriented the board both to keep easy access to the rear IO, and help with cable management. With the GPU oriented where it is, there will be NO visible cables through the glass desk top, as the front PSU area will be covered.

On the subject of drives, I''m considering getting even sillier. I have a gen4 M.2 slot I'm not using. I have 3 unused SATA ports on the board too. A Silverstone adapter, (x5 SATA from the M.2), added to the spare board ports, gives me 8 full speed SATA3 ports.

6x 240GB SATA SSD's and a couple of 500GB SATA SSD's for especially chonky games would allow 8 games to be installed on their own dedicated SSD's for not a huge lot of cash (on the scale of shit I've already blown on this thing !!) .

Theres a x4 riser running to an IO board with high speed high power USB C-A ports. The motherboard USB C is running to a front USB3x2 + audio set. All of these will be tidied up to make a nice little accessible set within the front of the drawer.

The front of the drawer will be blank, except for a power switch.

 

Mockup

All of the delidding has been done. The CPU block is direct die mounted. Both CPU and GPU have liquid metal applied.
The GPU is on a 90° PCB riser. This allowed me to run the X4 riser cable from the lower slot on the motherboard to allow the desired location of the X4 USB board, and I believe laying it down like this adds to the aesthetic too .I'm also trying to keep the height of the drawer down to less than filing cabinet size

Note the orientation, the rear IO is actually to the left as you look at it from the front, improving access.

The side rads are both standard 45mm low FPI 360 copper rads intaking push/pull.
They are linked via the rear rad, a crossflow 45mm low FPI 360 copper rad exhausting push/pull.
The fans will run at 800-2000 rpm, I'm hoping to just lock them permanently on 800, I think it should be possible. With 18 of them..........

 

Needs more rads

 

Delidding a 9950X jeez, you're game! Looks like it went smoothly though.

 

You should play this when you first get it up and running;

JSmith

 

One of my favourite songs and precisely where the name came from
Don't try and actually watch Captain Kangaroo though, it's on YouTube and utterly abyssmal...

 

Havent had the chance to test it yet . Fingers crossed.
It's not my first rodeo delidding of course, but a soldered $1000 chip was a bit scarier than usual. Debauer's tool is great though, pretty idiot proof.
Direct die CPU cooling is new to me too, but I think it all went well enough . The GPU block was so much more relaxing with no delidding to do of course.

Naturally it's all liquid metal now too

 

I've realised that I can't fit the suggested M.2 with Sata ports, they will foul the GPU.

Since I have easy access to the rear IO with the board mounted sideways anyway, and I have plenty of hubs, I'm going to abandon the PCIE USB hub I was going to run from the X4 riser.
Instead, I'm going to run a PCIE 6 port SATA card from that x4 riser.

That will once again leave my second M.2 available, which is a Gen4 slot, so I'm going to stick a 4TB Crucial T500 in there as originally planned.
I'm going to remove the pair of 3.5" 4TB Toshibas and condense them to a single drive (the T500) plus external storage. The T500 will handle the most often used storage, and double as a scratch drive for video editing.

That leaves me with completely mechless storage.
2TB PCIE-5 OS drive (Crucial T705)
4TB PCIE-4 data drive (Crucial T500)
6 empty SATA ports on a PCIE-4 x4 expansion card
4 (now empty) SATA ports on the board.

I'm going populate ALL of those SATA ports with 7x 250GB SATA SSD's (30 bucks each) and 3x 500GB SSD's (60 bucks each).
Each drive dedicated to it's own game, with the few larger drives for the occasional real chonker of a game. Seems like a hella cheap way to get games running fast .

I've also bought a new secondhand PSU

From MrPariah in the forums here, a Coolermaster V1300 Platinum , to replace my aging HX1000i.
18 fans, 10 drives, a couple of pumps, some high demand processing, way too much RGB etc, I don't think it hurts to have a little extra headroom , especially when I'm more of an overclocker than a gamer....

 

What purpose do all the smaller drives serve exactly?

 

The theory is that I can dedicate a drive to each game, keeping everything in the same place rather than trying to load stuff from a spinning drive mid game. NFI if that's a valid theory but WTF why not . Or use them as scratch drives for Premier and DaVinci. Whatever, I'll find a use.

In case you hadn't noticed, nothing about this build makes any real world sense at all for my use case!! Just roll with it lmao

 

Like it anyway. Makes you happy Brave delid

 

Madman, no surprises here but I fully support this, very cool

If you don't do things "because I can" well life is a little more boring.

 

It's all actually developing a lot more than it looks in these pix, I'm not that far off installing some plumbing.
New PSU is in, kinda. CM V1300 Platinum, should do the job.

I kinda forgot about this though. I'm glad I realised, it would have been a bastard to remember when the loop was built and running.....



Both drives belong underneath the GPU.


Factory heatspreader covers both drives.


That's better.
The PCIE-5 T705 OS drive is 2TB. The PCIE-4 T500 Data drive is 4TB. The latter being the cheaper drive PCIE-5 is still a bit pricey.


And this 6 port thing will run off the X4 riser cable to help enable my nest of cheap SATA SSD's, along with all 4 of the mobo SATA ports being available.
That will give me 10x 250G SATA SSD game drives (each dedicated to a single game) plus the pair of fast NVME drives in total.
Most of my data is stored externally anyway, this will be ample.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/405776997517

 

Would highly recommend doing a dry run and get everything running directly plugged into mobo before you start with the plumbing!
I always just put it together on the desktop, GPU straight in, RAM and HDD's, stock air cooler or similar and get it working with an OS of your choice, and possibly even stress test a few things. Much easier to find any issues now than once you have it all plumbed up and water filled.

 

Dedicated brand new 240GB SATA Crucial BX500 SSD game drives. One per game, 10 in total (more games than I own ).
6 of them via 6 port PCIE4 x4 riser/card, and the other 4 from the motherboard. Nice little 92mm fan for a bit of breeze around them just in case, with a grill to prevent cables and shit from fouling the fan. Airflow will exhaust the system immediately after passing by the drives.

 

yikes. bx

but i guess you run out of nvme ports...

nice to see the project. anyway.

is there not a multi nvme add in card..? gum-drives can be cheap .
the sata drive is a bit slow. not really that much in reality but ya-know. it's a biatch when youve had faster.

 

They are purely game drives. Main advantage will be seek times I'd imagine, which are already fast by simply being SSD's. At only 30 bucks each they should provide at least a little performance gain, not bad bang for the buck if it works out.

I only have 2x NVME slots, a PCIE5 which has a PCIE5 2TB OS drive, and a PCIE4 which has a PCIE4 4TB Data drive. I considered running some extra drives from the second M.2 instead of the data drive but the
layout of the rig makes that slot inaccessible for anything out of the ordinary. The GPU being parallel to the board and only 15mm clear of it kinda limits some things.

I only have one available PCIE4 slot (the other being PCIE4 GPU), which is physically X16 but electrically X4. I could add NVME to that, sure, but not as many as I can SATA, and I think? the performance difference will be negligible. Even to use that slot, I've had to run a card from a riser cable.`

Really I probably should just use a different board, but this one is working out pretty well with some creativity, I like the way it's heading. I hope to get a fair bit done over the weekend, hopefully the next pix will be more interesting .

 

Can't stay focused much these days. Moved to another part of the project for a break.

The desk begins...
A simple acacia benchtop, with some metal rectangles for legs.
The legs are undecided as yet, I would normally continue the desktop to the floor with wood. These don't look bad though. I can still change my mind later, I'll see what it looks like once it has the PC drawer under it. I'll have some kind of board across the back legs too, for rigidity and cable management. I'm just going to put floor sliders under this one, no wheels.

Cut to size glass is horribly expensive, I've gone with a kitchen glass splashback of all things, for 60 bucks on ebay. It's the nearest thing I can find to what I need in precut glass, but will cause some changes in layout as it is 800Wx400D (6mm clear TG). That's about 150mm wider than I would have liked, so the drawer needs to be wider to suit. The depth is perfect.

I'll probably leave a couple of braces across the hole (so multiple holes?) since it's only 6mm glass, just for a little extra strength.

There is a plethora of cheap options in acrylic, but not even vaguely tempted to go that way.

Not a huge issue, the desk is 2200W (600D) so plenty of room. I'll have to take up some space in the drawer with waifu or something lmao. Maybe a whole family of Ratzz...



Once the glass arrives midweek I'll triple check for size, cut a hole and rout a lip around it for indenting the glass flush into the desktop.