AcIDc0r3's Cosmic-Z [Build Log]

[Lone Crusader]

I decided to create a build log of my current computer build project.

[Introduction & Plan]

1) share it with you guys.
2) get input from you guys since the plan is somewhat loose.​

My Plan is to build a liquid cooled unit for both my CPU & GPU each having a closed loop liquid cooling system.

The rig will primarily be used for Internet, heavy video editing and creation, some folding and moderate gaming. I only have one or two games I play.

{Parts List Planned}

• Cooler Master Cosmos II Ultra Tower
• Custom made acrylic full side door for the Cosmos II
• ASUS Sabortooth 990FX AM3+ motherboard
• AMD FX-8350 Vishera (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ Eight-Core Processor
• G.SKILL Trident X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) (DDR3 1866)
• CORSAIR AX860 860W Fully Modular PSU (custom sleeved with MDPC-X triple braided sleeving)
• SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950 Video Card
• 512GB Samsung 840 PRO Series SSD
• Seagate Barracuda 3TB HDD (x6)
• CORSAIR Hydro Series H110 Water Cooler for CPU
• ARCTIC Accelero Hybrid 7970 Extreme VGA Cooler
• HT Omega Stryker 7.1 Sound Card
• All Bitfenix Spectre Pro Fans all White
• BitFenix Recon Fan Controller
• Akasa InterConnect Pro USB 3.0 Panel w/ USB 3.0 Card Reader
• Case lighting

Stay tuned...thanks!

 

[Lone Crusader]

[Current State]


When I started looking for a case I decided I wanted to go back to a full tower but also wanted a side panel window as well. The Cosmos II doesn't initially come with a see through side panel so I set out to find one.

I found a guy that designs them and even puts the bend in it to conform to the case and all. There are others out there that are making them but there not putting the bend in it. Very expensive too I might add. Anyways here's a look at what the side panel looks like attached to the case.


[Additional Photos] (2013-08-01)

 

[Lone Crusader]

(2013-08-06)
I got the Dremel 4000 in as well as the MDPC-X sleeving & heatshrink. The sleeving is triple braided and is very high density. The heatshrink is better than most others that I've come across as it's a 4:1 shrink ratio, most other is 2:1 or 3:1. Had to special order it from Germany at MDPC-X. Only the best of the best will do.











All that white sleeving is 330ft, more than enough to single sleeve a power supply. Initially I had decided to go all white on the sleeving but since I've decided to go with the ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z motherboard I have now decided to also throw in some red sleeving in there too. It is presently on it's way to me now from Germany.

 

[Lone Crusader]

(2013-08-09)
So far I've sleeved almost all of my SATA data cables with an unbelievable shade of purple with white heatshrink. I've also pulled the controller unit from the Cosmos II case and plan to sleeve the cables on it as well.

I started to sleeve one cable and then I noticed the bleed through. The unfortunate result of using white sleeving over black wire. It doesn't matter how dense the sleeve is you will get bleed through.

So now I'm waiting for a 10-pack of white electrical tape so I can pre-wrap each wire. It's a lot of work but it will pay off in the end.








Waiting on my Bitfenix Spectre Pro fans so I can replace the Cooler Master ones in the case. They should be in on Friday. Hrm, I think I'll choose faster shipping next time.

(Update)
I've decided to not use the built in fan controller on the Cosmos II. Instead I've decided to go with the BitFenix Recon Fan Controller because it's a dedicated fan controller while the one built into the case is mainly a rheobus. I'll have a touch screen digital readout of all my fans rpm's and can adjust the voltage and therefore decrease it's speed if desired. So I'll now be removing a lot of those wires from that control unit.

 

[apsmith21]

Case looks badass Kelly!!

A friend at work is doing a computer build right now as well. For your non-custom parts - do you have a favorite vendor?

Also do you wait for the big sales like black friday, or do you just pick and choose as you see a deal?

 

[Lone Crusader]

Case looks badass Kelly!!

A friend at work is doing a computer build right now as well. For your non-custom parts - do you have a favorite vendor?

Also do you wait for the big sales like black friday, or do you just pick and choose as you see a deal?

Oh yeah I love shopping at NewEgg and FrozenCPU. I don't usually wait for Black Friday's as it always seems to fall at an inopportune time. If you subscribe to one of NewEgg's newsletters you'll get Shell Shocker deals like sales that last 24 or 48 hours, even special promo codes that you can only get in the newsletter. I get a newsletter from them almost everyday.

 

[Lone Crusader]

Some tools came in the mail today. I know, there just tools right... but there special tools made specifically for sleeving. That's a heat gun and that blue thing is a heat shrink cutter so I can get precision °45 cuts and a specific length consistent every time. The others are various types of molex plug removers from a power supply. Also a straight cut wire cutter that I use to cut the sleeving to a precision °45. The pursuit of perfection every time.

 

[Lone Crusader]

I got my fans for the case in today, all Bitfenix and all white. There actually a little too white for what I want which is why I bought these fans in the first place. What's really cool about these fans is that you can separate the blade section form the outer shroud making it easy squezy to spray paint.

I want to keep my blades white but I'll paint the shroud that it fits in black to match the inside of the case. There are so many fans out there that's it's really hard to choose so I spent a couple of days sifting through all the different ones and then finding a review about it on YT then finally deciding on what I wanted.

In about two weeks I should have the brunt of just about everything I'm setting up on this build besides the new video card and GPU liquid cooler then I can start customizing it and putting it all together.

 

[Wreck]

looking good bud. I have the dremel 4000 as well. Works great.

 

[Lone Crusader]

I just got my red MDPC-X sleeving in, unfortunately I don't think it will go with my motherboard. I changed motherboards at the last minute and decided to get the Asus Sabertooth 990fx instead of the Asus Crosshar V Formula-Z so my color coordination has changed now. I'm going to order some more MDPC sleeving but I'm unsure as to which color to get.

Here's my motherboard.

Here's three colors of the MDPC sleeving. Can you guys help me decide which color to go with? What do you think?

VANILLA SANDS N.17

Grey, Titanium or Shade 19

COMMANDO GREEN

 

[Lordhumungus]

Really liking the direction you are going here. Personally I'd go with the green color sleeving as it's the most unusual. If you are going to water cool at all if you could get the cooling liquid to match that color (I'd imagine a sort of milky green) that would be absolutely stunning.

 

[Horhay]

Nice setup Acid! I am not an AMD/ATI guy so that's my only bias lol. This makes me want to build a new setup, mine is definitely starting to show its age, but I don't like go on a budget so I rather not do this now

 

[Lone Crusader]

Really liking the direction you are going here. Personally I'd go with the green color sleeving as it's the most unusual. If you are going to water cool at all if you could get the cooling liquid to match that color (I'd imagine a sort of milky green) that would be absolutely stunning.

Thanks, I was sort of leaning towards the commando green. I'll probably go with that. Thanks

Nice setup Acid! I am not an AMD/ATI guy so that's my only bias lol. This makes me want to build a new setup, mine is definitely starting to show its age, but I don't like go on a budget so I rather not do this now

Man it takes mucho deneros to upgrade a computer nowadays. Actually in my case building an entirely new rig aside from the hard drives. Yeah I have friends that are anti AMD/ATI too and there rigs are just as fancy as mine. I used to be an nVidia fan too a while back.

 

[Horhay]

Man it takes mucho deneros to upgrade a computer nowadays. Actually in my case building an entirely new rig aside from the hard drives. Yeah I have friends that are anti AMD/ATI too and there rigs are just as fancy as mine. I used to be an nVidia fan too a while back.

Yeah don't get me wrong, your setup sounds pretty damn fantastic, but yeah when AMD sat on their laurels and didn't really kept improving after AMD64 I jumped ship. Intel has been my favorite for a few years now. I think the last ATI cards I had were the 9800GTX and then I followed that with the X800 GTX. I absolutely hated their terrible CCC driver packages when they tried to add bloatware. At that point they lost me as a customer.

I agree on the money, the last rig I build was a few years back as that ran me close to 3 grand. So yeah going budget is big no no in my book

Are you using that SSD for OS only and the 3TGB as storage? Otherwise wouldn't there be some bottleneck between the two with reading data?

Is that your first HT Omega card? I currently have an ASUS and that blows the Creative cards out of the water IMO.

 

[Lone Crusader]

Yeah don't get me wrong, your setup sounds pretty damn fantastic, but yeah when AMD sat on their laurels and didn't really kept improving after AMD64 I jumped ship. Intel has been my favorite for a few years now. I think the last ATI cards I had were the 9800GTX and then I followed that with the X800 GTX. I absolutely hated their terrible CCC driver packages when they tried to add bloatware. At that point they lost me as a customer.

I agree on the money, the last rig I build was a few years back as that ran me close to 3 grand. So yeah going budget is big no no in my book

Are you using that SSD for OS only and the 3TGB as storage? Otherwise wouldn't there be some bottleneck between the two with reading data?

Is that your first HT Omega card? I currently have an ASUS and that blows the Creative cards out of the water IMO.

Yeah I'm using the SSD strictly for my OS, all the other optical drives are only for data usage.
I'm considering getting another smaller SSD for cashing purposes. I haven't quiet decided on that yet though.

The HT Omega Stryker is an awesome card. When I first bought it I was kicking Creative to the curb because they didn't support Dolby Digital Live on any of there cards plus they have massive bloatware on there driver installs. I wanted the DDL because it gives you surround sound during game play and also while watching movies that are in surround sound.

All in all I think this will be a killer build. I get most of the gear coming in this Thursday and Friday so it's going to be a real interesting weekend. I'll throw it all together as a test bench initially to make sure all the components work, then I'll tear it all down and start to sleeve the power supply and everything. I'm also painting some of the parts on the inside of the case too so my work is definitely cut out for me.

 

[Lone Crusader]

I got some more gear in today, actually this bunch is the heart and soul of the rig. Motherboard, PSU, CPU Liquid Cooler, RAM, Bitfenix 140mm Spectre Pro fan, Xigmatek Thermal Compound. I'll be getting more in tomorrow.

 

[Lordhumungus]

I'm curious what made you decide to go the AMD route. There are some pretty solid arguments for their graphics cards, but not as much for their CPUs. Is it purely to support competition or something else? In either case, you should have yourself quite the rig.

On a related note, my brother-in-law is asking me to help him sell his Cosmos II after he got the Corsair 900D to do a full custom water loop. Since the Cosmos is almost large enough to be a vacation rental and we don't have the original box, I'm trying to figure out the best way to sell it.

 

[Horhay]

Good luck selling that case, it's huge! Lol

 

[Lone Crusader]

I'm curious what made you decide to go the AMD route. There are some pretty solid arguments for their graphics cards, but not as much for their CPUs. Is it purely to support competition or something else? In either case, you should have yourself quite the rig.

On a related note, my brother-in-law is asking me to help him sell his Cosmos II after he got the Corsair 900D to do a full custom water loop. Since the Cosmos is almost large enough to be a vacation rental and we don't have the original box, I'm trying to figure out the best way to sell it.

I've always preferred AMD to Intel to perfectly honest. I do deal with Intel all day at work, mostly the Xeon architecture processing servers and such. If I was building a server I would go Intel because they tend to be better suited towards the server end than AMD is.

I prefer AMD over Intel because they run cooler for one thing which means longer life expectancy and they draw less power than an Intel does. They also integrate better with a AMD type graphics card. Call me a fan boi I guess. No actually I've gone with AMD since there inception and I even have stock in AMD.

That's funny that you mention trying to sell the Cosmos II after getting a 900D because I have a friend that helped me yesterday put my system together and he already has a 990D and after seeing my Cosmos II he wants to switch to a Cosmos II. It doesn't surprise me though because those two cases are direct competitors of each other. They're both pretty much the best two cases on the market right now.

I don't tend to overclock too extreme so that's why I went with a closed loop prefab liquid cooling unit for my AMD. I already put it through the test by converting my Blu-ray of Expendables 2 to a MP4 file. It's running stock right now as I haven't overclocked it yet and just idle the FX 8350 was running at 98° and while it was converting it jumped up to 119°. That's not bad considering my last processor the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition 6-core processor ran 115° idle with a stock air cooled unit.

My advice on selling the Cosmos II is to not send it by mail because it weighs 45lbs. Instead sell it on Craigslist, you should get a nibble on it considering it's one of the top cases on the market.

 

[Lone Crusader]

Small update:

It's mostly put together, i.e., it's up and running quite good actually. I'm still waiting on the clear acrylic door. Also I still haven't sleeved anything except for my case fans (white) and SATA data cables (purple). I'm beginning to think that white was a bad choice for sleeving my power supply. The reason being that the PSU cables are all black which means that there is bleed through with white sleeving.

When I sleeved my fans in white sleeve I had to first wrap the wire in white electrical tape. This made the wire larger in diameter or the area to be sleeved was larger in diameter. So I thought, well I'll just paint the wires white with paint made for plastic. Hrm, I don't think that's going to work either because as I bend the wire which wire is made to do it will cause the paint to sledge.

I've decided to get some different color sleeving from MDPC. I've decided on 130 ft of Commando Green and 200 ft of Shade 19.
Shade 19

Commando Green

Anyways I can't update with any pics because I'm waiting on my new card reader to come in. I mean it's just simple right now with no sleeving and I haven't painted some of the pieces inside the case yet but it looks really clean and organized. When I get the reader in Friday I'll post a pic.