Project: Sleeper Build (90's beige case, 1950x, watercooled)

[j-d0gg]

Tired of the grotesque designs of modern PC cases I sought to do something about it. Managed to cop this 90's beige server tower from a mutual friend, originally intended for a dual LGA-2011 Xeon 24-core monster, at the last second I switched the build to a 1950x Threadripper, having exclusively used server hardware since the Netburst Xeon-era this was a change of pace. Prior to that, my last consumer-grade machine ironically enough was an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe with Athlon XP3200 unlocked.

Started with this, you'll see some of the LGA2011 setup in the pics. All work done by me and myself.



Xeon setup installed, went back on the road, I drive a truck. I had to notch the inside of the drive bays to accomodate the giant S2600COE, which later proved useful when I tried to shoehorn the monster Zenith into the case. Some 80mm fan holes were drilled out in the rear of the case as well. I also drilled some holes for the S2600COE mounts on the EATX side, and later found the Zenith didn't need them, but in case you ROG guys decide to make a dual Epyc board I'll be ready to go.



A WILD ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME THREADRIPPER BUILD APPEARS!!!!



Radiator installed. The cooler is an Enermax TR360, with 3 120mm slimline pullers. Almost completely silent at times, it has 500w of heat dissipating power which is more than enough headroom for some serious overclocking, and that's before I strap some Panaflo U1A pushers on the front.



CPU, RAM and dual NVME RAID 0 boot drives installed



Guts, you can see the mounts for the radiator, I will probably drill these out for better airflow in the spring when I get home again. I fabbed up some small 40mm fans to use with the fan mount ASUS supplies with the DIMM.2 board, PerformancePC.com is based in my hometown and I drove 10min there to have them fab up all the fan connectors. They also fabbed the connectors for the 60mm I drilled behind the CPU and supplied the 80mm LED fans, which auto-modulate with the GPU temperature, once it climbs over 50*C they start pushing some air, these may be upgraded in the future to something with more horsepower as with the single R9 it gets pretty hot inside after an hour of gaming, and it will be home to either one 1080ti or two 980ti's.





Had a separate panel for a Baby AT version of this case with a window installed already so I mounted it, that machine is an ASUS P5A-B with a K6-3 450 @ 550mhz and 3dfx Voodoo 5500 PCI MAC flashed to PC, I'll probably post that mod here too, it's not ROG but ROG can trace its origins back to that motherboard it was the gamers Baby AT board of choice in the 90s with that ALi Aladdin V chipset.



23*C idle @ 4.00ghz base clock, Arctic Silver 5. Going to crank it up and beef up the fan configuration in the Spring, with Panaflo H1A or U1A pushers and two SanAce 150mm server-grade intake fans on the bottom, can you say 698cfm of cold air coming from the bottom of the case? Go big or go home baby!!!! Any more and it might suck itself to the floor!



I've made some progress past this stage but I'm on the road now and won't be back until about March to work on it some more but after these pictures, I added a pair of 2tb drives in the very top and bought those two SanAce 150's to put in the bottom. With the side of the case off and holding one 150mm fan in front of it at 50% power it dropped the GPU temp almost 10*C, so it seems I need to fab up a positive case pressure setup which should be easy, the local boneyard has tons of those fans laying around for cheap.

[MasterC]

Still have a dual-Xeon setup in service but inside a Lian Li V2000. Having so much room to play with is certainly nice, the challenge is to make the build not look half-empty when there isn't a server-sized motherboard 🙂

[j-d0gg]

MasterC@ASUS wrote:
Still have a dual-Xeon setup in service but inside a Lian Li V2000. Having so much room to play with is certainly nice, the challenge is to make the build not look half-empty when there isn't a server-sized motherboard 🙂

Having a smaller board inside that giant case is helping with cable management though, the Zenith is 2/3 the size of the S2600COE and as a result I can hide more cables behind the motherboard tray. I had an S5000PSL in a similar case and cable management was a nightmare, which I still have that setup and have thought about rebuilding it into a dedicated game server for LAN parties, it's what I upgraded to the Threadripper from. Dual Harpertown quad's, it's got plenty of grunt but they are the bottleneck in any gaming title from 2014 onward.

[j-d0gg]

6/1/2018 Update

In the quest for the magic 1ghz overclock I have built a push-pull setup with SanAce 120mm server fans that could push themselves across my desk if I let it, I've noticed a drop in temps a few *C difference. I scored the drivebay covers from a local scrapyard and the next step is manual fan controllers, I'm legitimately running out of fan headers on the Zenith and I haven't even started on the second GPU loop yet. All in, it has 17 fans. I never thought I would run into a silicon limit with overclocking but it appears I may have hit the limit on Threadripper 1950x.

The two LED fans in the rear also got dropped for some high-CFM Delta server fans which will find their way onto radiators when the Vega 20 loop gets built

Next logical step is to put the radiator fans on a separate controller which will probably either get modded into the case somehow or installed at the bottom of that 10-bay stack.