In the coming months, I will be moving. When that occurs, I will be giving another shot at UV Orange Coolant. It appears that pretty much everyone has gotten out of the market of making it anymore, so I’m rolling the dice on a brand that I don’t know as well.
Until then, here’s the latest couple of updates.
So I received my order for the Primochill UV Orange Dye today. Strangely….just like the UV Orange Coolant, the UV on the packaging was marked out with black marker. I still added the dye, it at least improved the color, but is definately not UV reactive….e-mail sent to http://www.performance-pcs.com . yay fun. I have also sent my 3rd e-mail and tried to call about the broken cathode that I received, but still not response from http://www.adorama.com .
On the plus side, my 3 new fans came in. I’m setting them up to specifically be quiet. They are the same as the 3 intake fans that I have set up for the radiator in color. 2 are 120mm and 1 is 140mm. They work great at least.
Soooo, there’s a few delays, I’m still waiting for the UV Orange Dye. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get the side window for the 915, upper portion of the case. Coolermaster seems to have abandoned the case altogether and doesn’t even have replacement parts. I’m tempted to mod it myself, but with it being my first attempt at a side panel mod, I’d at least like to have a back up. I had a 3rd cathode coming in, but it came in broken, sooo waiting on the customer support of Adorama.
While waiting I found a deal on a G.Skill Ripjaws KM780 RGB (brown switches for around $100 after some running around), so I picked it up. I’ve been running a Steelseries 6GV2 (black switches) for several years, but the “C” key seems to over poll and I’ve had issues with that keyboard since purchase. I’ve also owned a Steelseries Apex (rubber domes and it was soooo wide), a Corsair RBG Red (never worked as I wished it to and returned to Best Buy), and a Corsair with brown switches (LEDs started dying within a day and they couldn’t replace the board with the exact same one, so I got a refund from Corsair). Anyways, I also wanted orange LEDs, but despite paying $50 more for a Ducky Shine 4, I would have to go RGB. For RBGs I was considering this G.Skill, the silent switch Corsair Strafe (currently only available at Best buy for ~$160) or a Ducky Shine 5 with Natural White Cherry MX switches (first RGB on switch for Cherry), running around $160 on eBay. I didn’t go with this just because it was cheaper, but I liked the extra buttons, the design and its basically comparable the rest of the keyboards (okay, supposedly Corsair’s software has improved over my previous experience and supposedly better than the G.Skill’s software, but to be honest, I just set this keyboard up and it did exactly what I wanted with no issues). The better benefit of the Ducky Shine 5 is that there is not “key bleed” (light shining outside of the keys, the Natural Whites only shine through the key itself, so that it highlights just the character).
Another fun thing was pH testing ORANGE water….no matter what I did the results were orange…so with a suggestion from my friend [XMEN]Gambit, I went with a digital pH meter.
Now for pictures and a couple of videos:
All of the major parts are in. Time to get them together!
IMO, the motherboard is the single most important part in a computer. It determines what other components you can use. It also determines the speeds those components can run at and connects everything together. The motherboard I’ve chosen, is the X99 SOC Champion. This board is aimed towards overclockers and matched my orange and black scheme.
Here’s the motherboard in place:
The CPU is important in that it determines the direction you are going with your build. On some chipsets, you can go with a dual-core Pentium if you are just looking at browsing the web or you could go with an i3, a dual core with Hyperthreading so that it logically performs as a quad-core. If you aim at truly high resolution gaming, an i5 might be your goal as it truly is a quad-core. If you are considering more workstation or 3d design related activities, you will aim for an i7, which on most chipsets (like the Z79) is a quad-core with HyperThreading, so that it acts like it has 8 cores. I went with x99, this leaves me with the options of the i7-5820k, i7-5930k or i7-5960k. The 5820 and 5930 are 6 cores with HyperThreading, while the 5960 has 8 cores with HyperThreading. As previously mentioned, I went with the 5930.
Here’s the CPU seated on the motherboard.
Here’s a shot with the memory seated.
Next is the installation of the CPU cooler.
Oooh Shiny…
While installing the pump, everything seemed fine, until I connected the fan header. One of the leads popped off of the pump. In a way that I couldn’t repair it directly…Though I did try:
After disassembling a couple of fans, I found a header that replaced the broken one. I spliced it into the wiring. Though this lead to an adventure with Cooler Master, because they couldn’t find the serial number in their system. That ended up taking some time to resolve, but they did fix it.
Similar to the processor, the Video card is determined by your planned usage. In some processors the video is actually on board. This is a great option for someone who is just browsing. From there the range can go crazy, up to multiple cards being combined into acting as one.
As I do game heavily, I decided to go with one of the higher end cards, the NVidia GTX 980. The specific card I went with cost a bit more than the other 980s, as it has the option to use water or air. I intend to go to water later, so this was the most ideal choice. It is also an awesome card in that the chips are tested by Asus and they pick the best ones to use on this specific card.
This won’t be the only card to reside in this computer, as competitions come up that specify different GPU/Chipset combinations.
Card in place:
One of my favorite things to do is run wiring. I love to make them disappear as best as possible. This case really made it easy as it has plenty of space behind the motherboard plate. It also helps that the case had the option to mount the SSD behind the motherboard, making wires even easier to hide.
The view from behind:
And we have lights! Plenty more coming soon!
Nilk's Place 