R40 Engineering station - The making off

Final result

The final result with everything mounted and working!

A list of parts and "fun facts". The price of the base components in the build (main hardware) is around 3800$, the rest of the estimated build cost is what it would cost to replicated all the cables, custom parts etc.

I always enjoy working in 3D, so I decided to make this drawing that shows some of the custom parts I made for this project.

Base case with only motherboard and radiators installed. I actually designed this case myself, and am co-owner of the company that sells them, but that is another story.

The processor that I will be using is a 8 core/16 thread beast, capable of handling everything I should need it for.

The GPU´s are the Nvidia 980 TI´s. They are great for gaming which I will also be using the system for, but not so great for heavy duty 3D jobs. They will be fine for me, as the programs I use is mostly CPU intensive.

The watercooling is all connected with these fittings. The base principle is much like that of standard house piping. There is 2 o-rings inside of them, that compresses onto a piece of OD12 mm hard tubing.

The standard coolers of the CPU and GPU´s are being replaced with waterblocks. The water in the system then cools the copper, which has direct contact to the PCB and components.

All the cables have been made from scratch, and are individual length. This is one of the things that took the longest in the build.
All of these tools where purchased from www.e22.biz, and I can highly recommend you to try custom cabling out!

Testing out the color scheme.

I designed this cable plate which I had numbers engraved into so I knew exactly where each cable should go.

The cable plate mounts onto one of the case parts, and routes the cables directly into the individual components.

To make something fancy and practical for this build, I started out with a solid block of cast acrylic (never use extruded acrylic when milling, there is way to much internal stress in that, and your part will crack).

This block was machined into a sort of "distributor" that routes the fluid from one component to the next one.
The part was modeled in Solidworks, and machined on an industrial CNC machine.
It took roughly 5 hours to machine it, including setup and programming.

The block is sealed with o-rings, and then a 6 mm layer of acrylic.

Here you again see the fittings that the tubing will connect to.

To light up the front panel I lasercut grooves into the acrylic plates that is the front of the case. These fits perfectly with a 5 mm wide LED strip, that was then hooked up to a fan controller.

The LED strip is hidden by this metal plate that is the outer front of the case.

The distributing block is mounted via various different layers of materials.

The metal plate in the rear has also been precisely lasercut to fit the fittings.

All cables, and components mounted. I made a piece of acrylic that makes the cables turn 180 degrees without taking up to much space.

The cables returns to the power supply unit trough the cable plate shown earlier. It took a fair bit of tries to get them the correct length.

Starting the piping of the build. Each pipe has to be cut very precisely, as a mm or two will make them look way out of line.

Top and bottom piping done. Here you can see the radiators that will transfer the heat from the water into the air. There will be fans mounted on top of these holes that will draw air trough the radiators.

Final shots of the build, thanks for watching! If you want to see me fill it up with fluid, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OwB5al5KXg

Final shots of the build, thanks for watching! If you want to see me fill it up with fluid, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OwB5al5KXg

Final shots of the build, thanks for watching! If you want to see me fill it up with fluid, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OwB5al5KXg

Final shots of the build, thanks for watching! If you want to see me fill it up with fluid, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OwB5al5KXg