I have had this PC for about 5 years now and had started to think about upgrading it, recently upgraded the 6 x 320Gb SATA disks to 6 x 2TB SAS drives in a RAID 5 setup. Upgraded the LTO-4 to a LTO-5 Tape backup unit
I have wanted a water cooler in it ever since I got it built as when I ordered it, I requested the largest air cooler there was, because living in Queensland where the room temp stays 26-30C for most of the year round, the PC gets hot and overclocking the CPU doesn't help. So the techo's put in a Noctua NH-D15, unfortunately because of the large heat spreaders on the RAM modules they were only able to put it in sideways as the heat pipe from the cooler touched the RAM modules.
That position also meant that it blocked off the first 16x slot and also the second 8x PCI-E slot, at the time that wasn't an issue as I had plenty of slots left, the motherboard is an ASUS P9X79-E WS (which has 4x16 and 4x8 slots). Since then I have been adding RAID cards and starting to run out of slots and that cooler has always bugged me, (bit like walking daily past a wall picture that is crooked and not being able to fix it), very annoying.
So finally had enough and bought a water cooler (Deepcool Castle240RV2) as my tower case wasn't designed to hold a cooler radiator that big, I spent about 3 hours today bending things and squashing bits of the frame it now fits and works as it should. Temps are the same but I now have my slots back, I ordered a used CPU from China (E5-2689) that will give me 8 cores and 16 threads and that should be here in a few weeks.
My new 4k 27" LG monitor should come tomorrow and a then all I will need is another graphics card, but that will have to wait a bit now as I am broke. (Had to borrow from the missus to get the monitor ) Now at least this setup should last me another 5 years!
I have wanted a water cooler in it ever since I got it built as when I ordered it, I requested the largest air cooler there was, because living in Queensland where the room temp stays 26-30C for most of the year round, the PC gets hot and overclocking the CPU doesn't help. So the techo's put in a Noctua NH-D15, unfortunately because of the large heat spreaders on the RAM modules they were only able to put it in sideways as the heat pipe from the cooler touched the RAM modules.
That position also meant that it blocked off the first 16x slot and also the second 8x PCI-E slot, at the time that wasn't an issue as I had plenty of slots left, the motherboard is an ASUS P9X79-E WS (which has 4x16 and 4x8 slots). Since then I have been adding RAID cards and starting to run out of slots and that cooler has always bugged me, (bit like walking daily past a wall picture that is crooked and not being able to fix it), very annoying.
So finally had enough and bought a water cooler (Deepcool Castle240RV2) as my tower case wasn't designed to hold a cooler radiator that big, I spent about 3 hours today bending things and squashing bits of the frame it now fits and works as it should. Temps are the same but I now have my slots back, I ordered a used CPU from China (E5-2689) that will give me 8 cores and 16 threads and that should be here in a few weeks.
My new 4k 27" LG monitor should come tomorrow and a then all I will need is another graphics card, but that will have to wait a bit now as I am broke. (Had to borrow from the missus to get the monitor ) Now at least this setup should last me another 5 years!