VOGONS


First post, by Parts man

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Its time to build a bitching water cooled gaming PC from around 2002.

Goal for the build:
For this build My goal is to put together a early lan party show off fancy top end gaming system.

Parts and Prices:
Case: koolance PC2-C with water cooling parts $120, Price includes all the water cooling parts I track down. Its the latter model from early 2002.
Motherboard: New old stock Abit KG7-Raid. Needs a recap. $60
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ Free, Used my Ebay bucks, would have been $14.99
GPU: TBD. Using a 16mb Vanta temperately.
Ram: 2 sticks of DDR 256mb with heatsinks. $5 for the ram and $8 for the heat sinks.
Sound card: Audigy 2 $6
HDD: 2 New old stock Western Digital WD1200JB. $24.98 etch.
Fans: New old stock Green/Blue 80mm AC Ryan BlackFire4 UV fans. 1$ etch. Yes I know these are not from 2002, but what the heck.
CD drives. Panasonic early DVD-Ram drive, and CD-RW drive $20
FDD: 1.44mb FDD, $3
PSU: SPARKLE FSP550PLGR-SLI: Its a tick new for the build. $18 Some day I hope to track down the water cooled PSU from the Koolance PC1-C
Misc Parts:
18AWG UV cable for custom wiring. $12.50
IDE/FDD cables, $8
Stick on heatsinks for the south bridge and VRM mosfets The case has subpar air flow. $5

Price so far:
$340.44
Target price, $500, So far I'm well under budget. 😀

As of now I have 1 radiator installed in the case with 4 fans. I'm waiting on the motherboard and HDD and still haven't picked out a video card for the system. I'm thinking of getting a Radeon 9700 Pro and maybe voodoo2 SLI setup. But If I recall the kg7 doesn't like the 9700 or 9800

I'll have to cut and add a side window into the case, I'll be custom wiring the PSU with UV reactive wires.
I'll be cutting a blow hole on the bottom of the case for two or 3 fans and adding a second radiator amusing I have room for it in the case.
I have to repair the reservoir, Both the two I have have a broken off fitting. I'll tap and add a new fitting.

The hard drives will be used in Raid 1, I would have used raid 0 but I plan to use windows 98 and it gets buggy with bigger drives, and yes I know about the patch that fixes that. Etch hard drive will have their own water block. 😎
The north bridge, CPU and GPU will be water cooled. The system will use two pumps and maybe 4 if I can fit them in the case. 2 radiators if I can fit both in the case.

I'll try to get photos of the case posted tonight. Work on the system will start next week.

Last edited by Parts man on 2019-04-05, 02:23. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 3, by Parts man

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x0zm_ wrote:

Sweet! Look forward to seeing it. I remember lusting after those Koolance setups.

Indeed, I did too. Even if they were midrange performance wise and there were a lot of better setups at the time.
However the Koolance kits look rather cool and are far less likely to leek or have problems unlike other setups from the time.

I ended up going with a koolance setup because I know it would be less problems down the road. The case came with duel pumps, gold plated blocks a air bleeder, anti corrosive coolant, O-rings and clamps on the fittings or compression fittings. Wile most other setups form the time used soldered together blocks with NTP fittings and thread tape.