Some tip, how to mount DDC pump to radiator to save two fittings, hide pump and get mad over the noise 😀

You can cut thread from factory top of the pump. This kind of plastic is very hard, heavy to cut. I just break it out. Then you need some pads to seal.

That’s a really nice build you made!
I built my own watercooling solution some time around 2002 when there were only very few components commercially available. Those that were around were far too expensive, so we rolled our own. Water block was cut from a piece of copper by a friend who had access to a CNC machine at work, the pump was a fish tank pump from the hardware store and the radiator was sourced from a car heating system. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked great. I had a Socket A system back then, too. Since then I have always had a soft spot for custom water cooling solutions.
Keep up the good work!

Bought 92mm Rad from aliexpress to make setup more complicated. In future, i would also add watereblock for northbridge, but don`t know yet what motherboard I will use. Then i utilize all of the fittings that i have.

Also bought a Noiseblocker black silent. New, 5$. Year on the box is 2005. I don't think I can find an "older" one looking as good as this.

Each element must have some use. So, this rad and fan (12V, 1700RPM) reduces cpu temp by huge 2 degrees 😀

Nice build. A side question: you must really love old mechanical HDDs 😁 Why not some old SSD? That would be much smoother experience.

SSD from AXP/P4 era? Never heard about it 😮

Some time ago I was bidding on new Corsair XMS Xpert (version with displays). I ended up priced at $ 73, it sold for $ 74. Thought it was too expensive. Later I regretted it, because I made $116 net profit from selling three tualatin 1400s (bought for $75) it was only one registered offer in auction history in Poland. After all i bought XMS Pro for 36$. Poor price for their condition but I've waited long enough.

Those dimms has an one advantage in compare to XMS Xpert - first rewiev is dated for September 2003 on Annadtech (XMS Xpert - 2005)

Second advantage is that there is more work to create your setup 😀 Labels are hard to remove so I covered them with masking tape. The top part is actually a plastic sticker and is easy to pull off. Finally the surface was washed with isopropanol. Then I started painting.

I also planned to polish the paint after drying the layers to get closer to the factory condition. However, when I saw the end result, I didn't want to keep trying. The effect is ... nice 😀

Something I didn't do in the past while building the first WC setup. Side window panel. My Dad helped me cut the window hole. There was no choice where to cut on the left and bottom edge beacuse of fan grill and recess (place for hand when you try to open the case) visible in the photo below. I also had to remember to leave enough space on the left side to hide the glass. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to put the panel on the case

I chose the position of the right edge to be symmetrical to the left one and so that the HDD with the radiator was visible. The top edge was supposed to almost cover the power supply, wires and pump. Yep, was supposed...

The first mistake was marking the cutting height of upper edge. As I was doing this, I rested the removed panel against the desk, so I forgot that the housing is based on pads that are about 1 cm high. The result is that you can see a part of the power supply. At First I thought it wasn't a problem but after a while it started to get annoying.

The second problem is that the cut near the power supply has gone too far. My father said he was staring at because he was careful not to pinch my fingers while I was holding the sheet : ). You might be surprised by this, but I think it's a smaller problem. I tried to fill the hole with black silicone paste and effect is promising, but I have to spend more time on it because it is a very precise activity.

Something about the window. At first, I just wanted to stick plexiglass. In the meantime, I was at the glazier's because I had to repair the closet in my house (broken window). So i figured I would try to use normal glass instead of plexiglass. Price - 3$. I wish it were so cheap to make custom-made waterblock tops : ).

Something about mounting window into side panel. Sheet on each side of the panel is folded, turned inwards. It`s end piece can be used for holding the window on the right and bottom side.

Picture below shows a side view of the side panel. The black line shows how the sheet is folded, the blue line is the glass. Red arrow shows place and direction, where panel must be squeezed (compressed) all along.

Currently, the use of this method of mounting the glass causes that the panel is slightly deformed and sticks out from the body of the case. Panel must be compressed along its entire length to straighten it. I plan to use two thick planks and a few clamps for this. When straightening, I will have to replace the glass with something hard of the same thickness to prevent the glass from breaking. The other two edges will be glued with black silicone paste (anyway, without it, the glass sticks very tightly).

I will have to think about a seal around the window to make the power supply less visible. I really didn't want to use it because the ones I saw were always thick and stuck out from the body of the housing.

I felt the need to refer a lot of details, and in the end you can't see much in the picture, especially since the glass is ... transparent : )

The plate was straightened in exactly the same way as I came up with. Unfortunately, I can't show the effects, but what I broke, has been fixed. : D

Something about choosing the right motherboard - for me the most important element of the set next to the RAM. As you know, i create build in micro atx housing. Below are some ATX motherboards that I think look "cool".

Unfortunately, for the micro atx format, the choice is not so interesting. The only thing that caught my eye. Additionally, some of these boards are almost impossible to buy

Considering both any purchase possibility and a few other factors, after more than two months of searching, I bought this.

"How did I get this board?" It is more interesting story than you might think. Based on the auction archives, I knew that this board even exists. I found one offer with a computer that, according to the description, had it inside, unfortunately it turned out that it was sold and the seller forgot to remove the offer. very day I looked through all ads with desktops in Poland up to + -50 $ in the hope that one of them would have it. Of course, it got bored me after a long time. I tried to change tactics. In the archives of the auction site I found an offer with this motherboard . The offer took place a year ago. I asked the seller to give me the buyer's email address. I wrote to buyer and asked if the motherboard was in use. I was supposed to offer $ 25 right away. However, the seller (buyer 😀) immediately said he don`t use it and he wanted to sell it for $ 12. I didn`t negotiate the price ... 😀 The happiest moment while building this setup. It is a pity that he said that I have to wait 2 weeks for him to come home and then he will be able to send the parcel ...

Pros:
- the only important OC setting this board does NOT have is to decrease the multiplier (to increase the memory frequency while keeping the CPU frequency at the same level)
- no atx12V power plug - which is actually a disadvantage, but priority for this build is to keep a "clean look", a lot of cables in the housing make me sick
- atx20pin power plug is on the right side of board - the same reason as above
- this is not the usual red that we know from MSI boards or radeon cards. It's like "cherry red". It looks really great and I will try to capture this effect in photos.
- diferrence in performance between M7NCG and Asus with exacly the same freq and timings - 55s vs 45s in SuperPi 1M (A very pleasant surprise)
- lower idle temps - i don`t know if it was an illusion, but i swear - there was 37 degrees on asus and 29 on Biostar. Biostar has 37 only in BIOS, when i log into windows, temps begin drop to 29. It is impossible that it was the fault of the block clamp because it was very tight with screws and I checked it several times

The only disadvantage I can think of - no mounting holes for CPU Waterblock - my block uses screws.

During my search, I also posted a purchase ad on my local forum. One user told me to avoid Biostar boards from that period. He said he used to mount these boards in computers made to order for companies and half of them (!) Went back for warranty repair.Whether it was the fault of the capacitors or something else - I don't know. I suspect that those that have survived to this day will live forever. The person who sold me the board replaced 3 capacitors. In general, I wanted to replace all the capacitors around the CPU with polymer ones. Unfortunately, I can't find any with matching parameters. I also want to install a radiator on a mosfet, one of them is very hot above 1,9V vcore (which is normal, but this one burned me so much that I had to pour water on my finger from the tap 😀 )

I'll have to make a new block top. For now, I'm using a temporary processor clip. This is what the clip on my test socket looks like 😀

When there was air in the system and the liquid flow was clearly visible, I noticed that the liquid was flowing faster around the block than through the center. Theoretically, Athlon XP has no IHS, so there is little sense in moving the coolant away from the core. Thought I'd do an experiment. I blocked the outer passages with a piece of hose allowing all the liquid to flow through the center of the waterblock. I didn't notice a drop in flow.

Resullts is 2 degrees lower temps in indle and under load. In this setup, the same increase in cooling performance is provided by the 92mm cooler with the fan set to 12V. Later I will check what the difference will be after removing the pieces of hoses, because then I was using car radiator fluid. Now I use distilled water, biocide and XSPC EC6 dye. (diferrence between car fluid and distilled water is 6 ° C) Recently I decided to bleed the system in 100% which is terribly difficult. Due to the lack of a reservoir and the fact that one of the radiators is turned 180 degrees from the other.

I wanted to buy red coolant dye, but had to take advantage of the fact that the pci and ram slots are blue. The color of the fan was just accidental ...

I tried to take pictures with a 13-year-old digital camera. I was curious if it would add a bit of retro vibe and I think it does. Probably because it has a real flash instead of the LED on the smartphone.
I admit that I was surprised by the fact that such an old camera takes better photos than my smartphone 😀 Only minor details (gpu, cpu, etc) will change in the appearance of rig from now. A good time to add some decent photos.

Great job on the liquid loop. The whole system is done very well and it's super clean looking.

nice build.

My feelings about tualatin as well. It's not strong enough for 2003-2005 era gaming. If you overclock it it can run 2002 games ok but thats about it. I personally don't consider A64 or core2 duo as retro enough. So socket A builds are kinda like the strongest retro builds that I consider retro still.

The tualatin croud is much more about pushing the 440bx platform or PIII to its limits, however its limits are not much further past 1st gen p4 Willamette aka socket 423 which is well regarded as dogshit so its not saying much.

I completely agree with the words above. I also think the a64 is "too fresh".

The current goal of this build is to compete with p4-northwood. The fight is rather doomed to failure (no SSE2), but we'll see what the liquid-cooled XP-M shows. As most of the parts are going to be proper for 2003, Something inside me died when I realized (in fact, yesterday) that the first A64 was released in 2003. I thought it was in 2004. This slightly undermines the sense of this build, luckily there are more advantages (strongest cpu possible, no pci-e etc.)

ii should be able to hit anywhere from 2.5-2.8ghz on water. which would make it fairly decent vs a p4 3ghz in games.

One of the good things about the A64's, is being able to use a "modern" PSU. With them having the four pin 12v power connector.

I read about it all the time and do not understand this argument. Every decent motherboard for socket 462 from a later period has this connector: P

dulu wrote on 2021-02-21, 22:07:

I read about it all the time and do not understand this argument. Every decent motherboard for socket 462 from a later period has this connector: P

The majority of sA motherboards don't have the P4 connector on the motherboard, so once PSUs started to really move away from using 5v mainly and the supply of PSUs that could deliver the needed amount of 5v started to slowly dry up and age, this problem became more and more prominent.
If no decent 5v PSU is available, it will effectively rule out the vast majority of sA boards, including (afaic at least) all sA boards with universal AGP.

The reflection of that retro mobile phone really ties the whole system together! 😁

dulu wrote on 2021-02-09, 14:58:

SSD from AXP/P4 era? Never heard about it 😮

gigabyte i-ram

Tetrium wrote on 2021-02-22, 06:33:

The majority of sA motherboards don't have the P4 connector on the motherboard, so once PSUs started to really move away from using 5v mainly and the supply of PSUs that could deliver the needed amount of 5v started to slowly dry up and age, this problem became more and more prominent.
If no decent 5v PSU is available, it will effectively rule out the vast majority of sA boards, including (afaic at least) all sA boards with universal AGP.

A question of curiosity - how many minimum amps on 5V rail should the power supply have, if we do not plan to overclock socket A?