How to reuse an old waterblock

Nice an simple.

3rd paragraph, first page: "charging a ludicrous amount of them"

You mentioned drilling out motherboard holes, is this even possible to do?

You seriously need a new Engineer's Square!

Yay, finally more modding articles! :D

Simple and useful :D

Great article

An it's nice to see the modding comunity slowly rising again! ;)

Originally Posted by CandiceSwanstrom
Waterblocks don't date as quickly as other components,
:)

you have to try harder if you want to date a waterblock.
hint: they like the beach, lots of water, lots of sand. the only thing you have to bring is the paper.

Nice article ;)

Originally Posted by docodine
You mentioned drilling out motherboard holes, is this even possible to do?

Yes it is possible, the holes in the motherboard are surrounded by about 1mm of unused space to prevent stress from the screws messing it up. You could make them bigger, but it is risky.

I recently did this, but I had a local shop with CNC make me a new pressure plate for my DD maze4

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=169045

Great article, im sure its going to help a lot of people. If I wasn't so lazy I might have done something similar with my old Danger Den 775 block.

as per guide on xs systems -> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3502507&postcount=32

http://i380.photobucket.com/albums/oo244/mlwood2008/Duniekguide-1.png

nice guide but typically any good block now and days and from about up to a year ago will allow you to hook up other mounting hardware so its not really that necessary anymore unless you have a pretty old and I mean old water block. But still it was cool to read. :)

LOL yeah, i did this 4 years ago with one of Cathers SS Cascade blocks.......still got it actually

http://www.coolercases.co.uk/images/cascade_bracket/24.jpg

I got some custom plates kicking around also :) & have my SS Cascade still as well paul good block that :).

Im desperate to get my GTX 285 under water but full cover blocks are stupidly priced due to the sheer lump of copper and build costs involved, Im considering using a GPU only block and cooling the VRAM with some RAM sinks but this will probably cost £30-40 all in and a full block is only about £20 more... grr!

very nice article


glad to see bit-tech get back to more modding articles

Originally Posted by capnPedro
You seriously need a new Engineer's Square!

That's Hong Kong's finest digital caliper! It cost me at least £5.

Oh wait.... the square... yes it's a bit knackered. Then again it's really quite modern in comparison to my spirit level, which is so old it's made of wood.

The most important part is the measurements. for the different sockets holes. Over at Xtreme systems there is a handy guide made by duniek with mounting hole dimensions for the Intel LGA775 / LGA1366 / 478 / 1160 and AMD AM2/AM2+ / 754/939/940 and Nvidia GPU GTX260/280 / 8800 / nv7,8,9 series and ATI 4870x2 / 3870x2.

Saves a lot of time ;)

Nice article! I don't have any wc blocks yet, but most likely I'll be starting used and making a new/compatible bracket thanks to these tips.

+3 on the new modding articles... now to read MOTM! :D

I've done this a couple of times with old water blocks. With some patience and polish the result can look even better than the original. I had to do this last week when the acrylic hold down plate included with my hfx mini cracked. Stupid acrylic, I barley touched it...

I bought the thickest sheet of steel I could find on a sunday, about 1,5mm thick. I spent the better part of a day filing it down to the shape of the original hold down plate. When I mounted it it bent more than I found acceptable to so I scraped it and started from scratch. This time with a super stiff 2mm thick piece of stainless. It was a real PITA to work with this steel. It ruined my four 3mm drill bits, they barley even scratched it. So I bought new expensive drill bits which worked much better. After two solid days (three since the acrylic cracked) of drilling and filing I had new hold down and backing plates.

Sadly, my struggle didn't end here. I did a test mount with some neoprene between the motherboard and the backing plate. A few hours later the computer was assembled (remember, it's a hfx case which means hours of heat pipe bending) and I fired it up. Not even a LED came on, the only life sign was the ticking sound of capacitors discharging somewhere close the the CPU...

There goes the motherboard and possibly CPU I thought and went to bed. The following day I disassembled everything again and found that the neoprene had been pierced by several capacitor legs. All of them were close to the edge so I spent a few hours filing away those parts of the backing plate. This time I mounted it with a thicker sheet of neoprene and some clear plastic from an old PSU.

To my surprise it booted just fine and today, about a week later, I'm writing this post on the very same computer.