Project Ecthelion: Leak Testing, Benchmarks, and Temps

After a lot of frustration, the cables are done and its time to move on to the more fun parts of finishing up the build.  Now that everything is in place, we can begin to make sure our connections are sound and start filling up the loops.  Being that we are dealing with 2 loops here, leak testing is going to take a while. Bring on the distilled water!



In the picture above on the left is the rig ready to be filled. The the right we have gone through that process, and have booted up for the first time with liquid. I basically let it sit like this for a few hours, with paper towels placed in a few leak prone locations to see what would happen. Thankfully, we had zero leaks!  Now that we are verified to be leak free at ambient temperatures, I also want to begin stress testing to make sure it holds true when loop temps increase.

While I have a few stress tests running for the CPU and GPUs, lets play with the case lighting. Below you can can the standard White LED output using the NZXT hardware in the system. To the left is a cool blue alteration.  Thinking I will stick with the clean white look for this build.



Here is a shot of the back of the case to showcase the cable management and "hidden" tubing. Not going to win any prizes for inconspicuous cable runs here, but it works and is easy enough to manage.



I let the stress tests run for around 2 hours, and am happy to report there are no leaks, and temperatures are really looking good, as they should with this much cooling hardware. CPU stays around 42C when stressed and the GPUs never went above 47C.  That being said, these numbers are reported at stock clocks, so I would expect the temps to climb a bit once overclocks are applied. 

When at idle and during "regular" computing, temperatures sit at around 30C. Again, this is without overclocks applied and in my basement, so the ambient temperature is a tad lower than normal.  But still... really happy with the temperatures shown below to the left.   On the right is a quick run of 3DMark's Time Spy to get a general idea of system performance. Score of 17,042 at stock settings, better than 99% of all systems tested. Not bad!



Link to the Time Spy test:
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/3770997

Now that we are verified to be leak free and all the hardware is working as it should, we can move on to adding some color to our loops.



Will be showing that in the next post.  Almost done!

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