- Pentium X6800 Core2 Extreme CPU
- ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe motherboard
- 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800MHz memory
- 2 150GB WD Raptor SATA HDDs 10000RPM
- Gigabyte X1950XTX
- Plextor 12x SATADVD-ROM
- Enermax 565Watt ATX PSU
- Windows XP with SP2
- DirectX 9.0c
Well we picked up the case from Gabe on a Saturday, brought it home and began to move stuff around in the lab in an effort to get a place to get started assembling this thing. Basically we were trying to kill two birds with one stone this round and as we had Gabe and Eric building our water cooled Quad-Core/8800GTX system (Our next Review) whilst we tackled the Core2 Extreme silent system, in reality a much easier task than theirs as we only liquid cooled the CPU via the case kit, they did the CPU and VGA card both from scratch.
The PSU was the first thing we attempted to install and we found out right of the bat that a little relocation of the water pump and fan was needed in order to use a large sized or long PSU. We just decided to go with one of our older small sized 565W Enermax jobbers and it worked out excellent for us. The motherboard was easy to install despite the fact that it does not have a removable tray and we encountered no problems there. We next installed the drives such as the DVD and floppy, before proceeding to the installation of the hard drives. The hard drive bays offer a very nice pull ring to remove the hard drives bays from the system when and if you want to replace, add or remove drives.
After getting all the drives and system parts installed we tackled the main event the installation of the Apogee waterblock onto the motherboard, the installation of the memory and the final attachment of the neoprene tubes to the waterblock. Some people recommend pre filling the system with liquid prior to its installation into the system, but we have found that 99.9% of the systems we have built are completely leak free so we just pre-measure and cut the tubes and fill it after its installed. That was the case here as well, the Quiet Power P180 was leak free from the first time we tested the system completely installed and running. Like we stated earlier in the review technically the reservoir is inside the case, but to fill it you need access to the left hand side of the case. Please read the directions on how to measure the liquid into a correct balance correctly before filling the reservoir as this is important. This may sound like a lot of work, but it was really only about a two hour job to get everything in the case. There really were not any factors that made this build a pain in the ass, and in fact everything went smooth, straightforward and easy until the finish. The P180 comes with a users/installation guide and it would probably behoove you to read it before attempting this build.
