Saturday, May 14, 2016

Livestreaming Announcement and some news

Ok here's the deal. I can't keep putting up notices about live streams everywhere so that people find out about them. So from now on follow this rule: There will be a live stream every Wednesday and Saturday. It will start between 7PM and 7:30PM UK time(google it). If at 7:30PM there is still no live stream up on my twitch then there will not be a live stream that day.

In other news I have replaced my dead Sabertooth 990FX R2 with a Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming. I will put up a review of the GA-990FX-Gaming out soon. I've already unboxed it on the youtube channel and done a live stream with it where it's just me learning the mobo and playing with it before I fully to plasti dipping it an setting it up for LN2. The stream will be up on youtube some time soon. I've also got the materials I needed to make the super cheap CPU DICE pot so you can expect more about that soon.

I bought the new motherboard with money that was supposed to go into getting a capture card so if you want the stream quality to improve then there is button in this page that you can click to pitch in a little to cover the cost of a new capture card. Or just share my content with other people that also works.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

The cheapest LN2 GPU pot ever.

GPU pots are expensive. Like really really expensive. Slims go for 100-200$ and can't handle any of the big GPUs high power GPUs. Fat pots are even more expensive ranging from 200-400$. So basically that means I can't run LN2 on GPUs............
......
.......or does it?

Ladies and gentlemen I present you the Tapester GPU LN2 pot.
It's not pretty but it doesn't leak LN2 and it should be enough for some hilarity on a live stream. So then what is the Tapester? It's a reference HD 4870 heatsink wrapped in a liberal amount of electrical tape. It will mount on 4800 and 5800 cards. It should also fit several other AMD cards but I don't have them so I neither care nor know.


Here's some pics of the first iteration with a few hundred ml of LN2 in it.































The surprisingly leak proof bottom


Pouring LN2 into this first version was a very wasteful affair since I didn't give the top much of a funnel into which to pour.

Also during the whole cooling process the pot was making some horrible cracking noises as the tape shrunk from the cold. One of the cracks even shook the whole pot


I let the pot defrost and dry before I did an inspection of the damage that the LN2 did to it.



This is the only place where I found a visible crack in the tape. I think this is the one that shook the pot when it cracked. I'm also pretty sure that the tape cracked because I stretched it too much when putting it on. Either way I'll just add more tape.





The bottom of the HD 4870 has a layer of plastic. The tape didn't stay stuck to this when I added LN2 so this are got an extra piece of tape to hold it together better.



This wasn't caused by the LN2 but by lazy tape placement. one thing I noticed is that the tape held best when it didn't have any loose edges so this had to go.
Here too the tape started coming off. The solution is obviously more tape.

































I added some extra tape to the top for a proper funnel. After all if I can't get LN2 in the pot it isn't a good pot.


Here's the fixed bottom. The tape is just barely low enough to clear the center shim.




Here's a full frontal shot of the abomination.


And here it is fully insulated with 5mm armaflex and ready to roll. To test it I plan to just run some Unigine Heaven Basic preset with the 4790K on air cooling. If this works I'll have a few more HWpoints to add to my total. But much more importantly I will a working LN2 pot for 2 of my GPUs.Unfortunately I won't do much benching with this for a while because to get a good amount of points I'd also need LN2 on the CPU and I currently don't have the equipment needed to LN2 both a GPU and a CPU.
























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