ATCS 840 by Coolmiester

Custom Cooling

The entire case was de-riveted and disassembled and sent off for satin black powder coat, including all internal and external parts as I’ve found powder coating the exterior then wet sanding gives a much better base to apply paint. The reason I did this was because while that was away at the powder coater's, I was able to concentrate on the cooling - but not before cutting out windows and vents on each side panel. The hard drive cage also needed modifying to accommodate the HWLabs GTX240 radiator in the base of the chassis.


Dual loop water-cooling was a must at this point as I knew Zotac had something special up its sleeves with regards to the graphics cards so I needed to keep both CPU and GPU separate with their own radiator, pump and reservoir. I didn’t just want to go with the usual couple of Laing pumps matched with after market reservoirs so decided I’d do something a bit more radical.


I used two dual bay reservoirs and attached the Alphacool tops on each Laing DDC pump to the rear of each reservoir, essentially creating two giant pump/reservoir combos to fit in the 5.25in bays. To my knowledge this has never been done before so after tapping in some G1/4 holes to get flow between the reservoirs and pumps then a bit more 6/32in tapping to actually attach the pump/top and reservoir and a little Loctite liquid gasket seal, all was completely water tight and worked a treat.


It also made bleeding both loops a breeze and once I had black window film applied to the front of both, it gave the front of the case a gloss black window type look that would later match up to both side windows.


I also stripped down a Scythe fan controller and made a plexi mount which again was covered in the black film to match the two reservoirs below. Only the fan speed and temp indicators show through once the system is running (it remains totally black otherwise) and an external ROM drive will be used for normal operation just in case anyone was wondering.