Cosmos Skulltrail by Coolmiester

Hardware and watercooling

Cooling the behemoth would be Paul's most difficult (and most fun) task. The Skulltrail system was designed for two separate processors, 4GB of RAM and two GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards in SLI - no small feat when one considers all of it would be watercooled!


First things first, Paul had to determine how the loops would be run. He decided on specially designed nickel plated EK-FC9800 blocks for the graphics cards, and a MIPS Ram Freezer 4 for his memory.


With all the blocks chosen, he got any bare aluminium covers anodized on the D-Tek FuZion CPU blocks, the northbridge block and the memory cooler. With that, it was time to plumb them into the Cooler Master Aquagates and the 120mm radiator (for the GPUs) and the 360mm radiator (for the CPUs) from HWLabs.


Speaking of the Aquagates, they got a little treatment of their own (along with the front bezel) by getting anodized black. The look really changes the front of the machine.


Paul wasn't going to accept the Aquagates just as they were - in order to improve their performance, he did a bit of tweaking for the inlet and pump placement. The end result should be a more efficient water flow - but for now, it just helps the tubing line up to look cool in the dual-coloured loops.