Anton Nordström

Before I start the introduction of my build, I kinda feel like I should do an introduction of myself and my situation. My name is Anton, and I live in Sweden, I've always loved building computers, I remember building my first computer with the help of my father, being just about 4 years old. We used the Vooodoo2 8MB graphics card, which was a real beast back then. When I got to be in my early teens and got interested in overclocking, I dreamed about doing my very own custom loop watercooling system., but being in that age, sadly money did not fall from the sky so it would had to be put on hold. I went to study computer science in high school, but I quit after just one year. At the age of 17 I was diagnosed with LHON, an extremely rare disease which made me loose 95% of my vision (glasses does not help). Naturally this life changing tragedy made me quit everything computer related since I realized blind people should not be doing it.. In early 2022 I lost my job because of covid related effects, and I realized I was going to have a lot of free time on my hands. Bored out of my mind, a friend casually mentioned the CMWS and the thought hit me... this might be the perfect opportunity to do that custom loop that I dreamed about doing for so long. So now, here I am, almost 20 years after I lost my vision - trying to prove to myself that I can do anything I set my mind into. Honestly I knew this was probably going to be the toughest thing I have ever attempted to do by myself. To put some context into it, the last PC I built had an Powercolor X800GT in it. So I had a lot of technology to get caught up with to say the least. But that's it about me. Now onto my thoughts about the build. Hardware Case: Cooler Master Master Frame 700 Mobo: Asrock Aqua Z490 Aqua CPU: Intel Core i5 10600K GPU: Powercolor Liquid Devil Ultimate RX 6900 XT PSU: Corsair HX1000 DDR: Corsair Dominator Platinum 4x4GB SSD: Western Digital WD Blue SN570 1TB Pump: Corsair XD5 Radiator: Corsair XR5 360mm Distribution Plate: Phanteks Glacier D140 Fans: 3x Noctua NF-A 120mm It all started with this motherboard, Asrock Z490 Aqua, which I found had an unique and special "steel" look that I liked. So my first thoughts was that I where going to get that steel/white look into my whole build. After finding this case Master Frame 700 and doing some quick research on it, every single picture that I found looked just about the same, one radiator on each wing, and 6 extreme RGB fans. This was not something I wanted to do. So I decided pretty quickly that I would mount my fans on the back of the wings instead, for a more clean and unique look. I was a little worried that having the wing in-between the radiator and the fans would get too much resistance and that it would give the fans unnecessary noise. I was supposed to use an 5700 XT, but when my water block arrived it didnt fit.. I was lucky enough to run into a cheap Liquid Devil. which may not had been the best fit for the build. But I kinda like how it turned out. My original plan was to use two radiators because that's what all my research said I needed. In the middle of the build I changed my mind and decided to go with my gut and just a single radiator, and use the left wing for a distro plate instead. Had a feeling this would improve the looks a lot. Having the wings this widely open gave me an pretty tricky angle for bending the tubes, but I managed after some practice. My first real major problem actually didn't come until I filled the loop with water. (duh right?) I had heard that I was not going to tighten the fittings to hard onto the distro plate,and that's where it was leaking. After tightening it more and more and until it surely couldn't be tightened any more, it was still leaking. I tried changing the fitting. Still leaking. I tried using VVS tape in case the distro might be broken or something. I then filmed with my phone and noticed the water just took another way out. This made me realize that something else probably was wrong. I had been using the inlet on the pump instead of the outlet. Its crazy how many days I wasted on such a simple mistake. But this whole process, by having to use my hands and ears to try listen for leaks was time consuming and frustrating to say the least.. I used thermal tape to attach some clean steel looking fan grills on the radiator, in my opinion it gave it a whole new look. I cut out two areas so the fittings would go through without any problems. This is also where I chose to put my 7" monitor. Since the mobo already has some displays with temperatures/volts etc I chose to let this display show some data from my servers plus some power usage / current kWh price and some other stuff. I used home assistant to design the dashboard in yaml, which was easy and without problems. But when using my zoom program on windows I ran into my next issue.. When having multiple monitors in extended mode, both will get zoomed in, and follow the mouse, which totally defeats the purpose of having an informative min display. After doing a lot of googling and trying just about every zoom program I could find, I realized multiple display support does not seem to be a thing on magnifying programs. I was just about to give up on this when I suddenly remembered that I got a license key to a zoom program from the hospital like 15 years ago. I never used it back then cause I felt it was just easier to just dont use computers. I turned my basement upside down looking, and actually found the ZoomText box, and wouldn't you know, it actually had dual monitor support.