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I recently talked with Allan about the new gaming systems that we are producing and he felt it would be cool to give Driverheaven readers a little inside information about them. All American Computers has been around for five years building custom systems. During this time I became interested in water-cooling and water-cooled my personal system. After a few years I decided it was time for us to produce a water-cooled system for the public. AAC launched this system in 2003; called Poseidon, it was based on all “off the self” parts including the case. As a modder and water-cooling enthusiast, I felt that there was no case that was totally perfect for water-cooling and that Poseidon’s design was a compromise at best. I felt this way because when you introduced all the additional equipment, the system became very cramped and the system traditionally lost internal space for hard drives, optical drives, etc. This reduced upgradeability, made the system harder to work on, and due to the additional tubing restricted airflow for non water-cooled components. In 2004 we built “The One” gaming system for ATI. The system was shown on Driverheaven and was at the time the 10th fastest system in 3dMark. The system was successful but also very difficult to work on and manufacture.
It was at this time that the idea for LiquidXS was born. I had been playing with other water-cooled cases and studied their designs. I came up with a few requirements that I felt this new system had to have. Here are some of the things I felt were crucial. It had to be self-contained with no water-cooling components outside of the system. The radiator had to intake cool air from the outside of the case and not the hotter air from inside the case. The heat from the radiator had to not be introduced into the case where the system components resided. Routing of the water-lines had to be simple and not in the way of servicing the system. The case had to have good expandability for additional hard drives and optical drives. The majority of the computers weight had to be low in the case to make the system more physically stable. The system had to have good airflow for non water-cooled components and it had to be low noise.
Finally I felt the design had to highlight the components and be built using the finest hardware. The case ran though numerous designs until this year. It was at this time when ATI contacted AAC about building a demo machine for the launch of their new 512MB video card technology. I felt that the time was right to launch LiquidXS and so the first LXS was created. The case, which we named DeltaT (as in the change in temperature), was finally produced in its final form. The case embodied all the design requirements I had demanded be met. I inverted the standard ATX layout so that the motherboard was at the top and the power supply was at the bottom. The radiator, pump and power supply were separated by a mid-plate in the case to prevent the heat from the cooling system increasing the temperature of the hard drives, RAM and motherboard. The radiator intakes air from the outside and the power supply acts as the exhaust. In the upper section, the motherboard is inverted and mounted upside down. A fan intakes air to cool any hard drives and then it travels across the power regulation of the motherboard and system memory. The air is then finally drawn out behind the back of the case. This crossflow movement is very similar to BTX in format but utilizes current ATX motherboards. Finally, because the motherboard is upside down, the video card’s heatsink / waterblock can be seen, highlighting one of the parts you spend the most money on.
So with the layout complete we came to aesthetics. If it did not look good then who cares how good it works! A trademark of AAC’s high-end systems has been our use of an acrylic case, so this chassis was to be made of acrylic. In addition we used ultra high quality billet stainless steel switches with internal LEDs. This enabled us to omit a standard power LED and hard drive LED as they were integrated into the switch. We then replaced all standard mounting hardware inside the case with polished stainless steel bolts. Finally we offer custom laser etching and 5 standard colors to choose from. Combined with the variety of coolant colors and lighting choices, each LXS can become a true custom. In addition, if those options did not fulfill your vision than custom colors can be produced. An example of this is the blood red acrylic systems we have built for ATI’s launch of CrossFire. These limited edition red chassis with the CrossFire logo were built by AAC to commemorate the launch of this industry leading technology.
So with the case complete we spend over 7 hours building each LiquidXS, taking time to organize wires and ensuring that the system looks it's best. Once construction is complete, we get the system up and running. This is when the fun begins. Unlike most systems, every LiquidXS customer has the option to have their system professionally overclocked. That means that most LXS systems are faster than the same system built by someone else. Because we ship the system overclocked and ensure that the final result is stable, the system’s performance has been maximized without voiding its warranty. In this article you can see some pictures and benchmarks (below) of a LiquidXS that was shipped to a customer. The system was burned in and stable at these speeds. It could have run faster, but this was the level where the best performance to reliability was achieved. Performance is worthless without stability.
In the coming weeks, we will be working with Driverheaven to bring a sneak peak of what it takes to build one of these systems. This will be especially interesting as this will be the construction of the Special Edition CrossFire LiquidXS gaming system that ATI will be giving away free to the public.
As promised, time for some benchmarks from a custom system built for a customer comprising: 4000 Athlon64 @ 2.75 GHz, liquid
cooled
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