Silverstone TJ08 Project

The Design Constraints

This project is a departure from our usual project builds. Here we are showcasing one of our latest customer based designs. The build outline that was given was to build a small form factor case which would run almost silently yet still have enough in the tank to handle any computing tasks with ease. The case had to be simple yet stylish and of course the ever important all up cost should not break the budget in the process. So with that in mind we built our very first Phenom 2 720 CPU triple system with the rather nice Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H board in the engine room.

The XSPC Delta V3 CPU block and the XSPC 120mm radiator were used in the cooling system. The pump used was a modified Laing DDC 3.2 pump with our own Radiical Turbo Head our Primer Port/drain system fitted.

The Case

First let's have a look at the case that was selected.

We tend to hear a lot about Silverstone cases lately. In fact there seems to be a real following for one particular case in the water cooling scene. That case is the Silverstone TJ07. It would be true to say the TJ08 in no way resembles the TJ07 case in fact the Silverstone TJ08 would be swamped by the size of the TJ07. Even the Antec 900 case here looks big in comparison. So what is inside the TJ08...... the simple answer is not very much space.

There are two Silverstone 120 mm fans situated almost opposite each other to provide cross airflow. This suits our purposes as the lower front fan is a perfect mounting point for our radiator. As with most cases which were not designed to accommodate water cooling as a first option there is a small amount of modding to do. First the front fan mount hole spacing needs to be moved about 5mm upwards. This allows the radiator to clear the case feet. With the fan spacing corrected the fan and radiator can now be mounted to the lower front fan mounting point.

With the radiator in place the rest of the assembly of motherboard and ancillaries can begin.

You can see in the picture above that all of the hard drive and CD bays have been left available for use.

With the motherboard in place its time to set out the pump placement and start tubing out the system. Black Tygon 3/8" tubing was used here with Bitspower compression fittings to give the system that finished look.

The mock up picture above is probably the clearest indication of the space constraints within the case.

At this point the CPU block has been mounted with TIM and a final tubing adjustment has been made to provide the least stress on the CPU/TIM joint. Always worth while double checking at this stage before filling the system. One other thing is don't forget to remove the clear plastic covering on the Delta V3 base or you will get woeful temperatures.

With the rest of the parts fitted and the system filled it is ready to go. For those of you who have noticed the absence of a graphics card we are using the onboard graphics. An adjustment to the layout is available to fit a more powerful video card in the future should the gaming bug grab the owner.

Impressions and Performance

Probably the first question I had about this build was the expected performance level. Certainly the AMD Phenom 2 720 tri core is a very robust product with a lot of over clocking potential. There are heat considerations to be faced with increasing the over clock but even at default voltage the performance increase from over clocking this CPU can be substantial without a great affect on operating temperature.

On the question of using a single 120mm radiator for the build well there were a number of unanswered questions about the wisdom in using this size of the radiator. On a positive note a number of reviewers have praised the XSPC 120 mm radiator for its surprising heat dissipation characteristics using low speed fans. In this build the choice of a single RX120 did not disappoint. In fact I would suggest that this radiator redefines for me the use of a single 120mm in such applications. I was so impressed that I fitted the same system to one of our Q6600 systems with a view to establishing upper limits for over clocking using this radiator for the Intel CPU users. I was also surprised by the silence of the system even using the standard Silverstone fans set to low speed.

So to answer the performance question for the growing number of people who like power and silence without over clocking this system is ideally suited to your needs. Should you wish to push the limits at default the results will surprise.