Video card woes

So now that the main chassis is painted, and the side panels are most of the way done, I began piecing the system together.

You may have noticed last post, on the last picture was the motherboard mounted inside the case, there were four long bolts coming through the cooler mounting holes. These bolts are part of the mounting hard ware to mount the waterblock for the liquid cooling system.

What I did not show was the video card and its mounted water block. Why? because the water block does not fit...

GPU water block

 Stock coolers removed. I also had to remove an aluminum

rail off the top of the card.

Capacitors in the way :(

As you can see there are two capacitors in the way. This may have stopped some people from moving forward, but not me. I pulled out my trusty rotary tool, and drill and began some of my own modification. 

I began by removing the plexi top. I first cut the large finger of copper that was getting in the way of one of the capacitors (the one on the right, in the above photo). Then I drilled a pilot hole near one of holes that held the plexi top. I needed to be careful as I did not want to mess up a threaded hole that was holding the plexi top to the copper bottom. After increasing the size of the hole, by incrementally increasing the size of the drill bits, I used the rotary tool with a cut off blade to carefully complete the notch into the block.

 

You can see there is now clearance for the capacitors.
Unfortunately I will not be able the nickle plate the bare copper areas

A new problem arose. for some reason the cooler was not flat while sitting on the card.

This appears to the be problem...

   So that small raised bit of copper seems to be the problem.

Nothing that a grinding tip on the rotary tool can't fix.

And we are clear!

Woo, we seem to now sit flat on the card.

But, two problems quickly surface. I can get four of eight screws to line up. the other half seem to be about 3mm or 1/8 inch off! And it seems like there is even less room to get a fitting or plug onto the water block.

Looks like the card's PCB is a little larger...

After doing additional research, the ASUS Glaciator video card is NOT using the nVidia pcb reference design. It appears to be a slightly modified version, which is probably why there was clearance issues with the capacitors. 

I see two options for water cooling: 1. New video card 2. New cooler

Well, I can't afford a new video card, and would like to use the one ASUS has given me. I also don't have time to have a new waterblock shipped to me soon enough that I would have time to leak test the cooling loop. So stock cooling it is for now :(

In the future, I will most likely be upgrading the video card. Generally for new builds (for gaming rigs), I budget almost 15-25% of my build (minus cooling) towards a graphics card, it seems to scale with the build overall without leaving a huge bottle neck. Considering that the cpu and ram are really kick ass, I would almost need a pair of 295's in sli to even come close to seeing a bottle neck on the cpu or ram.Of course when I do upgrade the video card, the new card will be water cooled (and I will research it much better).

This was a definitely my fault for not completely researching the Glaciator video card, and not checking earlier if the water block would fit. I was super chocked when I found out water cooling the video card would not be possible for this build :(

So... anyone want to buy a partly modified un-used water block for a 55nm gtx260?