After my first year in educating myself as a 3D Artist, I was getting tired of my old rig, LISA. And it was evidently getting tired of me, as the old 285 GPU died a week before the exams were to be turned in.

So let me present LISA2! She still has components from the first, such as the mobo, CPU, RAM and CPU block, but other than that, all is new! It took about 6 months to build from first item order to first boot.

The journey was long, starting with a chassis of course. I emailed DangerDen about a special version of their Double Wide 21 chassis, and I got a reply suggesting I take the bigger, non-listed Double Wide 29. I got the options, and ran with the biggest! When I got it, mockup phase began, with fan, rad, pump and other stuff that needed to be placed. As well as cable management, which I knew had to be perfect! There's no real back cover in the case, so the cables have to look stunning, and give an aesthetic touch, so I got some MDPC-X sleeve and heatshrink, and made every power wire from the bottom up! (Except putting isolation on the copper wires, which are 1mm or AWG 17)

Then after mocking up with a cardboard PCB Mobo and GPUs (Needed them at school) the mounting of cooling equipment began, pump station with res, rad and so forth. Very heavy things being mounted! The rads are HWLabs silent rads, with prolimatech 140mm fans, 3 rads and 12 fans (Silent killer) And the pumps are a couble of D5s, one for GPUs and one for CPU (Adding RAM and Mobo on that next time).

That was a third of the work, now came cable routing and making, which took another third of the build time. Finding the exact length needed for GPU, CPU and Mobo is a pain, but a bigger pain is making 4 8s, a 24 and another 8 pin connector worth of wires with sleeving on, but worth every damn bit! When burning sleeve ends, I pinched my fingers on the melted plastic against a wire to ensure a low-profile sleeve (Hot, and painful)

So, I had been waiting all this time for ordering GPUs, because I knew there might be a 590 in the works, and there was! I opted to get a couple of these with a beautiful backplate and beautiful full-cover block! (Seriously, they rock!) Lastly came the tragic accident where my 285 gave up at college. Which speed up the process, as I had no reason not to take the old rig apart for the parts I needed. Mounting the hardware was the easiest task during the build, and I still didn't know how to light the thing!

Now came the final touches, cable management! Making some cable clips from two pieces of plastic (normally also for cable management, but only for up to 12 wires, I need 32!) some sleeve and heatshrink, the superclip was made! I've never seen cables being manged this tightly before, I'm very proud of it! Aligning the cables all the way down from the PSU to the hardware is also a hassle, but it pays off!

Now the lighting. The light is made out of two light diffusing plates of plastic, that are resting on floor-lists in the chassis. Under each of the two is a 45x5 array of LEDs on tape, making a softbox illumination profile (Photographers, beware of awesomeness!) and that gave a spare 50 LEDs for lighting the mobo above the two GPUs which would otherwise block all light.

Then came the tubing, watering and putting on the final touches (Painting screws black, removing stickers, all sorts of OCD stuff) and kaboom! It boots! I took the pictures overnight to avoid other lighting than the LEDs, makes for good atmosphere! I shot all night till sunrise at about 5am, and Photoshopped some HDR shot together for a few days and here they are!

Performance wise, it's all I've hoped for, it runs my games at unbelievable frame rates and settings in 3D, even with super-sampling and 32x CSAA. Raytracing is to DIE for! And with this extra cooling, I can get a 4GHz OC on the 920 (The CPU and RAM are my bottlenecks) More overclocking and the QPI won't play along anymore.

Long description, but it does have a well long story for itself, so I hope you like her ^^

And last but not least, I'd like to give a shoutout to my dad, for doing this build with me!