Installation and Performance

So it didn’t take long to get the Wetbench all put together, but as soon as I did I couldn’t wait to get some hardware on it. For testing, I went with our video card testbench with its orange motherboard and I pulled out an extra Corsair power supply from our reserves. With everything picked out getting everything on the Wetbench was simple. Our motherboard already had the ram, CPU and Noctua cooler all installed so I started there and dropped it over the standoffs I installed when putting the Wetbench together.

With the motherboard in I then started working on getting our power supply in. The hanging mount design was easy to work with. I removed the back mount and installed it on our power supply then dropped it back in. Then I just slid the second mount up against the front. The front mount doesn’t attach and can work loose though so you do have to keep an eye on it. I actually think a different design would work better, drop the front mount for a ring that slides over the power supply and could go a few inches deep to be out of the way. The front mount is already like this you just have to drop the front wall. Anyhow from there I just had to get out all of the wires needed for our build. I was going to use the stock black cables but after looking around I found the extra cables from our Fridge build, this gave me a few of what I needed but the fridge used up most of the 6+2 PCI cables. I used what I could then just added an orange extension for the other PCI cable needed for a one card test. I will still need to use the black cables for multi-GPU testing, but really the cables don’t matter too much for testing. They just look really good in photos. Routing the cables up under the motherboard tray was easy and I was able to keep things clean, leaving room for things inside later. In fact, I had enough room to keep the extra cable bag inside of the Wetbench for now though I hope to swap that out for a radiator in the future.

Before moving on to everything else I also wanted to get the two included power and reset buttons installed but I figured out right away that both were extremely tight and I only ended up fitting in one. Frankly, with our X99 SOC motherboard, I didn’t need one at all as the board has a power switch but I was surprised that I had trouble getting the switches in. If you REALLY need one or both you should get them in with a lot of work but I just ended up with the one for power.

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I was going to use the hanging mounts to install our SSD but I decided to just mount it inside of the case to keep things even cleaner looking. I might even remove the drive cage all together to make room for tools.

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Installing the video card was all that I had left to do and it dropped right in. I had to be careful with the PCI slot because there isn’t a big gap between it and the motherboard and I had to slide the PCI mount over to line it up perfectly. Remember I left that loose earlier specifically to do that. Once installed I tightened up the screws and it was mounted perfectly. The included thumb screws were easy to install in our Founders Edition 1080 Ti but I will say that with some of today's tall aftermarket cards it is hard to fit your fingers down in there to get at them. Removing the lip at the top of the PCI bracket would make room for those situations.

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So when it comes to performance, this is an open air case, so there isn’t much need for traditional fan noise or cooling performance testing because it is going to run as cool as your room temperature. Of course, you do have to remember that your components are out in the open unprotected as well and they will get more dust or in my case cat hair. I’m used to this with other test benches and the angled top made this a little easier to clean off with a little blown air. I think most people will set this up and leave it in place but for those using it for tradeshows or in my case, I only have room for one testbench to be hooked up at a time I had to swap it out. The side handles are great to have for this but because the acrylic accent comes down into that area you do have to be careful as it is a little sharp. This gets worse the heavier the case is so when you take advantage of the water cooling space it is really going to get heavy and hurt.

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Speaking of the water cooling, I was originally a little surprised at the size of the Wetbench, it is bigger than my other testbenches in depth, width, and height but I realized that this is because it makes room to fit a big 360mm radiator back there. You also have room to mount your reservoir and pump inside of the case, up under it in the drive bay mount or on either side. You can even run a dual loop though with just room for the one 360mm radiator you will have to get creative to do that. Sadly I didn’t test water cooling in the Wetbench, at least not yet, and some of you might think that is blasphemy but even with air cooling in the case I was really impressed with the performance and flexibility of the Wetbench.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #38327 16 May 2017 04:30
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