OutoftheBoxMods Blog

Project Hail to the King: Duke Nukem build

darthbeavis — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:06:09 +0000

Official worklog at http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=202908

This project was commissioned by NVIDIA as a gift to Gearbox for the launch of Duke Nukem Forever. Partners in this project include:
NVIDIA – Financed the project, project manager was Kris Rey, Community Manager from NVIDIA. Special thanks also go out to Eric Liu, Leslie Pirritano, and Mike DeNeffe (all NVIDIANS) for making this project happen. Sean Wix and Tim Springer from NVIDIA were patient enough to let us use their lab space and provide trouble-shooting to get some insane dual-screen 3d action going.
EVGA – supplied Classified 3 motherboard and two Hydrocopper 2 580s
Danger Den – Laser cutting services and all water-cooling at a nice discount
Crucial – killer Ballistix Smart Tracer ram and two SSDS
East Bridge Manufacturing – Discounted metal fabrication services – hub and mini gun came out beautiful!
BoxGods – insane design that make the project so much easier
ASUS – two 23″ 3d monitors
Frozen CPU – nice discounts on various parts especially the UV Green wire for the PSUs
Silverstone – 1500 watt PSU
Fernando from Painters Supply in Salem Oregon – busted his tail to help get skin painted in time
The guys at Mid Valley Metal works for the use of their HUGE powder coating oven for bending the skins
My wife Delia who helped me heat bend the pod skins and who put up with the mess in our great room while I built this puppy
and my best friend (next to the wife) Chris Fletcher who gave up his time to travel with me to NVIDIA to complete the build
Gearbox and 2k for making the game and supporting this project!!! official worklog at http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=202908

I will not reproduce everything in the Geforce.com article found here http://www.geforce.com/#/News/articl…forever-pc-mod but will instead add to it to provide more details and allow you to give feedback. Geno and I feel we want to not only produce worklogs to publicize the project but also to make the worklog a learning experience and to give back to the community. This worklog will be spread out over a a week or so – please keep checking for updates.

As stated in the article, we had several concepts for this project which were considered before arriving at one which everyone liked. My first submission was a school-girl themed design. I will not go into too much detail on this one but you can figure it out if you look at some Duke artwork. The second concept was the single Duke logo with buildings on each side.

Pictures of Holocron build – cover of CPU Magazine July 2011!

darthbeavis — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:58:14 +0000

The project is a 50 terabyte HTPC

working on Brimstone

darthbeavis — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:01:41 +0000

Specs are 3-way SLI 480s, ASUS Rampage III motherboard, Intel 980x Exteme Edition processor, 8 gig HDDS, custom Danger Den Double-wide Tower 21, Silverstone Zeus 1200m power supply custom sleeved by Performance PCS. Air-brushing of course by www.stevenunez.com

Here is version 1.0

First, installing Danger Den blocks on the nVidia Geforce 480s

Next, do some custom stuff like cover optical drive with wrap from Ridick Graphics and designed and SLI bridge cover which Danger Den will laser cut out of red mirror acrylic

I modded a Crystal Skull Vodka bottle (thanks to Geno for designing the top plug) to use as a resevoir:

Version 1 completed:

I took version one to QuakeCon where it was displayed in the ASUS booth (I worked the booth as well).

For version 2.0 I changed the loop a bit using black tubing and remove the skull resevoir as it was restricting flow. I also installed a double pump system using a Bitspower top and Danger Den radiator reservoir. Note the new Danger Den Rampage III block is used in this version as well. Killer product. This version was displayed at BlizzCon in the ASUS booth (which I again worked).

This is at PDXLAN 16.5 – running nVidia 3d Surround

New Air-brusher on board . . w00t

darthbeavis — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:24:43 +0000

www.SteveNunez.com – This is our first project: Brimstone. It will be my personal gaming rig.

CES rigs for Crucial and Nvidia

darthbeavis — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:21:05 +0000

Nvidia Trip . . .w00t

darthbeavis — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:26:14 +0000

Have a hell fun time . . .got a grand tour – saw cool stuff although I cannot talk about some of it due to NDA. The marketing guys at Nvidia loved the build. Here are some pictures of the trip.

Home run stretch for NVidia Charity build

darthbeavis — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:47:42 +0000

Just have to add the two 1 Terabyte hard drives generously donated by Western Digital (I <3 WD . . .just check out the raid 0+1 array of four WD Velociraptors in my clinic Skulltrail server via the builds and mods link). Thanks for Performance PCs for all the stuff I needed to get the sleeving done!!!

Blade design for Asus mod contest

darthbeavis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:55:12 +0000

I wanted to finish this project so here it is:
Only an Asus Xtreme motherboard with it’s plethora of over-clocking abilities and and performance features that are not only present but also transparent, is worthy of this build. The system will be animatronic and will open up when in performance-mode to give the liquid-cooling system the additional air-flow it needs to keep up with the Asus over-clocking.

Blade is sort of a group project. I enlisted a modder buddy, geno@boxgods.com, to design a Blade-themed case. He took my basic idea and really ran with it (putting in over 300 hours of highly-professional work).
The rig will be two gaming rigs in one case with a removable file server on the top. The shape of the build is a cross. The arms of the cross contain two 20″ LCD monitors in the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ arm of the cross. When the rig is turned on the cross arms turn to gaming mode by rotating 90 degree so you can see two monitors from the front and two from the back. The tower portion of the case has a radiator box that moves forward, rotates to display the Blade’s sword with the radiator behind it (fan grills made from polished aluminum bars will be between the rad and sword and will look like the grill on Blade’s car).

[wpvideo LKou4sFs]

Charity Build Videos

darthbeavis — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:57:04 +0000

More Charity Build Pix

darthbeavis — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:10:17 +0000

Talking it up to PDXLAN now