The main aim of the project was to build the fastest computer I could afford with the hope that it would be able to cope with whatever the future can throw at it for a good few years without being altered. You can watch a video tour of the rig at the bottom of this page.

At its core, the rig has an overclocked Intel Q6600 (at 3.6GHz from 2.4GHz), an ATI Radeon HD4870 graphics card, ASUS P5Q Pro motherboard, 8GB of Corsair PC2-8500 DDR2 RAM, and an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card.

Due to of the quality of hardware used, I thought I would give watercooling a try. I would like to say a massive thanks at this point to Rob, Marcus and everyone on the WatercoolingUK Forums. The help that they have given me has proven invaluable!

The original watercooling loop was installed in September 2008. However, being a bit of a perfectionist, I wasn’t happy with the final look of the build – the blue coolant, anti-kink coils and LED fans ended up looking like a single blue lump.

So I went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea of a classic “terminal green/black” combination – nicknamed Galileo v2.

As well as changing the colour of the coolant and coils and also the fans, I wanted to further personalise the case by having it powder-coated with a satin black finish by Tom at TTL Customs.

After a few months of running the machine with the green/black combination using PrimoChill PC ICE (UV Green) coolant, I found that the UV dye pigments had separated from the liquid coolant and caked itself around the outside of the tubing, losing its UV-reactive properties in the process.

I stripped down the rig for the third time in December 2009, replacing the coolant with ThermoChill EC6 (UV Neon Green), re-laying the tubing, replacing the reservoir with the EK Spin, which features a (totally useless, but pretty cool) flow indicator, and also replacing the CPU waterblock with an XSPC Delta v3 to improve both flow-rate and temperatures.

The machine is now hopefully in a state of calm, and the hardware gods have been kind to me thus far – Galileo v3 is planned for some time in 2011!

Photos of the build in various stages are on my Gallery.