One serious watercooled PC

[Jake the Dog]

a great effort indeed:

At last it is running, not finished completely yet but running, cool...

Here is the link to the photo's:

http://community.webshots.com/album/77148084zqpHgI?866

System Stat's:
Athlon XP1800 (not OC'ed - yet)
DFI AD73 Pro (yuk)
256MB DDR
Promise Supertrak SX6000 Raid Controller (128MB)
6 x 80GB Barracuda IV (raid 5 array)
1 x 20GB Barracuda IV
100Mb NIC
Yamaha YX510 Sound Card (Digital Optical used only)

The photo's show only the bare case of the system and the guts of the cooling tower (live in the next room). I'll add more photos of the outer finish once the panels get back from the anodisers. It should hopefully look a million bucks (its cost nearly that!).

The PC part is totally silent. The noise from the disk drives and fans is 100% blocked by the 5mm thick side panels. The fans only run at 1/4 speed and make almost no noise with the side off anyway. The loadest noise with the covers off is the squeele from the Barracuda's but the covers block it. The Cortina heater core + 2 x 120mm fans are for heat scavanging from the non-watercooled parts. This helps keep the MB regulators and RAM temp under control. 2 x 120mm Fans running at 1/4 speed are plenty.

The tower makes about as much noise as the average PC so lives in the next room with the hoses coming thru under the door.

Performance:
Cooling is really good. I found from my previous post in the OC and Cooling thread that I'd forgotten to connect one of the fans.
Now the CPU runs at 5'C above ambient on the die at 100% CPU load (DSP). This equates to 0.08'C/W compared to 0.5-0.7'C/W for air cooled screamers. Plenty of room to OC!
All temps are measured as Above Ambient;
Hard Drives are 1'C
Enermax at 2.5'C
Northbridge below 0.5'C
FX5200 GPU at 2'C
i960 Raid CPU 1'C

Anyone wanting to know about any of the coolers or any other part of the system is no-worries. Apart from the pump and the bits from the local auto wreckers, its a 100% DIY system. I'll tell anyone who want to know what I did if they are interested.

 

[Handruin]

That's some crazy cooling going on there.

I've always wondered about water cooling. I see that many of the water hoses "hope" from one component to another, be it the video card to a north-bridge chipset. How is this benificial if you have a warm component pumping warm water to another device?

If I had the time and energy, I'd love to play with something like this, that looks like fun.

 

[Mercutio]

A couple of my students did a water cooling project not too long ago. They worked from a Swifttech 8500 kit.

The rig was IIRC Barton 2500 and a Radeon 9500 on an FIC nforce2. Both were water cooled and overclocked to all hell. I don't know the final outcome of their work, speed-wise but I do know they had a ton of problems with their kit. Their pump apparently died a lot.

The other thing was, the machine in question had a WD BB hard disk in it, a Sparkle PSU and a cheap MSI CD-RW, so it wasn't anything like quiet.

After looking at their set-up, I decided that water cooling is pretty nifty, but I can't believe how much babysitting they had to do for their PC.

 

[Jake the Dog]

I spent a long time planning a serious water colling project but then abandonded it... I can't even remember why. the aim was not only to give me a serious overclocking enviroment, but also to make my PC virtually silent in the process.

 

[Handruin]

I guess I meant to say "hop", not "hope", although I would "hope" they "hop" without problems.