I am currently planning out the build of my next system, and need some help working out the water cooling aspect of things. Im not really new to water cooling, but i am on cooling at this level. I probably wont get to building it till around winter, but i want to plan everything out now so i can mod my case the few weeks im home over the summer and fall.
The system is a dual 2.4GHz Opteron on a Tyan Thunder K8W. 2 gig of ram total, and four Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 73G Ultra320 in a RAID 10 with an adaptec 2120S.
Even with my very nice ingramMicro discount this system hits the $5,000 line.
The question is how (or perhaps IF) to water cool it all?
My main concern is cooling the RAID. Ive checked out Koolance's HDC1-A01 Hard Drive cooler that lets you cool two drives at once, but i really question how well this works with such fast and active drives. Does anyone have any experience with this? I have searched around with little information on it in actual practice.
The second problem with the Koolance drive cooler is that i can only find it in 1/4" size. While i can find 1/4" blocks for the chips, i really question cooling this entire system on such small ID tubing.
The way i see it i will need two CPU, one (perhaps two) Chipset, one GPU, and two HDD. Wouldnt it be a bad idea to try and cool all of that with 1/4" or does it make a difference?
Could i just size down from 1/2" at the HDDs? Sizing down would drastically impair the water flow wouldnt it?
I thought of another solution where i would run everything in 1/2" and then once it get to the HDDs just Y the 1/2" into two 1/4" and feed them both off of that, then take the return from the HDD and Y it back from the 1/4" to 1/2" before it hits the rad. In basic theory i should keep the same pressure and speed with a slight decrease from the resistance of the split.
One last question is monitoring the system. I know Innovatek sells a "Flow-O-Matic" which can report the speed of the flow in the system. How is this displayed? Looks like its just a 3 pin connector that could be reported like a fan's speed. Would it be a good idea to have one at the beginning and one at the end of the system? Another downside is they seem to only sell it in 1/4" sizes.
Id also like to add temperature probes at the beginning and end of the system to monitor water temp. I know ive seen this done before but i cant remember any source of information on it.
This all seems rather daunting, would it even be worth it to try and water cool such a complex rig?
thanks in advance for any assistance.
The system is a dual 2.4GHz Opteron on a Tyan Thunder K8W. 2 gig of ram total, and four Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 73G Ultra320 in a RAID 10 with an adaptec 2120S.
Even with my very nice ingramMicro discount this system hits the $5,000 line.
The question is how (or perhaps IF) to water cool it all?
My main concern is cooling the RAID. Ive checked out Koolance's HDC1-A01 Hard Drive cooler that lets you cool two drives at once, but i really question how well this works with such fast and active drives. Does anyone have any experience with this? I have searched around with little information on it in actual practice.
The second problem with the Koolance drive cooler is that i can only find it in 1/4" size. While i can find 1/4" blocks for the chips, i really question cooling this entire system on such small ID tubing.
The way i see it i will need two CPU, one (perhaps two) Chipset, one GPU, and two HDD. Wouldnt it be a bad idea to try and cool all of that with 1/4" or does it make a difference?
Could i just size down from 1/2" at the HDDs? Sizing down would drastically impair the water flow wouldnt it?
I thought of another solution where i would run everything in 1/2" and then once it get to the HDDs just Y the 1/2" into two 1/4" and feed them both off of that, then take the return from the HDD and Y it back from the 1/4" to 1/2" before it hits the rad. In basic theory i should keep the same pressure and speed with a slight decrease from the resistance of the split.
One last question is monitoring the system. I know Innovatek sells a "Flow-O-Matic" which can report the speed of the flow in the system. How is this displayed? Looks like its just a 3 pin connector that could be reported like a fan's speed. Would it be a good idea to have one at the beginning and one at the end of the system? Another downside is they seem to only sell it in 1/4" sizes.
Id also like to add temperature probes at the beginning and end of the system to monitor water temp. I know ive seen this done before but i cant remember any source of information on it.
This all seems rather daunting, would it even be worth it to try and water cool such a complex rig?
thanks in advance for any assistance.