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Closed Water Cooling System Challenge

R

RaphaelVinceti

Gawd
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
600
I've been thinking about building a Closed system to eliminate dust, im just not quite sure how i should go about doing it. I was thinking i would get a passive radiator (probably a large aqua and mount it to the case), and leaving it on the outside of the case, with the barbs/tubing runing into the case through custom holes w/rubber to prevent cutting the tubing. But im curious about something, if im going to be doing what, should i WC EVERYTHING in the system, including Ram, HDDs and the Northbridge? or will i be safe just watercooling the CPU and GPUs? Im not planning on overclocking with this system, I just want to leave it on constantly, and im extremely perceptive to noise, so if i leave on a system with fans in my room, i cant sleep at night. Anyone have any other suggestions for me?

Thanks

Oh.. and Case suggestions would be nice too.
 
Possible, but you will have to figure out a way to use natural convection to cool your case off.
 
Anything in your case that generates heat needs to be cooled down somewhere. The small bit of airflow over hard drives and RAM is usually enough, but if the case is cooled off then every part of your system has a much higher risk of overheating. It'll literally be like driving in the sun with your windows rolled up. You'd have to cool the CPU, GPU, RAM, northbridge, hard drives and PSU; that'd be one hell of a loop. Get a strong pump.
 
This is gonna be extremely impossible even if you use water cooling. Everything has to be cooled down. The larger the radiator and the more the components connected the more the pumps or the stronger the pumps.

You need fans in your setup and 120mm fans are normally not loud at all. 4 120 mm fans in your pc is better than a heavy duty pump cooling your entire computer.
 
What about dual loop? two Aquacomputer Aquastream Modified Eheim 1046s? Cool the CPU+GPUs on one loop, and HDDs, RAM, PS (Or i can use the PSU/s as the only fans in the system...) on the other? I would just need to figure out what to do about the Radiators, what should i use for a radiator, if i want passive?
 
Aqua computer makes a bunch of passive coolers. The only problem im having is finding the RAM coolers.. Thats an issue.. i know someone used to make some, but i cant find any now...
 
Buy a cheap auto radiator, probably about a hundred bucks. Take your time when designing adapters, I used end caps from PVC pipe fittings with holes drilled in them to fit regular barbed hose fittings. That's the only way to run without fans.

You can get away with passive cooling for system memory, but you'll have to leave the case open or get one of the expensive Lian-Li cases that's mostly mesh grill. Make sure motherboard capacitors (those little cans sticking out of the board near the CPU) don't fry either. If your case has the power supply fan right near the CPU, and just about all of them do, you're fine. Just don't let the room go too far over 80 degrees F ambient.

Watercool the CPU, motherboard chipset, video card, and maybe hard drives, especially if you have more than one in close proximity to each other. Don't keep hard drives near a CD- or DVD-burner, you'll increase your likelihood of burning coasterware.

Try to get some good cooling for the video card memory. I still have trouble with mine overheating on really new games with everything turned on. You can tell because the screen will start to get slightly snowy, like when an old TV gets no signal, you'll see just a bit of that kind of snow.

I keep my huge radiator on the floor next to my desk in a little stand I made for it with a single piece of 1"x3" pine board about 12' long, cut to lengths and screwed together to make sort of a frame around it. I have it close to, but not touching, the wall, and I've never had a problem with convection. Don't keep it under your desk, it won't get enough airflow.

Hard drive waterblocks are a point of discussion on these boards as to whether you really need them or not. If you're willing to put the drives in 3.5-5.25 bay adapters and cut out a hole for a single 80 mm fan, you can keep them cooler than they would be in your watercooling loop that deals with much hotter components, but then you've got an 80 mm fan right in front of your case. The same general rule goes for most of the components in your case, you can get close to the performance of basic watercooling with aircooling, but it's noisy. Also, it can be hard to find waterblocks for things like hard drives and memory.

I could go on but somebody opened the Twizzlers and I can smell them from here.
 
Lol.. wow, thanks for the advice, though, i dont really want a Mesh like case, because i want no dust in the system at all. But, if thats the only way to go, ill just break down and buy a Lian Li desk, since i beleive that comes with one of their mesh ones.. Then maybe i'll get a large Auto HC, or a couple of the Innovtek passive coolers.. the really big ones.. depending on the money i have to spend.
 
A couple 120mm fans controlled with a PWM based fan controller can be dead silent. PWM controllers send bursts of full power to a fan to control rpm. Therefore they can run fans anywhere between 0-100%. I have mine running at 25% most of the time and really can't hear them at all.

I think todays mb's require some airflow across them. Maybe if you had some fans but went with the 'positive pressure theory'. Where you have more intake fans than exhaust, creating a slightly higher pressure in the case which would help keep dust out. You would have to filter your intake fans of course but that's easy enough.
 
The big double- and triple-120 radiators will fit inside or right on the outside of a case, but they're expensive and you have to watch the buildup of flow resistance. I think auto heatercores are generally slightly more open inside.

If you happen to get a case where the PSU airflow doesn't bring some fresh air over the motherboard caps (especially if it's one of those new boards that has an entire heatsink devoted to them), I'd get a Vantec Stealth fan mounted with lots of rubber washers between it and the case, just buy long machine bolts and put washers both between it and the case and under the head of the screws on the other side of the case sheetmetal too to completely decouple the fan from the sheetmetal. The more rubber, the better.

Positive case pressure is almost always the way to go, even if it's one fan in and one (less powerful) fan out. You can't help dust, I have a massive air cleaning system in my house and my case dust filters still have to be cleaned, albeit only every few months, but a little dust still settles inside.

Right now, I'm using a cheap case because my MB fried and I haven't gotten around to reinstalling everything in the replacement board, but my current case of choice is the Lian-Li 6077, I like to put my hard drives on 5.25" adapters so they get more airflow around them (and some are watercooled with the side-mounted blocks, so they have to be in 5.25" bays anyway). The 6077 has a straight column of 5.25" bays from top to bottom in the front of the case, with the power button/intake fans in an assembly that takes up three of them and an adapter plate for a floppy (and a cover plate for a CD drive). They have a full tower like that too, but if you have that many drives, you're probably going rackmount these days. I still think Lian-Lis have the best finish of any case, too.

I just counted, it has nine 5.25" bays total. It is expensive, though.
 
get an xp-120 ... a nice silent 120mm fan

a silencer for the video card

a seasonic psu

all fans on system 120 mm

everything should be silent enough
 
I think what ill do is go with an open mesh case, a passive liquid cooling solution, (like the Zalman, or Inovatek towers), and not OC at all. Ill use two loops. One for HDDs and Northbridge, and one for GPU/CPU. The only fans will be from the Powersupply, and hopefully those will be quiet enough.

Thanks for all of your suggestions though, they where all helpful.
 
Actually, you should probably cool the hard disk and cpu together ..

GPU and NB together. Or the other way around .. i.e. switch cpu and gpu around.

This will keep all components cooled without one causing the other to over heat since you're passively cooling the components.

You will need some air flowing through the ram too and the mosfets. I don't know what you're planning to do about that but a mesh case might not provide sufficient cooling alone.
 
I've looked into the issue a lot since we work with conductive fibers. These have a tendency to get into computers, usually followed by a sizable bang and the need for a new power supply (I only by cheap ones now, and by the dozen), or any number of other parts in rare cases (I still wish there were inline fuses to protect from powerspikes from exploding PSUs).
The big issue is how to cool the powersupply. There are water cooled models, but they are outragously priced. One option is to have an "aircooled" case in an hermetic enclosure, and useing a set of heatercores to transfer the heat out of the case (one heatercore in the case, with a good fan circulating the hot box air over it, one core and a pump outside the case removing the heat). You could combine this with a standard watercooling setup.
We finally settled on the brute force method, using hepa filters and strong fans to keep positve pressure on the case and not allowing anything in that way. Just make sure your powersupply fan blows out, not in.
 
This guy did it: http://www.webx.dk/oz2cpu/pcmod/water-results.htm#CPU
He WCd everything except southbridge, memory & mosfets, but if you have a single Nexus 120mm, that would probably be enough to cool those components if everythign else was WCd, and as long as you had well designed fan grills & a filter, you should have an almost absolutely dead silent system, and as long as you removed the filter every couple of months or so, everything will stay just about free of dust.
 
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