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Project Duplex

S

Squalish

Gawd
Joined
Aug 23, 2002
Messages
647
I'm setting out on a long term project to make a 2 motherboard watercooled case out of acrylic. Mobo A will be a new A64 machine, mobo B will be the a7v8x, TbredC 2400+, and ti4200 that I have now.

I was VERY close to just going with a Stacker, as pictures of it were the inspiration for this(esp the dual ATX/BTX part); however, I wasn't convinced that I could ultimately fit the PCI cards into the space allotted for the 120mm fan.

I just bought a 6'x3' piece of 0.238" acrylic which I think will last me the whole case. I need to get some posterboard for a mockup.

The plan is to have the motherboards radially symmetrical. Motherboard A will go in a normal configuration, Motherboard B will go in rotated 180 degrees about the Z axis (upside down, with everything still on the back panel). When I need to open them, the sides of the case housing MBA and MBB will swing out on acrylic piano hinges just behind the drive cage.

Everything will be cooled by a 2x120mm heatercore intake + pumps at the bottom of the drivecage. (not entirely sure if I could possibly include the PSU's in this, though I'd like to)
 
Apologies for the lack of progress on this, I havn't had nearly as much free time as I thought I would recently, and I've been working on a side project that will function as the companion to this - a WUXGA(1200x1920) DIY LCD projector.

I have done quite a bit of planning on this, which will be posted here eventually.
 
There are several bells+whistles I'm not including here, but these drawings should give you a basic feeling of how I'd like to lay it out. I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to secure everything, I'd like to stick to acrylic, acrylic rails (strips glued/bolted together), threaded rods, and heat-shaped acrylic.

The motherboards I want to mount on trays, and I the foundation for the trays could swing outwards away from each other on acrylic piano hinges fastened to the front portion of the case just behind the drivecage.. From behind it would look like a book opening. I'm torn about whether + how to include the PSU's in that rotation.

A lot of thinking went into the drivecage - it's two pieces of quarter inch acrylic kept at a constant distance of 6" by three or four threaded rods. It's 8.5 inches long, and has a fastener that you can't see in the back to secure the drives for transport. I spent a long time staring off into space to figure out spacing that I probably won't be using anytime soon :) The core idea was that a 5.25" drive is typically 6"x8". A 3.5" drive is 4"x6". Two 3.5" drives fit in the same space in the X-Z plane that one 5.25" drive fits. So you could vastly simplify drivecage design by using two sheets that are 6 inches apart, mounting two quarter inch rails on each side for the drives to rest on, and placing the hard drives sideways. If you secure them from the front/back, that means you have an airgap adequate for ventilation, can use the exact same structure as the 5.25" bays, and you don't have to screw in ANYTHING. The cables come out through holes in the side of one of the two sheets.

Also, if one wants to suspend these for noise reasons, you can mount them the traditional way, front-forward, have the cables arranged in the normal way, etc (though this means you can only mount 8).

Using this layout, these could fit 16 drives in side by side, fully cooled by two 120mm fans. I'll have a large heatercore in the front space, so it will fit 8 drives + core + 120mm fans without protruding from the case.

The tubes from the heatercore will go over to one side(the one that doesn't have the drivecables there) to the pumps + res, safely isolated from the drives. There will eventually be two resses in order to turn on/off a decorative system, but I'll save that for later.

The cooling system uses a single split loop for both computers -
bottom of reservoir->heatercore->Ysplit->
a) pumpA->component1->component2-> top of reservoir
b) pumpB->component3->component4-> top of reservoir

I'll be cooling a ti4200, a 2400+ thoroughbred C, a 3000+ A64, and a 6800.
Which component goes where I'm not sure, though conventional wisdom says that if I'm going to allow the back of the case to split in half, each half of the loop should stick to one system.

I hope to integrate some VGA switching into the box, too - it will be used to drive a DIY LCD projector and a CRT. The plan was to build a switch for each monitor, rather than the other way around, so I could have 2 monitors running off 1 system if I wanted.
I will be integrating a 10/100 switch I had lying around into the box too, forgot to diagram it, at the bottom of the backpanel.

Frontpanel:
10a.jpg

Back:
10b.jpg


Dimensions will be roughly 21"x10"x24"
 
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