Water and mobility

[dgz]

Lately I find myself more and more annoyed of the sound computers generate.

My Haswell based HTPC is literally the least noisy PC at my home, beating my tower and laptops by a large margin. Really happy with my Fractal Design Node 304 case.

While it's a nice case, I am not sure whether something as small would be the best choice for Zen or whatever I decide to go with on my am next gaming build.

My current gaming rig is contained within a CM 690 II. The 2500k inside is cooled by a NH D14. GPU is also fairly quiet. And yet the whole thing is noisy as fuck. Nothing excessive, it's just that all the fans generate a lot of air flow.

Every few months I go to the nearest tire change shop and use their compressors to clean to blow the dust away.

I am wondering how would that work if I decide to go water. Anyone in the same situation?

 

[Dayaks]

Well, I have been pleased with my H100i since you can lower the pump to inaudiable. Corsair's fans suck though. Factor in new fans that aren't garbage.

For a custom loop make sure you get a quiet pump. A lot of them will make your case sound like it has a fish tank pump inside. Don't cheap out on the pump if you go that route.

 

[Jay88]

A nice custom loop will easily cost 500 dollars and you will still hear fan noise but signicantly less. A super quite custom loop will cost a fair amount more because inorder to get proper cooling with low fan speed you will have to increase radiator surface area so either fat ass rads or a few of them.

 

[dgz]

Thanks for the input, guys.

I am more interested in how mobile are the computers with pumps inside them. That's why I pointed I take my PCs to the tire shops.

 

[Koween]

If you went with soft tubing I don't really see a problem. If everything is as tight as it should be and you don't throw your case around like a dead cat it should be okay. The huge heatsink in an aircooled pc puts a lot of stress on the motherboard when you move the thing and you seem to have not broken anything.
Rigid tubing may be a bit of a problem, as moving the pc makes it's chassis twist and flex and that could make the tubes slip out of the fittings.

 

[Tsumi]

I have transported my PC on 400 mile trips without issues. Custom watercooling on CPU and GPU.

 

[jamsomito]

I'm paranoid about my loop breaking when I transport my PC, but after countless LANs, there's never been an issue. Happily surprised at that. I use flex tubing and barb/clamps though. CPU only, one 360 rad, vario pump, mid-size res. For me, it's just crazy heavy. Probably 30lbs or so. Add a GPU block, another rad, more tubing and fluid, and I've heard of rigs around the 50lb mark. They really suck to lug around anywhere.

I've actually been thinking about building a seperate air cooled LAN box just to take to my buddy's place so I don't have to haul my PC into the car, into his place, inevitably down into a basement and reverse the whole process to get it home again. I'm in a NZXT Switch 810 for what it's worth. 8 case fans, optical drive, 2x SSD's, and your typical internal component layout.