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A Conservative Water cooler
For the past six months or so, I’ve spent a good amount of my free time researching and experimenting with water cooling systems. Unfortunately, my previous attempts up until now were not very successful, usually succumbing to unexplainable (by me anyway) air leaks. These systems were inline closed-loop type systems, so once it was closed and air appeared, it was a true pain to get it out. Fill lines can ease the situation somewhat, but I found that fill lines caused me to pull my hair out more than they actually helped me.
Taking my previous attempts into account, this time I decided to build a more classic-style reservoir system. However, seeing as this system runs in a college dorm room, there were a couple strict requirements I had to meet:
1. Quiet – The main reason I prefer water cooling. Not that my dorm is a quiet place, but I prefer not to be able to hear the whir of a high output fan while I’m trying to sleep.
2. Transportable – This system will be moved several times a year, both during class breaks and moving between living spaces throughout the years. Along the lines of this one, I also wanted the system to be completely contained – that is, there would be no way anyone could tell it was water cooled unless he opened it up.
Here is the system that will be taking the plunge:
Fong Kai 320ATX Case with Enermax Eg465p-Ve
Epox 8K7A+ Motherboard
AMD Thunderbird 1.0GHz AYHJA (can easily hit 1.5GHz or so.)
512MB Crucial PC2100 (2x256MB)
2x IBM 60GXP 40GB in RAID 0
Hercules 3D Prophet II MX (Geforce2 MX200)
The case has been modified quite a bit from previous endeavors. This includes cutting out all the factory fan guards, making a place for the radiator in the front of the case (see the picture near the end of the article), grommet mounting hard drives, as well as many mounting holes for pumps and various other components. The power supply’s fans have also been replaced with 2 Panaflo L1A’s of the appropriate sizes.
Okay, on to the good stuff...
The Construction
For my reservoir, I went out to Home Depot and bought a small “watertight” electrical box that has been used in a couple other articles on this site. The pump is an Eheim 1048. The reservoir was a little too small to fit the entire pump assembly inside it, so I decided to externally mount it instead. I drilled a ½” hole in one side of the reservoir and bored it out just a little with a pocket knife so the threads on the pump would match perfectly. I pushed the two together, and sealed the outside of the box with silicone sealant (I didn’t want to seal the inside because the silicone I had wasn’t rated to be underwater 24/7.)
In this picture you can also see the next step, threading the reservoir input into the top lid of the reservoir. Pretty basic stuff, sealed up and ready to go. You can also see the aluminum plate I glued to the mounting plate for the pump – the plastic tabs kept breaking off on me.
The planning for the wiring of the pump took awhile, since I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to do it. Eventually, I decided on the following system:
The pump would be wired to a 110VAC relay with a 12VDC coil. In order to connect the other end of the relay to the power supply, I wanted to have a system where it was VERY easy to disconnect everything while at the same time being very secure (this is a lot of voltage here, and for some reason I just don’t trust quick disconnects...) So, after cutting off the plug from the pump, I wired the other end of it into the power supply, and just barely had enough room through the existing grommet to feed the plug from the power supply into the case. I had trouble finding pictures of this wiring process, so I made sure to take a couple while I was doing it.
The other end of the plug, coming from the relay, was just an extension cord from Radio Shack that I ripped apart. The ground wire uses quick disconnects, but as you can see from the picture, I definitely just don’t trust quick disconnects by themselves. Now I had a nice clean relay, with connections for an AC and DC plug. One thing of note here: The extension cord I bought did not have black/white color coding on it (only the ground wire was colored green). I looked it up, and it turns out the narrower prong, if the plug is keyed, is always the black/hot wire.
Now that all the hard work is done, it’s on to preparing the whole system…
Preparation
My copper water block (the original Maze2 from Danger Den) had developed a lot of tarnishing since I didn’t know finger grease could tarnish copper when I first got it. I searched around the net for a good way to get rid of tarnish without actually buying special cleaners, and found the idea of using a vinegar/salt mix. A cup/bowlful of vinegar and a teaspoon or so of salt seems to work wonders. Just let the copper sit in the mixture for a few minutes, and all but the hardest tarnishing will be gone.
I had to drill a few new holes in the bottom of my case to mount the pump and reservoir assembly. Once the holes were drilled, I covered the contact points with small strips of Dynamat Extreme to keep the assembly from touching the case metal. I also added rubber grommets for it to sit on (above the holes, not in them), and vinyl washers on the bottom outside where the bolt heads would contact the case. This reduced most of the vibration.
All that was left was just connecting the hoses (with Teflon tape and a small amount of clear silicone for good measure) and testing the system out.
I was very pleased to see that a reservoir system is much lower stress – turn the pump on, and the system fills, no problems what-so-ever. The radiator in this picture is the smaller radiator that Be Cooling sells.
There was only one problem I had with this system: The “watertight” reservoir lid wasn’t quite watertight – the gasket leaked a little. I was forced to seal the lid down with silicone. The only other slight annoyance is a small “clanking” noise that the radiator emits. I was told by Be Cooling that this was the “turbulator” in the radiator, although I haven’t had any problems with it making noises up until now.
Results
Previously, this system was running an SK6 with a quiet Sunon 80mm fan Krazy glued on, as well as a 92mm Panaflo L1A as the intake fan. With this configuration, the CPU (FSB overclocked to 150MHz) would run at about 40C at idle and 45C under load (Prime95).
With the new water cooler, I’m only running one case fan, the intake 92mm Panaflo L1A. Currently, I’m running idle at 35C and under load it got up to 38C. All of these measurements were taken using the on-board thermistor and MBM5, so they’re not the most scientific measurements.
I plan on adding a rheostat to the one remaining case fan, but other than that, this computer is starting to get very quiet considering what’s under the hood. Here’s the final assembly before all the rest of the components were added:
I always find that different, although similar, perspectives on water cooling can help me understand a concept better, even if the projects I read about are very close in design. I hope this article has been helpful for some aspiring extreme cooling geeks out there.
Email me with any questions or comments.
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