My proposal for a water cooling setup (pics) - How sound is it?

[ZeroAce]

I made some 3D pictures to help myself better visualize my plan, and to see if it would even fit under the limitations of my case setup.


Explanation of what your are seeing:
-The yellow thing in the reservoir is a steel-wool type of material designed to let the water trickle down for noise reduction, and to aid in the separating of air from water.

-The water first splits off into two directions; One going to the CPU water block, and the other going to the GPU waterblock.
The water line from the CPU fows into the chipset block, while the line from the GPU routes into the HD water block.
These two then join up at the top and go into a stock "heatercore" radiator.

-Note that the radiator has two 120mm fans in a push/pull setup. It also has aluminum skirts designed to channel the maximum amount of air from the fans through the radiator.
-The radiator is not only mounted on the top because it is the most efficient for piping, but also because I can get rid of a little radiated heat through case conduction itself (although, it's only a steel case)

-The only fan left within the case is the one attached to the power source. The prudent thing to do would be to put an 80mm fan in the front of the case to be absolutely sure that the other components are getting the required amount of airflow, but my goal here is strip down as many noise making fans as possible.
-My hope is that the powersource fan will be good enough in terms of moving air within the case.

-Other notes: I will be attaching "ramsinks" to all the memory chips on my RAM, sound card(not pictured), network card, and GPU. I'm hoping that this will further allow me to get by without any stock case fans in my system.

General comments are welcome, but I have two specific questions off the top of my head:
1. What kind of GPH flow rate would my pump need to push through all this?
2. Is it possible that the Y-split setup would compromise the flow rate of the water tubes? (Ie. Might one tube be getting less or more water flow than the other?)
3. Would any stock case fans be necessary under the setup conditions specified?
4. Will a heatercore with the benefit of air skirts and a push/pull system be capable of dealing with all the heat generated from all four of these devices?

[CMonster]

Great graphics!

steel wool is a bad idea

probably not efficient to tie in chipset and video and hd cooling

keep in mind that you are simply moving heat to a larger surface area, which will be quickly heat saturated, meaning that the whole aparatus will reach a certain efficiency and you will not see temps that much below what you can achieve with standard heat exchange methods, and if you try to cool all three items (e.g. cpu, chipset, gpu, hard disk) your radiator will have to be exponentially large

-my little project of a few years back-

[ZeroAce]

steel wool is a bad idea

I was trying to think of a corrugated material that would slow the fall of the water without absorbing the water itself...
Any suggestions?

keep in mind that you are simply moving heat to a larger surface area,w hich will be quickly heat saturated

Sorry, I don't really know what you are referring to here, could you be more specific?

meaning that the whole aparatus will reach a certain efficiency and you will not see temps that much below what you can achieve with standard heat exchange methods, and if you try to cool all three items (e.g. cpu, chipset, gpu, hard disk) your radiator will have to be exponentially large

My goal really isn't to have super cooling, but to just get rid of the fans...

Also, I figured that the setup I have for the radiator would increase efficiency to the point where it is adaquate for cooling.

I could use two radiators, but then I would have so many fans that I would be defeating the purpose of it all.

-my little project of a few years back-

Could you elaborate for us what exactly we are seeing in that picture?

[n3uxf]

I would be cautious regarding placing the GPU in the water cooling setup. I tried doing that with a dual AMD/GeForce 4 setup and ended up frying the video card becasue it wasn't keeping cool enough.

Nice renderings. What did you use to create them?

[ZeroAce]

Maya 4.5.

I would be cautious regarding placing the GPU in the water cooling setup. I tried doing that with a dual AMD/GeForce 4 setup and ended up frying the video card becasue it wasn't keeping cool enough.

Are you saying that you used a dual split setup like what I propose, or are you saying you ran them in parallel (one after the other, on the same line)?

If the later then the GPU was getting the hot water off the CPU, so of course it would cause problems...

If the former, then one of the worries I had was that one of the channels might not get enough waterflow (so you fry the video card but the CPU does ok)

[Thematic-Device]

For the case fans anything under 25 dba should be good for your purposes. If your shooting for a completely silent machine. If your doing anything you shouldn't be able to hear it.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...alog=62&depa=1

theres a whole bunch which are clones of that one too, quite the selection


the steel wool idea would be unnecessary if the thing is typically filled pretty high with water

[ZeroAce]

I opted to go for 30DB 120m fans. They should give the best ratio of performance to cooling.

[Gomer]

I was trying to think of a corrugated material that would slow the fall of the water without absorbing the water itself...
Any suggestions?

If your return water is entering the top of the reservoir and you are concerned about splashing simply extend the return tubing down into the reservoir so it is below the operating water level.

[weapon]

material to slow the fall of water -- the foam they use for aquarium filters would work...it would also keep the circulating water nice and clean...

as for problems with running the GPU in the same loop, depending on how much water flow you have from your pump, the coolant temp will not be that different at any point in the cooling loop as the water will reach certain temp and then stabilize as the cooling system dumps heat out of the water.
trust me on this one, I have added temp sensors into the coolant flow in as many as 8 points on a cooling loop and the temp will get to a certain point and then be no more than half a degree F cooler or warmer at any of the 8 points in the loop.

your primary concerns should be getting adequate flow rate and having a heat exchanger (a.k.a. radiator) that is large enough to get rid of the heatload.

heatexchanger that will get the job done:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...threadid=25182
scroll down the above thread a little to see the finished product.

[ZeroAce]

So when it comes to the radiator: Having a big one with only two fans is better than having a normal one with two fans set up to increase airflow?

And when you talk about potential flow rate problems - Will just getting a bigger GPH pump solve all that, or will the Y-split setup inherently have trouble getting the same amount of flow to both routes?