Hey everyone. First of all, I would like to say that this is my first post here and to say hi to all of you. I hope to become an active part of this community.
Now for the rest of the post. I am planning to build my first rig soon and have been doing extensive research for the past 6 months or so. I am pretty comfortable with the building process and am confident that I can do that without a problem. Then I ran into overclocking and read up on it and found that I could save a bunch of money and still have great performance. Now I'm also pretty comfortable with overclocking. In fact, I wrote up a guide on overclocking at the AnandTech forums in the CPU/Processors and Overclocking forum, if any of you want to check it out. Obviously, the next step after learning about overclocking was to look into water cooling to push my CPU even farther. I've been reading up on water cooling for the past couple of days and here's what I've come up with so far:
Pump-
Swiftech MCP650 12v DC Pump (I would have gone with a Mag 3 but I didn't want to deal with leak problems on my first setup)
Radiator-
Thermochill HE120.1 (I'll explain why I am going with a relatively small radiator later on)
Water Block-
Swiftech MCW6002-64 or
DangerDen Athlon 64 TDX Block (depends on whether or not the Swiftech is in stock when I am ready to buy)
Reservoir-
DangerDen Clear Round Reservoir w/ 80mm mounting pattern
Along with the tubing/clamps etc. All of this will be set up internally in a gigantic Cooler Master CM Stacker case.
All of that will be set up pretty normally except for the radiator. Here's my rather unorthodox plan for mounting the radiator:
My plan is to actually mount the radiator
inside of a
4 in 3 module which comes as an accessory to the CM Stacker. The 4 in 3 module is meant to convert 3 5.25" bays into 4 3.5" bays. If you look at the dimensions for the 4 in 3 module, they are 184 ×153 ×129mm, and the dimensions for the radiator are 172x124x50mm. According to these specs, the radiator should be able to be mounted completely inside of the 4 in 3 module. Of course, I would have to find a way to fill the spaces between the radiator and the sides of the 4 in 3 module, but that shouldn't be too hard to do. I could probably cut up a rag or something and stuff it in between the radiator and the inside of the 4 in 3 module. This setup would have a few advantages:
First of all, it wouldn't require any modding (unless you consider cutting up a rag modding :P). Mounting a radiator on the inside front of the case by itself would probably require drilling holes to mount the radiator. In the 4 in 3 device, all I would have to do is slip the radiator inside and mount it either with some glue or string or a combination of both.
The other advantage is that it wouldn't require me to buy a seperate shroud and fan. The 4 in 3 module comes with a 120mm fan designed to cool the hard drives that are usually mounted inside of it. For my purposes, it would blow cool intake air from the outside of the case through the radiator. Provided that I seal the spaces between the radiator and the inside of the module, all I would have to do is mount the radiator a few inches back from the fan to alleviate the need for a shroud.
Hell, if I wanted to, I could probably mount two seperate radiators in two seperate 3 in 4 devices and have the water go through each of them in succesion, right? If I don't mind modding drilling a hole or two in the 4 in 3 device, couldn't I even mount two radiators inside a single 4 in 3 device right behind each other? According to the listed dimensions, they would both fit. It would just be a matter of getting the tubing to connect to each of them inside the confined space.
Do you guys see any problems with this setup, or any of the other components I listed? Anything that you guys would improve upon? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,