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Unread 11-28-2005, 01:22 PM   #1
pdf27
Cooling Savant
 
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Horsham, UK
Posts: 140
Default Silent, watercooled TJ-06

I may as well take the opportunity to start a forum off - it isn't going to come around very often . I know this is a slightly spammy post in that I'm advertising what I built, but the subforum has to start somewhere...

Below are some photos of my new PC, Dust Puppy. It's named after a character in the Userfriendly cartoon strip (my previous PC was named Erwin after another character). One or two of you may have seen them over at SPCR, where I've already posted them.











System is an A8N-SLI running an A64 3000+, 1GB RAM, Samsung P120 HDD (suspended in the wooden apparatus at the top of the case, with a 120mm fan blowing over it), Seasonic S12, dual DVD +/- RW drives, XFX 6600GT.
Water system is Thermochill PA.160, Sunon A2123 240v fan @ 115v, 1/2" Tygon with 5/8" barbs on as many things as I could fit them to, Eheim 1048, DDen Maze 4 GPU, Little River Storm G4 & DDen Bayres. The second Sunon A2123 240v fan @115v is sucking air from the motherboard compartment, blowing it over the hard disk and then leaving it to exit through the power supply. I was originally going to disconnect the power supply fan and rely on this for cooling, but as the power supply fan never ramps up and the accoustics are totally acceptable it isn't worth invalidating the guarantee for this. I might try in a few years however to see if I can hear the difference. The entire case is lined with Accoustipack.

I'm pretty sure the 6600GT was damaged during the installation process, but by and large it still works (gives me pink spots onscreen sometimes but otherwise OK).

Accoustics are pretty good - close to white noise with no noticeable pure tones and virtually no HDD seek noise. It isn't as inaudible as I was aiming for (i.e. not drowned out by my internal organs!) but is pretty good and substantially better than my previous PC (92mm Papst @ 7v + Barracuda IV).

This was both my first watercooled system and my first PC build, which explains the mistakes I made during build to damage the graphics card. It still has the odd problem (pink spots on screen sometimes, and Rome: Total War crashes a lot) but I think they are down to mechanical damage I did to the video card when putting the jubilee clip hose clamps on the block.

Constructive criticism as always welcome, but (heresy though it may be to say it) I'm perfectly happy with the temps I've got and so am unlikely to change the water cooling system in any way except to get a major advantage in noise emitted. Being as the system is very, very quiet right now and what noise there is is not intrusive at all, I'm very happy. Thanks to all at ProCooling for giving me the practical knowledge to build it.
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