Galden ZT 150

[Ultraviolet]

Sorry, the picture's small and it sucks, but hopefully you get the idea. I'm going with a low voltage opteron processor (1.xx series)--only 55w. Going to try to decide on the mobo today so I can order it and start getting real dimensions, but I have to decide on a pump first before I order the glass to be cut.

[Brians256]

It doesn't say what the pump head required is on those radiators, even with the input valve all the way wide open. It is just impossible for me to guess on that one as I have no idea. Ask a plumber. They'd have a feel for it if they've ever installed those in a system. There are probably tables that are available. Hmmm.. why don't you ask the mfg? I'm sure they have a clue what the radiators require.

[ricecrispi]

Antec Phantom 500W or 350 is worth considering. Phantom 350 needs some good airflow which you can accomplish with some 120mm low rpm fans. The 500 is basically the 350 with an annoying 80mm fan added.

Also consider the Ahanix Silenx PSU. I have one and its very quiet and solid performer.

If noises is really bothersome you should consider VIA chipset. It can run fanless and would be perfect match with phantom 350.
You could also run a pentuim M 479 chip and underclock it.

[Ultraviolet]

Thanks Brians256, I'll do exactly that. After a bunch of strange math using data on some of those radiators, I figure a 16" x 43" radiator of this type http://www.houseneeds.com/shop/manua...lectpanels.pdf (model No. SS 40 120 G) would be able to dissipate 382 watts with no air flow and a delta T of 50F. The radiator holds 0.63 gallons.

I'll contact the manufacturer and ask about pump recommendations, but I wanted to check that I'm looking in the right ballpark for heat dissipation amounts first. The system components so far are an Opteron 1.xx series (55w), mobo undecided, 3ware 9xxx series RAID card, 500 watt PSU and 8 hard drives. That whole system looks like it would draw less than 250 wattts to me. Stupid question, but a 500 watt PSU delivering 250 watts will release how much heat into the system? I can figure everything out but the PSU and would love some help on that.

[ricecrispi]

Depends on PSU efficiency. Good psu have efficiency around 75%. Antec Phantoms are 80-90% efficient. Total heat dissapated is around 250/.8 for most psus.

I would look into getting a VIA cpu. This things give off less than 20watts combined with the mobo. They have new C7 cpu and EDEN cpu at 1.2-2.0 ghz. They can be passively cooled with the newest products having NB, IGP, and CPU all intergrated as single core. A epia or mini atx board might work for you since you need a single pci slot.

[Brians256]

ricecrispi you are correct. This is an edit because I just thought multiply when you were doing a divide. Ooops!
250/0.8 is correct for total system heat production.

Ultraviolet, remember that the thermal mass of that water and radiator is going to take a long time to reach equilibrium. So, if you don't use your computer all the time, you could achieve much better temps by simply turning it off or hibernating. Most people don't use their computer more than a couple of hours at a time. If you work on it, you might use it in 4hr shifts (taking a break for lunch).

Edited because I can't do math right the first time. Thank God I re-read my post.

[bobkoure]

If you're building your case out of wood, why not build it like a speaker cabinet (MDF with wood-or-whaever laminate).
Baffle the intake and exhaust - and line the baffles with sound absorbent material - maybe foam like this stuff from Parts Express. Speaker builders have a lot of the same issues you're up aginst- keeping unwanted sounds inside a box, converting 'em to heat.

Of course having a sometimes-flooding basement to use for a home theater would be an excellent reason to go with a front projector (ceiling mount) and wall-mounted screen ("have to keep everything above the water line, dear...").
On the other hand, maybe you should be building in fiberglass or marine plywood, because of the high humidity.

[Brians256]

Just use marine grade polyurethane coatings on the case and put it up on rollers. Not waterproof of course, but strongly resistant, and keeping the bottom off of the floor will help it dry off.

[Ultraviolet]

ha, no no. The stereo is not in the basement. I merely mentioned that my basement is very humid and floods about once a year as a the reason why I could not build the typical loud 15 fan RAID system and stick it in the basement where it wouldn't be heard. I toyed with using mdf, but I really prefer not to use veneer. I'll be using solid cherry and mdf only for the hard drive enclosure which will be internal and not visible. As soon as I have all my parts, I'll order the glass and build the small tank.

ricecrispi, thanks for the via epia tip. I'm seriously considering them now. The 3ware raid card is larger than the whole mobo!

I have gotten 0 responses from any radiator distributors or manufacturers regarding the recommended pump specs so I may just be buying a series of pumps off of ebay and reselling them if they don't work. I'm going to start with the 1046 as there seems to be consensus that it is the quietest pump and it is submersible. The whole system will hold between 2-3 gallons.

I've also decided to go with the Fluorinert FC-40 instead of FC-77 as it seems to be the better liquid for this project. Among other things, the FC-77 is actually not viscous enough, about 1/5th the viscosity of water at 40C. I don't want to deal with the leaks. I'm mulling over FC-43 because that's on ebay almost all the time, but that has a viscosity of nearly 3x water at 40C and probably would necessitate a larger (louder) pump.

[bobkoure]

If you really, really want to liquid cool your hard drives, why not just use (make or build) HDD coolers and sound insulate the whole thing? There's at least one pre-built solution for this.
Or.. use already pretty quiet drives, like the Samsung Spinpoints and mount 'em in something that reduces head-seek vibration transmission (a problem you're going to have to deal with even if you fully immerse them). The spinpoints run pretty cool, but you sould use the zalman heatpipe disk coolers as they also have vibration isolation - and you'd be able to reduce the airflow to the drives, reducing noise even more.

[Ultraviolet]

Thanks, actually a page or so ago, I mentioned that I was going just this route with the hard drives and, in lieu of building something, will likely grab 4 of these http://www.koolance.com/shop/product...roducts_id=231 as you can mount 2 hard drives to either of these. I haven't fully settled on exactly what materials I'm going to use to isolate the drives--definitely mdf and ???

I was also considering the Samsung Spinpoints until I discovered that you have to disable the quiet mode, or whatever it's called, when used with 3ware cards. I'll probably just stick with my Seagates for now and enjoy the 5 year warranty.

Off topic: bobkoure, I notice you're in the Boston area--so am I. Maybe you'd be interested in seeing/advising on this monstrosity once I actually begin?

[mx]

I'd buy a PolarFLO HDD46 Copper Dual Hard Drive Liquid Heat Sink instead.



It's a pretty nice design with copper, delrin and low restriction, I'm thinking about building something similar to cool my PSUs and HDDs.

I stumbled over this auction yesterday. I asked him how much three of them would cost and he could sell three for $50 each. I would have brought three if it wasn't for the killer shipping cost to Sweden, $100!

[bobkoure]

Not clear how a second drive mounts to that - looks like the "bottom" plate has cutaways so you can fasten screws into the underside of the drive on top of it.
I'm pretty sure hard drives are designed to transmit heat to their sideplates (ran a little experiment - took mine out, put heat sink compound on the sides - turning the drive cage into a heat sink and reported drive temps went down a bit - don't remember how much but it wasn't enough to get excited about) and these coolers do contact the sideplates - but only very small area...

[mx]

Yes I belive they design hdds to transmit heat through the sides. I would like to see a block like this with the disks mounted under it. Heat travels up so most of it would end up in the wb. I wonder if it would be enough with one heatsink?

___ -> block
||||| -> disks

Just an idéa...

[bobkoure]

And I'd like to see side-mounted heatsinks. Just plates, say (so it'd be easy to have holes for disk mounting) with 1/2" or 3/8" copper tubing soldered (or brazed or silver soldered) in a serpentine shape, avoiding the mount holes. And maybe some rubber blocks with inletted nuts facing out to facilitate mounting in 5 1/4" drive space (not sure about that latter as IMHO if you're not sealing the drives up in some sort of box there's really no reason to water cool.
And, actually, given fairly quiet disks to start with (like the spinpoints as seagate sadly seems to have lost interest in making the quietest drives) and suspension (or other means to isolate seek-induced vibration transmission) and some sort of noise absorbtive material inside the case (or lining the baffle, if you've a baffled case) then IMHO you can have very quiet disks and still be cooling with air.
The challenge comes when you're trying for a very quiet system using SCSI drives. W/C ing very possibly makes sense there...


PS: the forum software keeps changing "o u t w a r d s" (without the spaces to) *****ds. How exactly is this a rude word? PM if you need to explain in a rude way

[Joe]

Originally Posted by bobkoure

PS: the forum software keeps changing "o u t w a r d s" (without the spaces to) *****ds. How exactly is this a rude word? PM if you need to explain in a rude way

Ahh because remember that scam thing people were doing a long time ago with "out-war" ? so we banned that word. I will remove that from being filtered.

[Joe]

Outwards <-- all fixed

[bobkoure]

Y'know, I really don't remember - some kind of FPS?
Anyway, thanks for putting it back and I promise not to use it in a bad way