Is this impossible?
 

I'm looking for another project/hobby...other than doing a bunch of reading on the web, I'm totally new to water cooling. I'm looking to enjoy this project--I have no need for OC'd processors, but I do need large amounts of storage so I've been dreaming up this:

8 drive SATA hardware RAID-5 server--motherboard and processor undecided, but this will be a dedicated server with no heavy processor requirements so I am on a hunt to find the one that runs the coolest. I am looking to do a 100% fanless watercooled setup. Since one of my hobbies is woodworking, I am building the case out of cherry (this will be my second) so I have no constraints now. Case design will depend on parts required for the project--possibilities include incorporating this into an end table etc.

I am looking for something aesthetically beautiful and completely silent. The thing I am struggling with is the passive radiator--8 drives, a processor and a gpu (again--the one that produces the least heat and has a waterblock made for it) will generate a lot of heat. I obviously have to go with an external radiator (which already puts a crimp on my aesthetics requirement), but is there anything up to this task excluding some extreme custom work? I've seen the Zalman and Innovatek externals--would these even come close to fitting the bill?

I'm not looking to be spoonfed information, I realize that I have a lot of research to do and there's not a time crunch on this project, but I'm not really sure how/if I can proceed with this until I get this radiator situation figured out.

Can it be done? Yes. Easily.

Waterblocks are rarely "made" for a GPU/CPU. For you CPU, a swiftech MCW6000/6002 will be hard to beat. Great bang for the buck, and an easy install to boot. As for the radiator.....look here: http://www.alphacool.de/perl/shop.pl...140&art_kz=149

They are scaleable, so you can add them on as you need them. You can also try a few of these:
http://search.ebay.com/finned-transm...fkrZ1QQfromZR8

Four of them mounted externally should be more than adequate. As for a pump try a DDC or MCP 655. Do you want to watercool your hard drives? If so this could be a good candidate for custom work.

The hardest part IMO will be watercooling a power supply capable of running your system, as i doubt any of the passive solutions can handle 8 HDDs and a full system.

This can be delt with. I wouldn't want to go into it unless UV is willing to take some risks and spend some serious time with this build.

A Pentium M would be a very good match for a system like that.

Thanks for the responses--those radiators are exactly what I was looking for. Odd that I never turned them up in a Google search. I'll have to figure out how much cooling I need (although I didn't see any heat dissipation specs listed), but at least I know that it can be done so I'll move on to other hurdles.

maxSaleen, I'm interested to hear you ideas on custom hdd cooling. So far I'd just been looking at this and similar typed solutions. The Koolance looked nice because it allows you to sandwich two drives together so I'd only need 4 instead of 8.

And finally, I would love to hear any thoughts as to how to approach cooling the PS. All of the passive supplies I've seen don't look like they would cut it and all seem to need movement of air in the case via fans, which I won't have. I realize that I'm taking on a large project which will be time (and money) consuming, but I'm doing this really because it looks fun. There are obviously far easier ways of slapping together a RAID-5 system--I could stick in 10 fans and put the whole thing in the basement for a total silence solution. But that wouldn't be fun. I'm willing to take on whatever is required, it will just take me longer because I'm new at this.

The Pentium M is a good idea that I hadn't considered. Your talk of custom hdd cooling got me thinking of possible custom CPU cooling. I have a old 700mhz (slot 1) and an even older dual 450mhz (both Dell's) sitting around which probably run pretty cool compared to modern processors, but would need some creative cooling ideas. Maybe the Pentium M is even cooler running though? I have no idea, I'll look into it.

Any reason you want it fanless? 8 hard drives are going to be louder than a couple quiet fans.

I'm doing this from a MAC!!!!!! In their store....
 

For HDD cooling I was thinking of two absolutely huge custom made copper HDD blocks. They would span the width of eight HDDs side by side. One would cool the top, the other would cool the bottom. I can think of some people who might do this sort of a custom job for you. Eight HDDs can be dead silent if enclosed in foam. I'll post my ideas for PSU cooling when I'm back at my workstation.

READ THE TITLE!!!!!!!!

Hmm!

A Pentiuum M system with a 8 HD sandwhich in foam wrap.
Sounds tasty! :D

If you put a heat scource in a ' chimney' with radiative shielding and the radiator below it, wont that pull some air through the rad??
A light-bulb with a shade below it maybe?

Fanless iss not a requirement of a silent system - they just need to be very quiet. Many fans are quiet enough, and would greatly improve heat disipation over no fans atall..

I think very quiet/silent fans would be more than enough to keep 8 hdd's cool.

There are psus that are just about silent aswell.

I had two radiators each 130 x 150. I had them both shrouded and each with a single 120mm fan. Both were mounted vertically.
With fans on 12v I ran at ambient plus 10 degrees, but with the fans completely turned off, I ran at ambient plus 20 degrees. The latter suited me far more.
This was with a heavily over-volted and overclocked AMD XP1600.

Now my orientation and my shrouds and the fans all meant that the radiators were very poorly setup for fanless operation. Mount them horizontally, free from air obstruction and I am sure they'd do a lot better. You CPU and GPU and drives will have more heat, but I'd suggest that even a horizontally mounted 120.3 sized radiator would do a good job.

When you see the chart of air-flow-vs-temp for radiators, you'll see the graph gets very steep at the zero-end. I'd strongly suggest you install one slow speed 120mm fan. "Tricod" fans [see thread at overclockers.com.au or read the PA160 design thread here) are very, very quiet.

My current case design has a single 120mm fan for the PSU, that sucks air out of the case. All other avenues for air enterring the case have been removed save for the large radiator duct. Still a work in progress I am afraid, so no pickies. However, the noise level for this design is expected to be very, very small and yet performance will be close to the full-on rigs with multiple fans and large pumps. Oh, and yes, my definition of "close". :D

I think that the "fanless" design is as much about aesthetics as it is about silence. He said something about this thing being mounted "in" a piece of furniture he would make. I'll post my PSU cooling schematic when I get the chance.

To go through four external transmission coolers and keep any reasonable flow rate he will need a much better pump solution than a single DDC or 655.

I think you are being a little over-zealous ranting about how easy this will be.

The total lack of fans is partially to see if it can be done effectively and tastefully, but it's primarily because of the noise and just the fact that it gives me a project to work on. I have 3 computers running beside me right now and it sounds like a freight train is coming through my living room--all of them started off with quiet fans, but they only stay quiet for so long. I do have plans for this being incorporated into a piece of furniture. I'm designing a computer that won't even be recognized as a computer and I don't want a piece of furniture humming or blowing air. This is not a practical project, it's just supposed to be fun.
I realize that 8 drives spinning constantly will generate some noise, but as I'm designing this case, I can bury them behind a foot of wood (I won't), decouple them from the case etc. Ideally, I'd like to get enough effective watercooling for all heat producing parts that I have the freedom of designing this into a piece of furniture that is almost totally enclosed--fans wouldn't give me as much freedom.

I really like the idea of custom hdd cooling, but I'm not real excited about 8 drives side by side. That would take up a lot of realestate and force me into building something fairly wide or fairly deep. The other flexibility I wanted was to start off this RAID array with perhaps as few as 4 drives and pick up the other four as price drops and need arises. This means I would like to keep the drives semi accessible. Would I need to use some thermal paste or something along those lines between the copper waterblooks and the drives? If so I imagine I couldn't pry that up everytime I wanted to seat another drive next to it. Would a 2 row high stack of 4 work with 3 waterblocks--or perhaps a stack of 4 with 2 drives on each row and 5 waterblocks work? It would mean that there is a waterblock cooling the bottom and top of drives though and that might not work--I don't know.

I'm also trying to get a handle of just how large a radiator I will need. It will almost certainly not be incorporated into the piece of furniture, but be totally external and probably vertically oriented to save on space and eyesore. I came across a review comparing the Cape CORA 642 Convect Maxi and the Innovatek Konvekt-o-Matic Maxi. Both seemed about the same size and performed about the same (the Innovatek had about a 1C better cooling rating). I've found no heat dissipation data on the Cape Cora, but the Innovatek Maxi reports a value of about 125w. Now for the stupid question: do I simply take the reported watt figures of my drives, processor, gpu (system ram?) and use those figures to determine the amount of radiator needed? Two Innovatek Maxis would give me 250watts of heat dissipation and 8 300 or 400 seagate, 1 processor (a pentium M) and a videocard (I have a few 16 and 32mb cards sitting around that I'll use if I can find a workable waterblock for them) comes out to around 300watts. Am I wrong in thinking that I could get away with 3 Maxis and that this would actually be overkill? As far as pumps go, can you put pumps in series?

I think my idea of a heat scource in a chimney above your Rad would work very well here:
Hot air rises. It cannot leave a vacume below it. So it will certainly draw cool air through a Rad.

I was thinking a big PELT with the hot side attached to a Zalmann HS and the cold to a WB. in a chimney above your Rad.
I know this does almost nothing for cooling the water but that is secondary to getting air moving through the Rad in this case.

flow = CPU - Pump - Rad - WB/Pelt - CPU

Yes. Koolance systems work like this:
1 pump sucking & 1 pushing. In a Common Res. This gives better head. Not flow.
It also gives you redundency in that if 1 pump dies you dont have a melt down.
:)

It will be hard to ignore the sound of 8 hard drives humming inside this piece of furniture. The acoustics of the 8 drives will drown out about any fan noise. Perhaps consider the trade off of the extra expenses vs the simplicity of only 2 quit fans blowing through a heater core.

Depends. Wood could be quite effective at dampening any noise from the hdd's, just have to make sure theres no viabration by mounting them on something soft.

Hdd's can be cooled by air and remain silent. Watercooling them is a waste of time/effort + added complexity (same with chipset).

Only if the "chimney" is routed outside of the room. Otherwise your dumping heat right back into the room which will go right back through the rad sooner or later. Not to mention adding a heat source adds $'s to the power bill. Not very efficient for sure.

Other than that it is an interesting idea. Sounds like a experiment.

Does your WC setup dump outside?
I think, with a window open, the extra heat wont be a problem.
Otherwise you may as well put your Rad and fans outside. Smaller holes!
:)

I'm not worried about the heat from the radiators. In the winter, this place is freezing and in the summer it is airconditioned. I'm pretty much dead set agains fans of any sort any where. If it turns out this isn't a doable project, I'll just slap together this system in an off-the-shelf case, cram it full of fans and stick it in the basement. But from what I'm learning, I think this may be a doable, albeit huge, project. I even found waterblocks for ram poking around on the web today. It seems the big hang up is what to do with the power supply. I found a few WC PSU's today, but I don't think any will fit my application, so that seems to be the next issue to deal with. Any ideas?

....I guess I speak with a forked tongue :p

This project is feasible. I don't see why a 655 wouldn't be enough of a pump to push water through a couple of transmission coolers. Overclockning isn't in UV's mind, so temps only need to be low enough to keep a stock system stable.

Anyone want to tell me how a hermetically sealed case, with foam insulation covering every internal panel, would allow the noise from eight HDs to escape? The issue of vibrations can be taken care of by decoupling the HDs from the chasis.

UV: if you don't like my idea of one MASSIVE HD block, perhaps you would like the idea of two smaller ones? I'd avoid koolance if you can, as such a system would get expensive quick.

Cooling the PSU: I don't have time to sketch this one up so I'll try to explain it. Take a BIP and a Tornado 12cm fan. Have the arrangement stacked so it goes:

BIP->Fan (blowing toward PSU)->PSU

Since the fan would make a load of noise, I suggest you pad that area of the case very well. You'd also have to build a custom box inside of the case to isolate the heat of the PSU from the rest of the system.

......Continued below......

While I'm thinking out loud here, I should note that the whole BIP+Tornado idea isn't so great. This system's build might be an excellent candidate for flourient. Actually it's a perfect candidate. The whole system could be sumerged! I should warn you that flourient is VERY VERY expensive. You'd probably need to spend about $200 or so for a system of this size.

The upside to having a submerged system is that you don't need any custom heatsinks for RAM, PSU, MOSFETS, etc. You can use regular old heatsinks. All you would have to do is set up an adequate flow pattern to keep the hottest parts of the system cool.

What happened to fanless?

You can't hermetically seal the case and expect anything resembling cooling. The mobo and other parts NEED ventilation of some kind. Sealing up a case is like creating an oven.

Now we are going from a passive cooled system in a home made wood case to submersion cooling?

What's next?

A fanless system is a pretty good candidate for submersion cooling. Though that's just my opinion.
Agreed. But I think this helps make the case for submersion cooling. The wood would have to be just for looks. The case would have to be made of something non-porus.

Open your mind people!

Yes, I can make a hermtically sealed system with no fans and have it cooled appropriately. It'll be expensive and silly, but certainly possible.

Imagine:
A case made of foam and steel etc as per above and sealed. Inside it are all the components. Any component of any real heat production gets a waterblock. So, I'd say PSU, CPU, GPU, NB, HDDs, Mosfets. The loop should use a submerged pump so its heat goes into the coolant. The internal loop should have a radiator at the top of the case, inside the case, so that the hotest air is recycled to the bottom of the case as cold air. Yes, you heard right.
Outside the case, where I'd have a suitably large radiator. Again, I'd mount this horizontally to maximise air flow. If vertical it must be, try and mount it where it will get some sort of air flow. Near an air-con outlet would be good! Cathar found a radiator from a small car (Diahatsu? Mini?) that was the size of 4 x 120mm fans. Sounds a little small for us, but should be suitable.

So, inside the case most components drop their heat into the coolant. Those that don't heat the air which rises, and is cooled by the radiator at the top of the case.

Water cooling a PSU is something I still want to do. There are more than a few people who have done it. You can buy commercial units from Europe, and you can wire these together as I believe they are not exactly mega-Watt units. There are even some PSUs designed for HTPC these days where are like the laptop PSUs, and there are some PSUs which do not have active heat-sinks, and hence can be converted without the need for electrical engineer approval (required in Oz).

In other words:

1) Eheim 1250
2) Tuppaware container reservoir
3) 3m of Clearflex and some stainless steel hoseclamps
4) 2 x 120.3 radiators, or a custom small-car-radiator
5) 1 x 120.2 radiator for inside the case
6) 2 x WC PSUs from Europe, or 1 x 500W unit, some copper pipe, an oxy and some balls
7) G4 CPU block
8) Silverprop GPU block
9) Silverprop NB block
10) Custom made Mosfet blocks
11) Custom made HDD block

For the HDDs, I'd just make my own HDD cage out of copper sheet, and solder a copper pipe to the side. Chances are it will be heating the HDDs up anyway.

Mosty PCs can cope with 250W power supplies, some need 350W, and this server with all its HDDs will **at most***, IMHO, need 400W. The 400W can't be noise, it can't be movement, it won't be light, as none of that escapes the sealed case. So we know the heat load of the box - all 400W coming in leaves via the WC loop. Find out the C/W of the radiators for 400W at near-zero air flow and recalculate it again and again (the C/W changes with the differential of the air and coolant temp, so its a loop) until you get the figures.

Wow...I'm not really sure what just happened.... I've never heard of that florinert stuff, but did a few quick searches on it and at least a few places say that the PSU cannot be placed in it. Maybe this isn't the case?

In looking at the existing WC PSU's on the market, it looks like the water never enters the PSU but rather flows through a type of waterblock on the side. If this is the case, shouldn't this be extremely easy to do to any PSU? For a larger PSU, maybe have a couple of waterblocks on either side or the top or...? I assume there must be a catch here, because I couldn't find any mods on the web showing something like this. Maybe another option is using two WC PSU's that are already on the market. Suddenly though, there are about 100 waterblocks popping up in this thing. Has anyone ever used two pumps on two different circuits? That to me seems like an idea here because I feel like I'm just going to be circulating hot water to components toward the end of the chain, plus it seems I'd have a better chance of keeping the flow rate up.

In the design of this, I DO want the hdd's to be in an enclosure that is as close to soundproof as I can manage, but I don't mind leaving the rest of the components (mb, ram, mosfets) or anyone other non noise producing part with some air (and I agree maxSaleen, that custom waterblocks here are the way to go considering the prices for a single hdd waterblock). I still do not want a fan, but the enclosure could probably be designed so there is at least some place for hot air to escape. I liked the idea of a small radiator inside the case at the top. Would this still work though if the only ventilation was at the rear? For instance, say the design is an end table, could the radiator be mounted to the underside of the table top and still be effective? Basically, in any furniture design, I want the top and three sides to be unaltered as a result of this project, but the back can be screwed with.

Long Haired Git, I understand what you are saying about calculating the necessary radiator needed for the project, but I cannot find any figures for Cape Cora, Innovatek or those transmission coolers on ebay. Is this material available somewhere?

And is it just me, but is Germany the only country that is seriously in to this watercooling thing? I'm going to pay more for shipping than the parts...

1. Traditional PSU design has the hot component (Mosfets? Transistors?) mounted on a heatsink or pair of heatsinks. The heatsinks are typically, however, live. As in 120/240v AC power. Thus, the way it was done by BladeRunner and an Aussie I can't recall (but Google might) is to take out the heatsink, and replace it with a custom waterblock (bent copper pipe for the Aussie, flashy shiny thing for BladeRunner) and then electrically but not thermally isolate the component from the waterblock using mica shims. So far, haven't mustered the balls to do this myself as I've been zapped by 240v and I didn't like it.

2. Recent innovation has so called "silent" and "fanless" PSUs. Not sure how these work. Perhaps its just got better live heatsinks and lots of holes in the PSU casing, and components that can handle hotter temps?
Perhaps they thermally connect the live heatsink to the casing? In which case, you could then add a block to the casing, or replace that thermal interface with one to a WB.
Remember, the worse the interface between the heater (Mosfet) and the coolant, the hotter that component has to get to get its energy into the coolant. For a fanless PSU, that temp could probably get pretty hot before you care.

3. 100 WBs ain't going to matter much if 99 of them are basic straight-through-flow types. Eg: 10mm ID copper pipe soldered to the side of a copper HDD cage, or to the outside of a fanless PSU. Remember also that flow rates don't fall proportionatly as the resistance is so impacted by flow rates and vis-versa.
Eg: Laing D4, 2m x 1/2" tubing, 1 x 120.3, 1 x 120.2, 1 x LRR Whitewater block = approx 7.7 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and a Swiftech 5002 (to represent a medium impendence GPU block) = 6.8 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and a Swiftech 5002 (to represent a medium impendence NB block) = 6.1 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and an Atlantis block (to represent a low impendence HDD block) = 5.9 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and an Atlantis block (to represent a low impendence PSU block) = 5.7 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and an Atlantis block (to represent a low impendence Mosfet block) = 5.5 LPM

Now the above are all approximated but you get the idea.

BTW, Eheim 1250 with the above gets 4.5LPM, MCP350 gets 3.5 LPM which is all "enough".

4. WRT the "hot" water at the end of the loop, I give you this:
http://www.geocities.com/lh_git/wckb...p_changes.html
So, 400W @ 3.5 LPM (MCP350) gives water 1.6 degrees hotter at the hottest point than the coldest.
400W @ 5.5 LPM (Laing D4) gives water 1.0 degrees hotter at the hottest point than the coldest.

To me, I'd have the CPU right after the big radiator, and I'd put the GPU next, the NB next, the HDDs next, the mosfets and then the PSU. Who cares if the water is 1 or 2 degrees hotter by the time it leaves the PSU?

5. Design it thinking of hot air rising, and getting the coldest air, and venting hot air away from the PC and you'll be fine. Remember also that once you remove the fans and silence the drives, you'll hear things like power mosfets "whistling". True silence is ambitious.

6. WRT coolers, I can't help you with those rads (being an Aussie), but I can point you to http://thermal-management-testing.com/ThermoChill.htm and predict that **typically** a radiator of the same size will perform approximately the same. You'll definately need more than 1 x 120.2 as shown in that site for 450W because you've not got good air flow, but then you can probably live with a higher difference in temp between coolant and air. You never get in trouble in buying the biggest radiator that will fit.

Whilst you are there, check out Graph 15. See how steep the graph is getting? Well, passive radiators will struggle to get 0.5 CFM even if horizontal, so you'll be in the LHS area of the graph. :( Best to go large then!
Graph 13 is also scary, but remember that BillA was keeping the delta-T to 5 degrees. As per previous, my 260mm x 150mm of passive heater cores was able to keep approx 60W cool using no near zero air flow but with a much larger delta-T (probaly 15 to 20 degrees).

7. Define serious? Cathar designed the best blocks so far twice in a row (LRR, Cascade) and Silverprop make one of the best GPU blocks, and are Aussie like me. What are you buying from Germany? WC PSUs are rare and are typically DIY. Eheim pumps are also popular. However, you could buy all your components from say DangerDen or Swiftech, except you'd have to DIY the PSU and HDD blocks.

Passive Massive
 

You don't need to cool your hard drives if you get 5400RPM 2.5" notebook drives such as WD Scorpio, which is far quieter than any 3.5" drive and produces virtually no heat. It has lower access times than most 3.5" 7200RPM drives and you can but them into RAID configurations to make up for the speed and smaller storage.

An Antec Phantom 350W fanless PSU, which is what I use in my carputer, has the exact same internals as their 500W version, so if you watercool it (the whole PSU is just one big heatsink, so waterblock attaches anywhere on the outside) you can get 500W out of it easily. This thing can actually spit out 400W for weeks straight with no cooling at all in a case with no ventillation (mine). It does get hot to the touch, but still much lower than the maximum specified by Antec. Passive PSU's work by their high efficiency of AC/DC conversion, therefore saves on electric bills and outputs less heat. Typically PSU's have 65-75% efficiency depending on the load, but this one has up to 90% efficiency. So at 300W it'll dump 30W of heat roughly. It costs quite a bit, though. Make sure you get the 2005 model as the 2004 model often had defects being reported. Antec customer service is excellent.

I recommend CSP-MAG over Liang DDC because the CSP-MAG is quieter, and my DDC often didn't start up! So my experience is bad, although they tell me it is rare to have a failed DDC. On this forum there's some engineer guy who says the next version of MAG will be even quieter, if that is even possible. Just so you know, my CSP-MAG is enclosed in one inch of thick uranium-238 and dead silent, dead cool. Eheim 1048 is nice, too, but it's AC.

I definately agree that you should get Pentium M, but Venice is also a great option because of the price. I can passively cool my overclocked Venice @ 1.7V, which resides very happily in my carputer. Pentium M should produce less than half the heat if you can obtain one. They have very expensive motherboards, though.

Don't worry about performance because since you're cooling everything passively the temperature delta is significantly higher than a fan-cooled solution, so flow rates and waterblocks make a much smaller difference. Radiator is by far the most important. Pentium M can handle 100C, so don't worry about temps. My carputer has the CSP-MAG running at 7V and spinning very slowly, but runs just fine! So the CSP-MAG is more than what you need. Focus on radiator instead. You can even bury the radiator deep into the Earth and its cooling capacity would be unreal for a passive! Maybe even run a peltier with that, I don't know. You should also build a condenser system so you don't need to worry about refilling your reservoir every several years.

cotdt, I have to ask: where did you get uranium-238, and what did that cost you?

This is where I currently am in this project: nowhere. I am still looking for the radiator. Since I can't do anything to hide a large external radiator, I want it to look nice and I want it to be copper so I can avoid corrosion (assuming I get all copper wb's). Something like this would be ideal. Copper, gorgeous, made to just about any size--only problem is that they are somewhere I am not (Prague?). I haven't written them to see if they would ship to the US yet--I don't imagine they would though. Does anyone know of anything in the US that sells Cu radiators? And, assuming a US company exists for Cu radiators, I'm still having a hard time trying to determine how much radiator is enough. All the graphs I've seen begin their measurements well above the 0 air flow.

In looking into the Pentium M ideas, it seems like a pain in the ass to get a waterblock on using the 478 to 479 adaptor. If I can find a place that does custom radiator work (or just has one large enough), I may scrap the P-M idea in favor of something that's easier to work with and hopefully isn't too hot.

I've spent a bit of time drawing up case/housing/furniture plans and it has become clear that I need the parts in hand before I can get too specific. I'm looking for Cu waterblocks for processor, chipset, video card, mosfets and ram. No parts have been purchased, so I am extremely open to ideas. Bear in mind, this system will never be overclocked, is striving for dead silence and 24/7 uptime. I'm thinking of trying to build the cooling for the 8 hard drives myself even though I have never worked with metal or soldered in my life--we'll see how that goes...

The PSU(s) will also be watercooled. I'm not sure if I will need more than one and I'm also not sure if I will be purchasing absurdly expensive watercooled ones, or trying to cool an Antec Phantom as cotdt suggested (the problem i see with the phantom, is it is all finned, so I think mounting a WB to it with effective contact area would be near impossible). After doing the research, I've given up on trying to modding a regular PSU (actually wanted a redundant PSU) for watercooling because I simply don't have the experience to try it.

For pumps, I'm just trying to get the quietest possible. The Eheim 1048 keeps coming up as the quietest--I assume I would need two with all the blocks and the probability of a large radiator in the loop.

Any other heat producing items I should be thinking about? I'm going to be getting a 3ware RAID card, but I don't think they even come with heatsinks, so I'm thinking that won't be a problem.

I've just done 2 seconds research on the fanless PSUs. As far as I can tell, the heatsink on the outside of the case, or the case itself for some models, is not thermally connected to the hot-bits at all.
The model I looked at in a review with internal shots (sorry, lost link, but google and you will find) had heatsinks on each end of the PSU, outside the PSU case. These heatsinks were connected by heatpipes to heatsinks inside the PSU. However, these heat sinks only get heated by the air that is heated by normal heatsinks on the hot bits.

I suppose, in the end, the risk of manufacturing faults causing PSU casings or heatsinks to be live, is just too great to bare? Can anyone confirm my guesses based on review photos?

Now, I suppose you should consider that the PSU has higher spec components designed to live at higher temperatures.

In which case, perhaps an easy way to WC a PSU is to take a fanless PSU, strip it out of its case, and then mount it in a custom case that includes a small radiator in it?

Man, it just doesn't make sense to me though...