h2o setup, HDD cooling, and AMD unlocking
 

For my H2O cooling setup, I don't want to take the risks and effort (and the cost in electricity!) for supercooling, so I'm going to go with basic watercooling. I want to cool my hard drives, though, since they get pretty damn hot in the summer.

Does anybody know a good source for harddrive water blocks? I've seen a couple on the site, but has anybody tried them? Cost is an issue too, though, because I have three hard drives to cool, plus the CPU :P

I was thinking of a MAZE1 waterblock from dangerden.com for the CPU, which is an AMD TBird 1.2ghz 266 (feel free to suggest something else :) I may try overclocking to 1.4ghz..

So in short, I need to cool three hard drives and a CPU with 1/2" tubing. Ambient temperatures are about 90 degrees in the summer.

1) What GPH pump should I be looking for to power all of this? Brand/model would be helpful, too. My tower is a big, vertical beast and there'll probably be about 2 feet of lift max.

2) What's a good, economical radiator that would handle this load? :) What about a quiet, but powerful fan for the radiator?

3) My chipset has a fan (and maybe heatsink?) on it already (Abit KT-7A board)... is cooling the chipset worthwhile?

4) Is a MAZE1 ideal for this?

5) I need three waterblocks for my hard drives... the hard drives are far apart (my case holds 6 or 8 hard drives, so they're spaced out.. about the size of one hard drive between each drive), so size shouldn't be too much of an issue.

6) Do I need to worry about my processor being "locked"? I saw some articles on this, but since a lot of people are running overclocked tbirds and probably haven't been soldering stuff on their CPU, it seems like it's not a problem?

Sorry for the load of questions, and thanks in advance!!

Get in touch with #rotor about the HDD blocks:

http://3rotor.dns2go.com/index.html

He can get you what you need :)

As for an economical and efficient radiator, heatercores can't be beaten. You buy them at local auto store for under $20, make a custom duct for the 120mm fan, epoxy fittings in place and still come out under $30.

Thanks!
 

Hey, thanks for that :)

Still wondering about the pump, though...
3 HD blocks and a CPU block with 1.5 ft lift and a big radiator, on 1/2" tubing...

I would have the rad output going into a Y, one loop for the cpu, and one for the hdd's.

for a rad, go to liquidcool.org, he has two nice heatercores. For the fans, I wouldn't go below 80cfm if you are using one fan, but with two fans you could go to panaflo L1A's which push 69cfm's and are dead silent.

:)

hey, thanks :)
 

Hey, thanks a lot!
Would a 300gph pump suffice, do you think?

300 GPH should be fine. I really like the Eheim 1250, but they are very costly. Danner Mag Drives are nice for a good bit less.

Why use a splitter? Put it all inline instead. Who cares if the coolant to the HD is .25C warmer then before it goes into the CPU block. Afterall HD are usally run with no cooling at all.

I much prefer the Maze2 simply becuase of its clamp, but the Maze1 is a strong performer.

Heatercores are the way to. I have a plain one with ~40CFM dropping ~85w into the air. All with coolant about 2-3C above room temps.

YaY
 

Hey, thanks guys!

I'll see for myself how much hotter the water is after passing through each of the blocks to determine whether a splitter would be useful... it will be passing through 4 blocks after all.

I think I have all the info necessary to build it now, I'll let ya know how it goes!

I would stay away from inline because of the flow restriction as well as the temps. Of course inline is much much simpler, but hey, watercooling isn't supposed to be a plug in type thing anyway