How does this aquarium-based watercooling system look? (pic)
 

Damn... i spent too much time in Paint for this :D

http://members.arstechnica.com/subsc...n/wc-sized.GIF
Aquarium is 20"Lx12"Wx12"H.
The rad is going to be as big as possible.
The fans are going to be Panaflo 120mm's or bigger, shrouded.
The "Hot water in" is the water from the block.
The pump is on the bottom because the coldest water is at the bottom.
No fish are involved.

Its pretty much self-explanatory, but if you have any questions just shoot. And if you see any obvious problems, let me know.

I'm doing this because my case is too small for watercooling effectively.

As an aside, i wish the text box was bigger.

OK, I've used setups like this before, ditch the rad, it's not doing anything signifigant in this suitation, simply have the fans blowing across the surface of the water, you'll have the temp stay around ambient + -2c or so.

basic evaporative cooling at work.

Will it evaporate enough to be of much use? Although i would definitely appreciate the simplicity of not having a rad in the loop... http://members.arstechnica.com/subsc...cratchchin.gif

I was thinking of using a sheet of plexiglass on the top to stop random shit from getting in the water - how would i work around this?

If i just cut out holes for a couple of fans, should they be blowing in or out?

Or ditch the aquarium! :D ...

I'm using it because its free and i don't have enough space to mount everything in the case. Also, the pump i'm planning to buy likes to be run submerged (Via 1300 or Maxijet 1200) and this is a simple way of having everything neatly outside the case. I couldn't think of anything else that would be this neat for as little effort.

yea just have one blowing in and the other sucking out, at either end, it won't evaporate as much as a normal bong will, but you'll be at the high efficiency end of the bong cooling scale (water loss wise) it'll keep the water at better than normal rad based cooling temps anyway.

Just blowing on water? I wouldn't have though so.

I don't have any exact temps (didn't take much notice of them at the time) but it would be fairly trivial for me to take the evaporative structure out of my open res and just have the fans blowing over the water, infact I'll do that right now.

Any results Volenti?

after over 3 hours the water temp finally stablised @ 3 degrees above ambient.

a few things to keep in mind though;

this was with a T-bred 2100b@2.405gig, 1.9v with cpu burn running in the background while I surfed.

it's pretty humid here currently, even my normal evaporative cooling is only getting 1 degree below ambient currently (normally 3-5)

the res I have is about 1'x1',3''