I started out by doing a lot of lurking and research on these boards, and once I had an idea of what I wanted to build and how it could be done, I started shopping around for parts.
My basic goals for the project are as follows:
- I want it to be very quiet
- I want it to perform quite a bit better than air cooling can
- I want to cool everything that needs active cooling with one water loop
- the system should have only two fans (on the radiator) unless this is decided to be a bad idea
- it should look nice when complete
etc...
I picked up a Danner Mag3 from reefgeek.com, a WhiteWater from d-tek, and pretty much everything else from cooltechnica. My local hardware hank has proven to have very little useful stuff save for some nice brass hose barbs.
I got the whitewater and a shipment from cooltechnica yesterday afternoon, and I was running an ice-cooled computer by suppertime. My heatercore needs some attention before it can be incorporated into a case, so I started out by running a dishpan full of cool tapwater through just the CPU block. It cooled very well with the chilly tapwater.
After 20 or 30 minutes, the CPU temperature was starting to rise. I put a bunch of ice in the dishpan, and was able to bring the water down to a few degrees above freezing. Needless to say, the CPU cooled very well like this, and I was even beginning to get small amounts of condensation and fog on the tubing and the block's base.
After a few hours of ice cooling, I had used up all of the ice in my freezer trying to see how low I could get the CPU temp. I shut the machine down and fabricated a wooden stand to hold my heatercore over the dishpan. I don't have proper barbs on the core yet (I'm just shoving the 3/4"OD clearflex inside the 3/4"OD tubes) so I wanted to have the connections over the dishpan to contain any dripping. Once I had the heatercore mounted and hooked up, I made a cardboard shroud to hold my two 120mm Roton fans above the core in a suction setup.
Running the fans at 5v makes them undetectable over the noise of my hard drive and power supply fan (I plan to WC and/or noiseproof these eventually). The ghetto shoved-in connections to the heatercore leak maybe a drop every hour or two (
much better than I expected), so I can now justify putting off adapting the barbs for a while. The water temp (with CPU idling or at low loads) leveled out around 80 degrees F.
cooltechnica botched my order
and only sent me two of the twelve hose barbs I ordered, so I'm holding off on adding in the GPU and NB blocks until the rest of my hose barbs arrive in a few days. (I explained the situation and they said they'd have the rest of them off to me ASAP. good guys.)
I'm in the process of building a homebrew double 5.75" bay reservoir out of acrylic. I have some good (I think) ideas for making blocks for my HDDs and FETs, and I'm still brainstorming how I'll cool my PSU.
I plan to update here when I make new developments, get more goodies to drool on, or break stuff. Lemme know what you think and speak up if you have any suggestions or advice.