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Originally Posted by Brians256
I just looked at the P180 case today and was not impressed for it's watercooling potential. The whole value add of the P180 is it's ability to make the most of air cooling while maintaining quiet.
What I see as ideal would be a separate path for air cooling the radiator such as the bottom plenum used to channel air over the HDs and out the PSU (yes, it's on the bottom). Essentially, it is the same thing as a radbox, but integrated.
The P180 only has space for a decently sized internal radiator in the main chamber, which means that the CPU heat is being transferred 6" away to a large heatsink (the rad) and then wafted around the motherboard before being exhausted. Is that significantly quieter than a massive heatsink like the Zalman 7700Cu? At that point, you are watercooling not for quiet, but for overclocking (which I highly endorse).
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Brian,
Is your point that to get both quiet and decent OC, the heat from the radiator needs to be in a different place than the components being cooled - the CPU, etc.?
This makes sense to me. Seems to me that having the rad exhaust into the same chamber as the CPU will not give materially better results than a good ac setup and that I'd be throwing a lot of oc / silence potential away by going this way. I understand the desire for packaging everything together but that could be done much as you noted with the bottom plenum in the P180 or as an add on to an existing box. I've been waffling on the approach I'm going to take but I've pretty much decided to go the external rad approach with a wind tunnel chamber under the PC case for the rad. I may still get the P180 - seems to be a great case and very quiet for the hdds and other things that go bump in the night - but my current case is perfectly servicable - Antek SLK3800-B.
L