I think it depends on whether you have "city water" or your own well. I actually have both. On my well, I have a small pressure tank in the basement next to the well. It's nothing more than an accumulator to maintain (relatively) steady flow without continuously running the pump. For those on city water, all you get is a line coming into your house that eventually connects back to the nearest water tower.
You wouldn't really need a big pump for this task. You'd just want fairly good sized lines running down and back. Look at it this way. If you ran a line down to the computer and through a couple of blocks, then just hanged the hose out the case, you'd get a lot of flow due to the head between the tank and computer. Gradually start raising the elevation of the outlet and flow would begin to decrease, but you'd still have some flow right up until you had the outlet higher than the water level in the tank. The pump doesn't need to overcome much of the elevation. It just needs to provide a boost to the system flow. Provided you keep the lines outside the case to the 1" (25mm) range, head loss to friction in them will be miniscule. Any normal watercooling pump would do fine.
Another question, however. Does the tank also provide your drinking water? If so, you may want to give your materials list a careful inspection. Some tubing is not meant for use with drinking water. You also won't generally find aluminum in a drinking water system, though I'm not positive on this count.
|