Creating a case with a vacuum....

[m_kelder]

I was thinking, sometime in may I am going to be having a phase change setup running cooling the gpu/vid ram/northbridge/cpu and probably the system ram as well. This means I have a lot of insulating to worry about. Why not just put everything in a vacuum? I could make a clear case that would seal air tight, have a vacuum meter on it and a fitting for the vacuum pump to connect to. This would mean that everything that needs to be cooled (everything that stays in operating temps with just normal cooling from the air) would have to be coupled into the cooling system. I don't know what one the motherboard needs this, probably mosfets, southbridge, pll and a number of other things. Kinda sounds like more work or as much work as just insulating everything but I want to play around with this idea for a bit. Surely it's been done before... anyone have results? Anyone done it? Any suggestions, comments welcome.

[Butcher]

Well it seems like a lot of work really and lots off stuff doesnm;t work in a vacuum. HDDs are one, I'mnot sure about capacitors but they might fail too.

[m_kelder]

I was planning on making a case just for the motherboard and vid card, everything else would be outside of the vacuum. Purhaps making little enclosures around the waterblocks would be better. Seems to me that it would be much easier and less problematic that way. I could put two way foam tape on the surface of the pcb and the enclosure unit around the block and tubing, creating a seal and then the vacuum. That way I could see if something was going wrong, plus it would look good...

[Brad]

it'd be easier to have the phase change setup cooling a body of water to 5C or so below ambient (so you wont get condensation) and have that pumping around your system. If you need anything particularly cold (ie the cpu) I'd just put a pelt in.

Also, in a vacuum, things like the mosfets, inductors, ram chips, whatever would have nothing to transfer heat too, they'd all overheat

[grep]

Why work with a vacuum, what I suggest is nitrogen. Not liquid nitrogen but gaseous nitrogen just like the stuff in the normal air around you. But totally without water vapor, in a closed system then an air/air style cooler with some kind of cooling, in a closed system. Maintained at .25 psi above atmosperic with a regulator and a small nitrogen bottle to handle slow leaks and stuff. No reason the Nitrogen can't be cooled way below ambient with something like an air-conditioner. No water vapor means no condensation no matter how far below the dew point you cool too. I have been thinking of this for a long time as my setup would not require being entirely inside the box. I could mount the air/air cooler outside and the airconditioner outside and keep all the noise away from the room that way. I would duct the cool nitrogen into and the hot nitrogen out of the case using insulated pipes. The case itself would be both heat and sound insulated The removeable media devices would be mounted external to the box and be 1394 firewire or USB2 devices. Heat/Sink Fans would still work normally and the extra 1/4 pound pressure wouldn't even be noticed by the hardware. The sound reduction wouldn't hurt my feelings either. The nitrogen would be moved into and out of the case by normal fans, probably 2 120mm fans, one intake one exhaust, The external air/air heat exchanger could be very large to reduce backpressure and to allow quick exchange of heat from the closed nitrogen system to free air with the free air cooled by an airconditioner. If the airconditioner is run to produce very cold air, a simple drain hole to drain off any condensate. The cost would be fairly high, the operating costs for the additional electricty for the airconditioner would be fairly high, it wouldn't be pretty but it shold cool like hell. Throw in a spot cooling system like a Vapochill and you could run the cpu itself way below zero, and keep most of the system components around o, and if you really felt the need you could water cool the video card and chipset even further. A vapochill run in pure Nitrogen at 0 degrees would be far more efficent than running in air at ambient room temp with no danger of the heat exchanger icing up.