Is this impossible?

[Ultraviolet]

Wow...I'm not really sure what just happened.... I've never heard of that florinert stuff, but did a few quick searches on it and at least a few places say that the PSU cannot be placed in it. Maybe this isn't the case?

In looking at the existing WC PSU's on the market, it looks like the water never enters the PSU but rather flows through a type of waterblock on the side. If this is the case, shouldn't this be extremely easy to do to any PSU? For a larger PSU, maybe have a couple of waterblocks on either side or the top or...? I assume there must be a catch here, because I couldn't find any mods on the web showing something like this. Maybe another option is using two WC PSU's that are already on the market. Suddenly though, there are about 100 waterblocks popping up in this thing. Has anyone ever used two pumps on two different circuits? That to me seems like an idea here because I feel like I'm just going to be circulating hot water to components toward the end of the chain, plus it seems I'd have a better chance of keeping the flow rate up.

In the design of this, I DO want the hdd's to be in an enclosure that is as close to soundproof as I can manage, but I don't mind leaving the rest of the components (mb, ram, mosfets) or anyone other non noise producing part with some air (and I agree maxSaleen, that custom waterblocks here are the way to go considering the prices for a single hdd waterblock). I still do not want a fan, but the enclosure could probably be designed so there is at least some place for hot air to escape. I liked the idea of a small radiator inside the case at the top. Would this still work though if the only ventilation was at the rear? For instance, say the design is an end table, could the radiator be mounted to the underside of the table top and still be effective? Basically, in any furniture design, I want the top and three sides to be unaltered as a result of this project, but the back can be screwed with.

Long Haired Git, I understand what you are saying about calculating the necessary radiator needed for the project, but I cannot find any figures for Cape Cora, Innovatek or those transmission coolers on ebay. Is this material available somewhere?

And is it just me, but is Germany the only country that is seriously in to this watercooling thing? I'm going to pay more for shipping than the parts...

[Long Haired Git]

1. Traditional PSU design has the hot component (Mosfets? Transistors?) mounted on a heatsink or pair of heatsinks. The heatsinks are typically, however, live. As in 120/240v AC power. Thus, the way it was done by BladeRunner and an Aussie I can't recall (but Google might) is to take out the heatsink, and replace it with a custom waterblock (bent copper pipe for the Aussie, flashy shiny thing for BladeRunner) and then electrically but not thermally isolate the component from the waterblock using mica shims. So far, haven't mustered the balls to do this myself as I've been zapped by 240v and I didn't like it.

2. Recent innovation has so called "silent" and "fanless" PSUs. Not sure how these work. Perhaps its just got better live heatsinks and lots of holes in the PSU casing, and components that can handle hotter temps?
Perhaps they thermally connect the live heatsink to the casing? In which case, you could then add a block to the casing, or replace that thermal interface with one to a WB.
Remember, the worse the interface between the heater (Mosfet) and the coolant, the hotter that component has to get to get its energy into the coolant. For a fanless PSU, that temp could probably get pretty hot before you care.

3. 100 WBs ain't going to matter much if 99 of them are basic straight-through-flow types. Eg: 10mm ID copper pipe soldered to the side of a copper HDD cage, or to the outside of a fanless PSU. Remember also that flow rates don't fall proportionatly as the resistance is so impacted by flow rates and vis-versa.
Eg: Laing D4, 2m x 1/2" tubing, 1 x 120.3, 1 x 120.2, 1 x LRR Whitewater block = approx 7.7 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and a Swiftech 5002 (to represent a medium impendence GPU block) = 6.8 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and a Swiftech 5002 (to represent a medium impendence NB block) = 6.1 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and an Atlantis block (to represent a low impendence HDD block) = 5.9 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and an Atlantis block (to represent a low impendence PSU block) = 5.7 LPM
Add additional 20cm of tubing and an Atlantis block (to represent a low impendence Mosfet block) = 5.5 LPM

Now the above are all approximated but you get the idea.

BTW, Eheim 1250 with the above gets 4.5LPM, MCP350 gets 3.5 LPM which is all "enough".

4. WRT the "hot" water at the end of the loop, I give you this:
http://www.geocities.com/lh_git/wckb...p_changes.html
So, 400W @ 3.5 LPM (MCP350) gives water 1.6 degrees hotter at the hottest point than the coldest.
400W @ 5.5 LPM (Laing D4) gives water 1.0 degrees hotter at the hottest point than the coldest.

To me, I'd have the CPU right after the big radiator, and I'd put the GPU next, the NB next, the HDDs next, the mosfets and then the PSU. Who cares if the water is 1 or 2 degrees hotter by the time it leaves the PSU?

5. Design it thinking of hot air rising, and getting the coldest air, and venting hot air away from the PC and you'll be fine. Remember also that once you remove the fans and silence the drives, you'll hear things like power mosfets "whistling". True silence is ambitious.

6. WRT coolers, I can't help you with those rads (being an Aussie), but I can point you to http://thermal-management-testing.com/ThermoChill.htm and predict that **typically** a radiator of the same size will perform approximately the same. You'll definately need more than 1 x 120.2 as shown in that site for 450W because you've not got good air flow, but then you can probably live with a higher difference in temp between coolant and air. You never get in trouble in buying the biggest radiator that will fit.

Whilst you are there, check out Graph 15. See how steep the graph is getting? Well, passive radiators will struggle to get 0.5 CFM even if horizontal, so you'll be in the LHS area of the graph. Best to go large then!
Graph 13 is also scary, but remember that BillA was keeping the delta-T to 5 degrees. As per previous, my 260mm x 150mm of passive heater cores was able to keep approx 60W cool using no near zero air flow but with a much larger delta-T (probaly 15 to 20 degrees).

7. Define serious? Cathar designed the best blocks so far twice in a row (LRR, Cascade) and Silverprop make one of the best GPU blocks, and are Aussie like me. What are you buying from Germany? WC PSUs are rare and are typically DIY. Eheim pumps are also popular. However, you could buy all your components from say DangerDen or Swiftech, except you'd have to DIY the PSU and HDD blocks.

[cotdt]

You don't need to cool your hard drives if you get 5400RPM 2.5" notebook drives such as WD Scorpio, which is far quieter than any 3.5" drive and produces virtually no heat. It has lower access times than most 3.5" 7200RPM drives and you can but them into RAID configurations to make up for the speed and smaller storage.

An Antec Phantom 350W fanless PSU, which is what I use in my carputer, has the exact same internals as their 500W version, so if you watercool it (the whole PSU is just one big heatsink, so waterblock attaches anywhere on the outside) you can get 500W out of it easily. This thing can actually spit out 400W for weeks straight with no cooling at all in a case with no ventillation (mine). It does get hot to the touch, but still much lower than the maximum specified by Antec. Passive PSU's work by their high efficiency of AC/DC conversion, therefore saves on electric bills and outputs less heat. Typically PSU's have 65-75% efficiency depending on the load, but this one has up to 90% efficiency. So at 300W it'll dump 30W of heat roughly. It costs quite a bit, though. Make sure you get the 2005 model as the 2004 model often had defects being reported. Antec customer service is excellent.

I recommend CSP-MAG over Liang DDC because the CSP-MAG is quieter, and my DDC often didn't start up! So my experience is bad, although they tell me it is rare to have a failed DDC. On this forum there's some engineer guy who says the next version of MAG will be even quieter, if that is even possible. Just so you know, my CSP-MAG is enclosed in one inch of thick uranium-238 and dead silent, dead cool. Eheim 1048 is nice, too, but it's AC.

I definately agree that you should get Pentium M, but Venice is also a great option because of the price. I can passively cool my overclocked Venice @ 1.7V, which resides very happily in my carputer. Pentium M should produce less than half the heat if you can obtain one. They have very expensive motherboards, though.

Don't worry about performance because since you're cooling everything passively the temperature delta is significantly higher than a fan-cooled solution, so flow rates and waterblocks make a much smaller difference. Radiator is by far the most important. Pentium M can handle 100C, so don't worry about temps. My carputer has the CSP-MAG running at 7V and spinning very slowly, but runs just fine! So the CSP-MAG is more than what you need. Focus on radiator instead. You can even bury the radiator deep into the Earth and its cooling capacity would be unreal for a passive! Maybe even run a peltier with that, I don't know. You should also build a condenser system so you don't need to worry about refilling your reservoir every several years.

[Ultraviolet]

cotdt, I have to ask: where did you get uranium-238, and what did that cost you?

This is where I currently am in this project: nowhere. I am still looking for the radiator. Since I can't do anything to hide a large external radiator, I want it to look nice and I want it to be copper so I can avoid corrosion (assuming I get all copper wb's). Something like this would be ideal. Copper, gorgeous, made to just about any size--only problem is that they are somewhere I am not (Prague?). I haven't written them to see if they would ship to the US yet--I don't imagine they would though. Does anyone know of anything in the US that sells Cu radiators? And, assuming a US company exists for Cu radiators, I'm still having a hard time trying to determine how much radiator is enough. All the graphs I've seen begin their measurements well above the 0 air flow.

In looking into the Pentium M ideas, it seems like a pain in the ass to get a waterblock on using the 478 to 479 adaptor. If I can find a place that does custom radiator work (or just has one large enough), I may scrap the P-M idea in favor of something that's easier to work with and hopefully isn't too hot.

I've spent a bit of time drawing up case/housing/furniture plans and it has become clear that I need the parts in hand before I can get too specific. I'm looking for Cu waterblocks for processor, chipset, video card, mosfets and ram. No parts have been purchased, so I am extremely open to ideas. Bear in mind, this system will never be overclocked, is striving for dead silence and 24/7 uptime. I'm thinking of trying to build the cooling for the 8 hard drives myself even though I have never worked with metal or soldered in my life--we'll see how that goes...

The PSU(s) will also be watercooled. I'm not sure if I will need more than one and I'm also not sure if I will be purchasing absurdly expensive watercooled ones, or trying to cool an Antec Phantom as cotdt suggested (the problem i see with the phantom, is it is all finned, so I think mounting a WB to it with effective contact area would be near impossible). After doing the research, I've given up on trying to modding a regular PSU (actually wanted a redundant PSU) for watercooling because I simply don't have the experience to try it.

For pumps, I'm just trying to get the quietest possible. The Eheim 1048 keeps coming up as the quietest--I assume I would need two with all the blocks and the probability of a large radiator in the loop.

Any other heat producing items I should be thinking about? I'm going to be getting a 3ware RAID card, but I don't think they even come with heatsinks, so I'm thinking that won't be a problem.

[Long Haired Git]

I've just done 2 seconds research on the fanless PSUs. As far as I can tell, the heatsink on the outside of the case, or the case itself for some models, is not thermally connected to the hot-bits at all.
The model I looked at in a review with internal shots (sorry, lost link, but google and you will find) had heatsinks on each end of the PSU, outside the PSU case. These heatsinks were connected by heatpipes to heatsinks inside the PSU. However, these heat sinks only get heated by the air that is heated by normal heatsinks on the hot bits.

I suppose, in the end, the risk of manufacturing faults causing PSU casings or heatsinks to be live, is just too great to bare? Can anyone confirm my guesses based on review photos?

Now, I suppose you should consider that the PSU has higher spec components designed to live at higher temperatures.

In which case, perhaps an easy way to WC a PSU is to take a fanless PSU, strip it out of its case, and then mount it in a custom case that includes a small radiator in it?

Man, it just doesn't make sense to me though...

[Ultraviolet]

Well, there are a few watercooled PSU's on the market that are absurdly priced and the best one only had a single 18A 12V rail which won't cut it. It seems the best completely silent PSU is the antec phantom 350 cotdt recommended, but I think my system would really be pushing the limits of a single 350 (8 hdds and maybe 2 pumps)--especially at startup. It only has 2 sata connectors though. What would be the effect of splitting these into 8? And since there are 2 12V rails on the antec, am I correct in assuming that each sata connector is on a separate rail? I suppose it would also be possible, though not entirely desirable, to mount this PSU externally on the back of the piece of furniture so it gets far better air circulation than inside.

I really don't want to try an internal watercooling mod to a psu and it doesn't seem that cooling the antec with external WB is possible because of all the fins. But one or two 350's with some creative case designing just may work.

Still the radiator issue though... Has anyone ever tried cooling a system with an actual home heating radiator like in the link I provided in my previous post? It seems it would be an enormous volume of water, but I think that would only be a good thing. Does anyone have any knowledge of US companies (or places that ship to the US) that make all copper radiators?

And just a general computing question: Since I seem to be getting away from the redundant PSU now, what is the effect of a total PSU failure on a RAID-5 array? If it just goes down and will come back up nicely with a new PSU, I can easily live with that. If the array is trashed though...

I really appreciate the knowledge and help so far on this forum.