Part 3: The PC Interior

The jackets:

On the inside of the PC there are 4 waterjackets.

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I bought them from people on Tweakers.net, but one extra, a 5th, I made myself... the GPU-RAM cooler!
My 9500 was running at 9700 speed and performance due to the wel known hack (well known to us tweakers that is)
and with the higher speeds for the ram also, it got REALLY hot.
Since I was WC'ing my pc anyway, I figured I'd go the extra distance and cool the ram chips too.
The red copper elbows I got from Praxis and the copper plate from 'Granaat', a shop in Amsterdam
specialised in all metals in all shapes and sizes.
My neighbour was so nice to solder it all together and it worked quite well.
With some Arctic Silver Adhesive I glued it on to the chips since there are no mounting holes.

Unfortunately things didn't quite go as planned. I measured everything on the card to fit, but I never checked to see if
it would fit back in the AGP slot. Well, it didn't. The card didn't fit because the copper pipes were blocked by capacitors
Who the hell put them so close to the slot anyway?
I tried to pull the copper pipes off before the glue hardened with as result:

I toar the goddamn chips off too! (that's number 1) I was SOO pissed off, I immediately went out and bought myself a new card.
And since I refused to go down in performance, I got me a 9800Pro
The ram cooling idea has been shelved indefinately since I don't feel like killing a 520 EUR card... yet.
But give it time... I'll be this stupid again in the near future, I promise
For now, I mounted 'Tweakmonster' ram sinks...

The motherboard looked very cool with al that copper mounted on it and it was darn heavy too!

My new and shiny 9800Pro was transformed as wel into a watercooled graphical monster, albeit with sissy cooled ram.

Then came the question of what direction the flow should go... what would be cooled first or last?

The flow theory:

When the water enters the case, it is split into two streams. One follows the NORTHBRIDGE -> GPU, the other the
SOUTHBRIDGE -> CPU path. Splitting reduces the flowrate, giving the water in the jackets slightly more time to heat up.
The order of jackets is also important; the way I ordened it, the least heat creating component is cooled first.
This way, the relatively high increase in water temperature from sources like GPU and CPU won't reduce the water's cooling
capabilities before reaching the other, less hot, jackets. Besides, as hot as the CPU and GPU get, water will pretty much
always cool them, even at higher temps. So the Delta T between water and jacket will always be optimal for every jacket.

Many people believe that things like 'flowrate' and 'jacket order' don't matter (much).
This could be true, but until that's scientifically proven and as long as it doesn't cost me anything, I will do it my way.

Just before the streams leave the case to be cooled, they come together again.
They lead outside through copper pipes, as explained in part two.
I placed the pump after the jackets but before the radiator so that the pump can throw in it's 28 watts before it enters the radiator.

Again this gives the geatest Delta T between cooling water and cooling air which should give
the best cooling... theoretically... but what do I know.


The case:

For PC switched devices, like the pumps of my watercooling, I placed
two 220V power sockets into my PC case, one of them grounded.

The 220V comes from branching the PSU powercable just before it enters the case and is switched by a relais that senses
12V coming from the PSU. If the PC goes off, so does the power to the sockets, shutting down whatever is hooked up
At first I tried to take the 220V from inside the PSU, but I killed it in the process (that's number 2).

The little blue block in the middle picture is a relay that was supposed to switch
12V to the ground of the grounded socket when the MHE was hooked up.
It was designed so that when the CPU temp goes over a certain limit, a piece of software would turn
on the CPU fan, giving 12V to the relais that connects the MHE fanblock to 12V from the PSU instead of 12V
from the motherboard. Taking so much power from 1 fan header can fry it, trust me on this one.
So if the CPU temp got too high and my fans were in whispermode, the fans would get 12V regardless of the switch position.

Cool huh?

The system was not foolproof though (fools can be quite ingenious if they have to), you could only connect the
MHE power cable to the grounded PC power socket. Stick it anywhere else and you blow a fuse, stick
anything else in the PC and you could fry that too...
So to avoid me killing any more of my stuff, this ingenious little device was never hooked up and eventually
even removed. (I just left the reference because it was so darn clever... so I thought)
I only use the MHE when going to LAN parties anyway and there I need max cooling all the time.

To connect either the Mobile Heat Exchanger (MHE) or the Mother Of All Water Coolers
to the PC, I used high pressure, high tech (and high cost) snelkoppelingen.

Crap… at over 10 euro's a piece this should've rung a bell that I was NOT on the Low-cost track here!
Anyway, it works perfectly, no substitute for perfection. Sure, Gardena koppelingen would work too, but
when I pruts, I pruts to the max! Wanna move it? Let's say for a Lan party ('For a Lan party'),
simply disconnect them for a near drip free separation and rejoin later…

Creating a silent PC was a worthy goal, so far I've eliminated the need for most fans, among which a very noisy
92MM High Performance Papst fan. But that still leaves quite a few other fans and noise makers to silence.

My PSU is an Enermax 450 watt with all the bells and whistels, that's supposed to be very very quiet...
but not quiet enough.
I got me one of the most silent 80mm Papst fans and replaced the one in the PSU.
The 92mm fan wasn't so bad, so I left it.
The cooling would be a little less than with the standard fan, but I'm guessing (more hoping actually)
that with the heat from all the other devices being transported out of the PC case by water instead
of airflow through the PSU, the PSU won't have to cool as much... Of course if I'm wrong I'll just
have to buy a quiter PSU since my enermax will have gone to PSU heaven... AGAIN

I killed pretty much all the noise except from the harddrives. I have two 80gig 7200rpm Maxtors,
one with fluid bearing the other one regular.
7200rpm drives get hot and to increase their life expectancy they're being cooled by 2 fan HD coolers.
I obviously couldn't kill those fans, but I had to reduce the noise. That's when a friend of mine called
me about his project of making his PC silent as well. His brother in law gave him a bunch of
professional sound absorbing foam, much like the noiseblockers you can buy for your PC.
I volunteered to try it on my PC first, just as a favor to him.


The front of my case is full of holes. Holes that the manufacturer put in there to increase air flow.

But they also let every bit of noise through. I cut several shapes from a sheet of aluminum, spray painted
them black and glued them over the holes. Then I used two seperate layers of different material to insulate
to the max. I also started insulating the bottom, back and sides of the case to prevent any noise from bouncing
around inside till it found a way out.

To prevent alge from reducing the cooling performance I had to use demineralised water.
In my very own private distillery (read: laundry dryer) I made a large batch of this water.

Regular water has impurities like calcium and other crap in it that might deposit in the system
over time, so normal tap water really is no option.
Just add a little fake 'water-wetter' (5% regular anti-freeze should do) to reduce surface tension and
increase heat transfer. (notice the 'gemeente waterbedrijf' jerrycan in the back?).

I have about 25 liters of the stuff ready to use. This is of course way too much, but there's a reason
for that. You see, at first I had a slightly different plan for my reservoir/airtrap setup and I was
making 'cooling fluid' as fast as I could since I needed lots and lots of it.

I wanted to fill up this 165 liter waterbarrel and use is a reservoir, but the risk of a leak and having
165 liters spill all over my floor kinda put me off of it.
So this idea too is shelved for now... but I'm still considering it.

But it's not all a succes story.
During trial runs it appeared that either the lexaan lids were too weak or the
pressure in the system to high, because I had some MAJOR leakage.
Both chipset jackets leaked and the VGA jacket too!

The water damaged my motherboard (that's number 3) and as a result it had to
'warm up' every time for like 5 minutes before it booted into windows
Luckily my previous (killed) motherboard came back from warranty repair,
so once again I swapped motherboards.
But this time it has new, thicker jackets and all appears to be fine... for now...

Final words: system running 100% A O.K. and super duper quiet...

oh, you want temps? ok, depending on how cold it get's outside... I had the cpu as low as 12 degrees... unstressed stable!
The jacket was like 5 degrees or so... so now condensation is becoming a problem...

But since I prefer to keep my room warm and pumping out 250+ watts of computer generated
heat into the open air is a waste of power, I hooked up the MHE... nice and warm

2 years later:

The system has performed and still is performing as expected.
I had no more leaks, even when I upgraded both the motherboard
and the videocard. I did find out that though soundproofing the PC
is a good idea, closing all air vents is not. It evenually killed the
Motherboard from overheating all the time.
But I'm not crying, it gave me a perfect reason to upgrade

My rig's now sporting a 2.6GHz Venice with a X800XL@800XT PE