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Anyone got a water cooled PC here?

Anyone got a water cooled PC here?

Postby Syphon Filter » Tue Apr 06, 2004 9:57 am

Hi I'm new around here but have been a member of a couple of overclocking and modding sites for sometime. A couple of months ago a decided that it was time i bit the bullet and went water cooled. So now I have about 2 litres of water coursing through some tubing inside my PC....all fun and games until it leaks i guess :eek:

Anyway here is a little bit about my kit and a couple of pics for you to take a look at.

So where to start. Hrm...well here is what I am running as a system:

Abit IC7-Max3
P4 2.8 C stepping running at 3.5GHz
2x512 Corsair PC4000 DDR (TwinX matched RAM)
Sapphire Radeon 9800XT
SATA HDD's
and an oh so lovely Lian Li PC71 Case

The water cooling equipment I am using is as follows:

Eheim 1250 Pump
DTek White Water block
Dual 3.5" Resovoir
Thermochill 120.2 Radiator
2x 120mm fans
And a few feet of tubing to connect it all together.

All these items can be viewed here:

http://www.coolercases.co.uk/

Now Before we get into how I went about piecing the kit together and the rest of it maybe I should say why I did this. There were 3 main reasons:

1) Water cooling is very quiet when compared to a high performance heatsink and fan. So that was a major factor

2) It keeps my system much cooler than a heat sink and fan. This allows me to run the overclock of 700MHz that I am currently sporting. Instead of running my front side bus at the rated 200Mhz I am currently running at 250. This give me much higher bandwidth and thus increases performance significantly. Having the corsair RAM helps a great deal in being able to achieve this.

3) I was bored.

Right now thats out of the way lets take a look at how i did this.

Lets take a look at the mounting hardware for the block

Image

To fit this you have to remove the P4 Heatsink retainer bracket from the motherboard. This is done easily enough with a slim screw driver and a lot of care (we dont want to go breaking any traces now). Once the retainer is off we can see the 4 holes that will allow the metal mout to fit on. This is held on with the use of 4 nylon nuts on the back of the motherboard. Once this is attached there should be no need to remove it unless you plan on changing your cooling hardware.

Heres what it looks like from side on, excuse my MS paint skills :-?

Image

The water block itself then slides down onto the 4 posts and is held on with a spring and nut assembly that is designed to apply the correct pressure to between the CPU and the waterblock.

Here's what it all looks like with the block mounted and tubed up:

Image

The middle tube is the inlet and the outter two tubes are the outlet which are merged back into one via the Y piece. Now I decided to bypass the Y piece in the end and run the two outlets directly to my resovoir as it has the capacity for 2 inlets. I did this mainly to reduce the number of connections in the loop thus reducing the chances of leakage.

The next step was to fit everything inside the case. Now a lot of people feel that there is a right and wrong way to do this. So I did plently of research and found that this is simply not the case. Just install everything in such a manner that keeps it easy to tube.

So as you can see from the following pic my Dual 120mm radiator is at the top of the case, the pump fits in nicely underneath my 2 optical drives and the resovoir is located in the floppy bay. The fans on the radiator are controlled using a Vantec Nexus fan/CCFL controller available at:

www.overclockers.co.uk

Once happy with the placing of the components its just a case of cutting up tubing to length and connecting it all together. This is where care must be taken. Tubes must be fully pushed onto fittings and clamped securely. People use either metal clamps (Jubilee clips) or plastic clamps. I decided to use Jubilee clips. Now the danger with these is that you can over tighten them and cut the tubing. There is no hard and fast rule to tightening these. You just have to use your common sense and be careful.

Here is a picture of everything installed in the case:

Image

Since these pictures were take there has been some "wiring cleanup"

The mixture I use in my system is 80% Distilled water/Battery Top Up water and 20% Antifreeze. The antifreeze prevents corrosion and stops organic growths.

Now for the crucial part. Leak test for 24hours at least!!! I have heard some serious horror stories where people have not done this and had a hose pop off or something...drenching their PC. To be on the safe side i let the system run insitu for 3 days. After that I was happy to use my machine and not worry too much.

One last pic with the lights on:

Image

So thats my watercooling setup. Its a shame I dont have any pics of the front of the case. The resovoir sat in the floppy area looks awesome from the front.

Things for the future:

1) Watercool the northbridge and graphics card. This will mean retubing the system and buying 2 new water blocks.

2) Mount the radiator so that the 2 120mm fans suck air in from the top of the case and down onto the rad.

3) Maybe get a bigger resovoir. A dual 5.25" bay res of something similar.

Any comments appreciated and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Syphon ^*^
Last edited by Syphon Filter on Tue Apr 06, 2004 6:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Raptore » Tue Apr 06, 2004 10:10 am

LOL funny you should mention this.
The other day I knocked over a glass of ice water that was sitting above my tower. I've wanted a water cooled case for a long time but that wasn't exactly what I had in mind. :-x

That's a real nice layout you have there. Have you noticed a big difference in preformance?
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Postby Syphon Filter » Tue Apr 06, 2004 10:14 am

yeah its a fair bit quieter...though now i am noticing noise from my gfx card and PSU more :dontgetit

the temp difference is big too. On air I was seeing temps of:

Idle:45*C
Load: anything up to 64*C if i was running something like prime95 on torture test to check stability.

Now with water I am seeing idle temps of 39*C and full load of temps of 50*C tops. Playing games and such like I see temps of around 47*C max really. Running seti@home usually it clocks in at like 45*C. So I am seeing a temp difference of like 15-20*C depending on what I am doing.

Once I have my northbridge and gfx card water cooled too I imagine the noise levels will drop even more.
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Postby Raptore » Tue Apr 06, 2004 10:20 am

Is this running on actual water or a special coolant fluid?
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Postby Syphon Filter » Tue Apr 06, 2004 10:26 am

nope...just distilled/deionized water...the type you get to top up your car battery...with a little antifreeze thrown into help break surface tension and to prevent algal growth and corrosion. Some people use tap water but its not really a good idea as it will have all sorts of impurities in it that will cause the system to gunk up after a while. I also called 3M about something called Flurinert (remember the stuff they breathe in the movie Abyss). This stuff is amazing. Flows and transfers heat just like water but is 100% non conductive. So even if it did leak no probs. THe other idea i had for this stuff was to just create a tank and dunk the motherboard in. It would cool amazingly well if you did that with the right flow control. Thing is this stuff is like
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Postby *Starz* » Tue Apr 06, 2004 4:59 pm

Great thread...maybe you will come back and update this one as you upgrade your cooling system...Thanks for the pics too...awesome... :thumbs:

I see a trend beginning here at PROneT...we are beginning to see more and more members working with water cooling...maybe we can have an area dedicated to just that in the future.
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Postby ~Robrowe~ » Tue Apr 06, 2004 5:03 pm

I have posted several pics of my watercooled rig and myself and tweakmod are working on starting a thread for this in the hardware section for everyone to post their rig pics and braggin rights.
Is that a dtek whitewater block Syphon?
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Postby *Starz* » Tue Apr 06, 2004 5:08 pm

Sounds great Rob...I was wishing your pics were in a different thread to enable more exposure... ^*^
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Postby ~Robrowe~ » Tue Apr 06, 2004 5:12 pm

We are going to need help cleaning up our mess when we are done. :notworthy :notworthy
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Postby *Starz* » Tue Apr 06, 2004 5:16 pm

No problem...and I doubt that either of you will need that kind of help for long... ;)
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