Thursday, May 26, 2011

Liquid cooling minor case mod

I put together a PC for a Vista build about 3 years ago, and every summer since then I have had concerns about its ability to survive the heat of our basement. I had been considering a water cooling rig for my Quad-Phenom machine because it idles at about 40c during the winter months.

I didn't want to have to build and leak test a system myself so I settled on Corsair H50 All in One CPU Cooler as an alternative.  I thought this would be a good compromise to the noise/heat dissipation as well as the overall build and test problems of normal water cooling systems.  The theory was really there, but it all fell apart when I realized that I didn't have a 120mm rear exhaust fans.  The only option that I had was the Acrylic side of the case had an 80mm hole.  After a little research I found that a 4" holesaw is ≈ 102mm and decided I would give that a try.  If you have ever tried to cut a hole in acrylic you probably know what was wrong with this plan, despite having 4 clamps holding the acrylic down, everytime I lowered the drill press down to the material it caused it to jump a few millimeters before I could get the drill head released.  The surface area of the hole saw allowed too much grip.  Plan b was to drill the hole in some particle board and use a trim router to finish the hole.  The key to this is going slowly enough that you don't heat the bit up too much and start melting the acrylic.  All things considered, for 45minutes of work it was a pretty successful project and I managed to not ugly up the acrylic too badly.

34 comments:

  1. Not gutsy enough for liquid cooling

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  2. Good stuff! Water cooling is rather high maintenance.. at least, when it comes time to change that disgusting water.

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  3. Very interesting blog!
    Check mine out!
    +Followed!

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  4. thanks for the information!
    will follow.

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  5. Interesting, following you.

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  6. Anonymous4:26 PM

    Awesome rig. I'm thinking I'll do something similar for my next one.

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  7. good review! +follower

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  8. The idea of liquid cooling has always boggled my mind because whenever I think electronics I think KEEP THIS AWAY FROM WATER. I bet the performance you get is incredible though.

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  9. 40c idle temps really aren't bad, especially with your rig. It's the load temps that matter though. Cool blog man, followed.

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  10. Very genius!

    Following

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  11. I have a few Q's about water cooling. Does the cooling unit itself produce noise? A couple of years ago, I built a quiet pc. I do some audio recording in a room close to my pc, and the pc is not isolated. I've been looking for a solution for a perfectly quiet pc.

    NB - when I first built the pc it was quiet enough. Not totally silent, but very close (the damn graphics fan was noisy, it was the only thing, all case fans and cpu fan were close to dead silent [powersupply was infact, completely silent])

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  12. nice, wish i could build my own computer

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  13. Anonymous5:26 PM

    I wish I had more money to do projects like this...

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  14. i have no idea what we're talking about.

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  15. You should post pics bro, sounds good.

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  16. Love this blog post! A really interesting read! Followed!

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  17. That's cool! acrylics really is hard to handle

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  18. Anonymous8:13 PM

    I just use conventional fan, intake in front and exhaust out the rear. Using the Antec 300, it stays rather cool out here in summer. I haven't tried liquid cooling though.

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  19. Nice, this was a really cool read.

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  20. Very interesting. Not many people into modding anymore!

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  21. cool :D this could be so usefull

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  22. Sweet blog following! I do a tech blog also if you are interested!

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  23. Cool blog, following you

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  24. nice, I have not tried water cooling in years, back then I had to go to the DIY store for a few bits. Nice to see it has moved on.

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  25. Good post, I'd like to see some pictures!
    +1 following

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  26. Sweet man! My PC is always getting too hot. Might have to make this my next project

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