• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

[Case Gallery] Convective silence

  • Thread starter Thread starter dead_meat
  • Start date Start date
D

dead_meat

Guest
To view this case mod, go here.



Specs:
ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
Asus EN7600GT
2GB RAM
Antec P182 case
Antec Phantom 500 Passive PSU
DIY Passive Radiator
+ 2x samsung 22" LCD's

Mods:
Watercooling, DIY passive radiator, Switchpanel for the pre assembled (and quite unnecessary) case fans.

The idea was to make a pc that would be totally silent.
I also wanted a somewhat Darth Vaderish look since Las-Vegas-in-a-box like LED pollution annoys me a bit. I constructed a passive heat exchanger for my old watercooling rig so I could get rid of all the fans in the system. Of course, it also required a power supply that had no actively rotating fans (the Antec Phantom). I mounted the Eheim pump and Innovatek tank on top of the DIY radiator, so it is a separate module with shut off valves and quick connectors and can be disconnected easily for maintenance. This thing turned out to be quite good, the noisiest part of the system is now my second monitor (old 17" CRT) that keeps a slight humming sound.

Update: the second CRT broke, so I swapped to 2 x 22" LCD:s,
totally silent now....
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Welcome to the TPU forum..


Looks good like to see more pics though ones that show more of what you have done.
 
Welcome to the TPU forum..
Looks good like to see more pics though ones that show more of what you have done.

Thanks,
I added one picture , and I will post more when I get a decent cam.
Dont want to snap the new ones with a crappy cell phone camera...
 
I am not on about the quality of the pics but how close the camera is. Like to see some taken further away from the computer.
 
hope your planing on upgrading your hardware, just seems like a bit much of a water cooling setup, for your hardware, other then that WOW nice job on the water setup looks,, AWESOME.
 
Welcome to TPU!

Nice rig! Care to share some more details about your rad?
 
hope your planing on upgrading your hardware, just seems like a bit much of a water cooling setup, for your hardware, other then that WOW nice job on the water setup looks,, AWESOME.

I am not planning to upgrade the hardware because there is no need for me to do so at the moment. If I want / need more juice I will simply overclock, the rad is quite effective ...
This will do for a one more year or so, after that, I will a replace these with the best MOBO, CPU, RAM & 3D card that i can find and so we go for another few years....
The watercooling parts (except the rad) in this setup date back to 2001 and have seen 24/7 use in three setups before this.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
hope your planing on upgrading your hardware, just seems like a bit much of a water cooling setup, for your hardware, other then that WOW nice job on the water setup looks,, AWESOME.

Just becouse hardware is not the latest and greatest it should NOT go against the actual mod.. I hate it when ppl put down a modded case \ system due to old \ older hardware.
 
Welcome to TPU!
Nice rig! Care to share some more details about your rad?
Thanks,
The rad itself is an old crude aluminium 20kW DC power supply cooling profile.
The rounded aluminium corner pieces and backplate are made from a
telecommunications cabinet manufactured in the 70's. Four meters of copper tubing is connected using silver soldered capillary T-pieces that i bought for about 2$.
The copper tubes are soldered to silvered flat copper pieces used to link battery terminals
and screwed in to the rad (with some heat sink paste).
After this, I painted it with acrylic silk black (for the not so glossy finish).
 
I have to say, you did an awesome job with this. Have you tried overclocking this rig yet?
 
I have to say, you did an awesome job with this. Have you tried overclocking this rig yet?
Yes, 10-20% CPU & GPU overclock is reasonable , but after this you might get crashes & lockups etc..as usual, these values are from my pages for comparison:

Convection rad
idle CPU 30C, GPU 35C, MOBO 26C, full overnight torture CPU 40C, GPU 55C, MOBO 28C
Old rad
idle CPU 26C, GPU 32C, MOBO 26C, full overnight torture CPU 38C, GPU 50C, MOBO 28C

You can see that with the old radiator the temps were few degrees lower than with this, but hey...the old one had four 120mm fans on it .....
Also, the hotter this gets, the more efficient it is as it is not cooled by force.
 
I use old hardware all the time, not putting his mod down, just asked if he was planing to upgrade,, & he said his computer runs fine with the old hardware. the computer I'm using right now is an old 2.6 P4 with 1.5gb of PC133 memory, but I dont think I would spend all that time building a kick-ass water cooling setup for it,, Just my opinion. it's his time not mine. still think he did a awesome job on it.
 
Looks wicked man! I love it! If I was going to setup a lc rig, I'd have the same outcome! Love it! 10/10 flat!
 
I voted 10/10 because:

^^
 
this is secks ... 11/10
 
Wicked water set-up... :-)
 
I voted 10/10 because:

pShh, hardware is unimportant in a good mod. There's a lot of work done to this thing, I see it, and much appreciate it. Making your own rad out of copper tubing, and silver solder is worthy of a 10 to me.
 
Back
Top