Performed 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....
16 Comments on Convective silence
Looks good like to see more pics though ones that show more of what you have done.
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...
Nice rig! Care to share some more details about your rad?
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.
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).
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.
^^
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.