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There are 4 parts to this review, please use the pulldown below to browse sections or simply hit "Next" at the bottom of each section to continue

Liquid Cooling a Dual Athlon System
By: Pieter (dutchcedar) Bijleveld, November 9, 2002

The Battle Plan

Computers are lots of fun to mess around with. I caught the bug awhile back when originally building BaDass, the victim in our liquid cooling project. She was built as a personal workstation for my design work and has performed flawlessly since day one. She runs great, flying through everything that's thrown at her.

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Sometimes however, we just can't leave well enough alone. This PC is a perfect example. I prefer not to hear a PC very much, but BaDass isn't silent. With a total of fourteen fans spinning at the same time, that's to be expected. The thinking here however, is that if we can get rid of the two loudest (80mm @ 2800RPM) fans and the fastest (Blue Orb @3000RPM) fan, we can make her even quieter. By going to a liquid cooling system, we can improve the cooling performance at the same time. Only the eight case fans and power supply fans would be left and since the speeds of those are variable, we may even get to slow them down a bit. There's also a bonus in liquid cooling, if faster processors or over-clocking are in her future, she'll be ready.

Liquid cooling is not nearly as extreme as it was awhile back. High quality components are readily available these days and plenty of forums and articles are on the web covering the details of such systems. The most important reason for doing this, however, is that it will be a lot of fun.

Before the fun starts, remember that this is a "working" computer, so the challenge is to prepare everything possible ahead of time so it can be installed and working before the end of the day. That means no "in the case" testing, a minimum of "cut and fit" work on the case and thorough preparation of everything involved.

There is one other requirement. Everything must have a fit and finish that's beyond what's normally expected in a professional system.


 

The Case and the System

"BaDass" is built around a rather unique concept, being a "double-wide" case.

She's made from two aluminum Cooler Master 200MX cases that sit side by side. The two "case halves" are held together as a sturdy and lightweight unit by an anodized billet aluminum top cover, front plate and drive cover plate. All of these parts are interlocked with machined tongues and grooves and fixed to the chassis with gold plated allen screws in the front and thumb screws in the rear. The case halves pivot from the rear with a continuous vertical piano hinge. This allows access to both sides of all the drives and facilitates getting to all those things tucked away in hard to get to corners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


The system to be cooled carries on with the "double" theme, stuffed with two of everything (well, almost everything).

 

 

System Specs
Motherboard ASUS A7M266-D
Processors Dual AMD 1900MPs
Memory 1024MB Crucial PC2100 ECC registered
Video 128MB Matrox Parhelia
Sound TB Santa Cruz with a NewQ Gold equalizer
Hard Drives Dual Maxtor 7200rpm 80GB striped RAID 0 in Lian Li removable bays
RAID controller High Point
DVD Pioneer 16X slot drive
CD-RW Plextor 40X12X40X
Zip Drive Iomega
Floppy Drive Sony
Power Supply Enermax 431 watt power supply
OS Win 2000 Pro
Fan Control PCMods Rheobus
HDD Cooler DigiDoc5
Case Lighting and Fans Blue Cathode light and eight 80mm case fans

Laying out the Plan

Because the left half of the case will house most of the cooling components, they will be somewhat isolated from the motherboard. With the exception of some drive bays, the entire left side will be used to place equipment in. We don't want any indication that this rig is liquid cooled without looking inside.

The front two 80mm intake fans on the left side will be used to cool the radiator, at least for the initial modifications. Later on we will find out there is a better solution, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.


The consensus from most people involved in liquid cooling computers is to move a lot of coolant through the system, but very slowly. To put these both into action, the plan is to use a unique mix of ½" and 3/8" lines. Keep in mind that the volume carried through two 3/8" lines is roughly equivalent to a single ½" line. Using this combination of tubing sizes should allow us to pump a sizeable amount of coolant at a fairly peaceful flow rate through the entire system.

The Equipment Layout

Before buying or fabricating any parts, all of the components were laid out in CorelDraw. First I drew each of the components to scale, including different pumps, radiators, etc. that were available. An image of the motherboard was taken from the ASUS website and laid into a scale side view of the case. I was then able to move any of the large selection of parts in and out of the drawing until a good arrangement was found.

 

To help the design process along and to get opinions from people with more experience, the drawing was posted in the AthlonXP forums. It was amazing how helpful this proved to be. The comments from fellow forum members brought up a few flaws and more than a few good suggestions. It was during this process that the idea of using the back door came to light, as well as the plastic air shroud.

The drawing evolved over time as new ideas were incorporated and changes were made. This is the final version.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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