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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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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.
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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.
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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 |
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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.
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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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