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Commercial Water Cooling, And Quiet
Aleaxander writes: "I followed this link about three weeks ago and may have found something I've been looking for for a long time; a way to make my PC's quieter while still keeping my systems cool.
A commercially available case that is water cooled, and which according to the above review seems to perform well on the cooling front, while also running quietly? Will I be able to finally stand having an overclocked PC running in the room while I am watching TV, listening to MP3's or simply waiting out a long download while doing something else? I hope so. Anyone who has bought or tested one of these cases should post their impressions, because the specifications listed on their site probably don't tell the whole story (the chart on cooling in the Comparison section that uses a graph from Tom's Hardware, and tags their Ambient Temperature on the bottom scares me)." And really, there's no reason that water-cooled computers should be any more exotic than radiators in cars (well, except for the energy-chuggin' high power use they would imply).
I've seen a few posts saying that water cooling doesn't really reduce the noise enough to make it worthwhile, partially because of hard drive noise among other things. One advantage of water cooling over aircooling is that you can use the water to move the heat away from the computer itself (within reason).
;-) I would think that making the front of the acoustic enclosure into a door would work.
Imagine, then, acoustically insulating your case using foam, cardboard, carpeted wood, or whatever. With an air cooled case, you have just screwed up your air cooling because of too many holes in the acoustic insulation. With water cooling, you only need to allow the water cooling hoses out of the acoustic insulation, and they can go to a big radiator *outside* of the acoustic insulation.
Of course, you will want a way to access the CD, floppy, and power switch.
-Paul Komarek
Does anyone know what happened to those cooling systems that used a crystal that would absorb/emit heat as electricity was applied?
I think you're talking about Peltier coolers. They're definitely gaining market share - they're on the rack at my local CompUSA, even. They go for around $25-$50. They work as advertised, but they use a lot of electricity. They're no quieter than a regular CPU cooler, though, because they still require a fan.
What's your damage, Heather?
...is that someone in here has found a way to squish their computers into a 8 inch by 8 inch by 8 inch cube!
Speaking for the Mac users...we all thought that it wasn't a real need to have a computer run silent? No, sorry let me rephrase that..
We had it jammed down our pieholes that when Apple started making fanless computers, that it "was no big fucking deal, bitches" and why don't you worry about getting 3-fucking button mice instead and you Mac users give a shit about the stupidest things...blah blah blah
Jessis - get your stories straight... i mean, if the poster wants a silent computer so that he doesnt have to hear the fan blowing all the time.. they call them iMacs and fucking Jobsian G4 Cubes... there's no need to bother with some weird ass hydro-powered case like it was a fucking Russian sub with James Bond at the tiller.
And yes, it can run linux
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
The basic rule is W=CF(V**2) -- the capacitance of the switching nodes times the switching frequency times the square of the supply voltage. Capacitance has been going up as oxide thicknesses have come down, along with more layer of metal. Frequencies have also gone up; you might have noticed. Voltages have come down, but not nearly as fast as the other two have gone up.
My 500 MHz K6-2 ran on 2.2 volts; my 1200 MHz Thunderbird runs on 1.8 -- even if the capacitance had stayed constant (and it hasn't, by a long shot) the power would have gone up 60%.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If you're interested in these cases check out this thread at ars-technica. They seem to be everything you could want in a water cooling system. Allthough the Liquid Nitrogen debate still runs hot.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
I RUN A DUAL PROCESSOR DESKTOP WITH 3 HARD DRIVES AND I DON'T SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT . MY SYSTEM IS VERY VERY QUIET. THE WEIRD THING IS THAT EVERYONE I KNOW SEEMS TO TALK REALLY QUIETLY, TOO.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
I live 5 minutes away from the first vendor for these units (Infotech) so I've been researching the Koolance cases for quite some time.
They are quieter then a normal power supply, but they still make some noise. They seem to be very well manufactured, just by eye-balling the unit. Definatly not a "hack job". I personally haven't bought one yet (my PII350 is cool enough thank you), but it's on my list if I ever go for those cool 1GHz Athlons that can be safely OC'd to 1.4GHz+. $180+ depending on configuration - but that's the price you pay for being cool (pun intended)!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
The best item I've found (I'm not an overclocker, mind you) to quiet hard drives, and CD roms are the following items...
1. Teflon tape. Wrap it around the head of mounting screws. It will act as a "threadlocker" for high RPM CD-Roms (which can loosen the screws through vibration.
2. Thin rubber mat. See above.
3. DynaMat, or another acoustic absorbing material.
In fact, the ultimate way to quiet a PC is to make a "snorkle, over the top side of the PC. Take some sheet tin, available at any hardware store, use a razor blade, and a pair of tin snips, or heavy duty scissors. Leave small fins for mounting it to the back of your PC, line it with DynaMat, and you've just knocked out about 60 to 70 percent of your PC's noise, the cooling fans. Make sure you use a rubber, or teflon washer when mounting it.
Line the inside of the PC with DynaMat, (leave room for vents, of course) and the only sound you'll hear from your PC is when you're swearing at it.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
After reading the site and poking at the specs I have some misgivings, some of the specs seemed cooked in their favor to me, for one I noticed that the SCSI hard drive in dual fan case is listed as running at 138 degrees Farenheit, making their HD cooling solution beat it by 34 degrees. The fact is that ALL of my SCSI enclosures run at 125 to 130 degrees. They start to alarm at 130 and warn me of failure. The average is around 127 degrees across about 30 drives. This means that they are beating the HD fan solution by 13 degrees. This also makes me wonder if that is the case since they pushed the higher numeber up did they also push the lower number down, is the total savings closer to 5 or 6 degrees? With this noted, that they are playing with the HD cooling numbers, how many of the other numbers they list are being played with?
With the fact that their solution can only handle 3 devices total this does not make HD cooling overly practical.
I also noticed that their case did not contain any case fans for other circulation, with their solution only providing cooling for three devices (let's pick CPU, Power Supply and one HD) That means you have to air cool the rest. Their case does not seem to have good ariflow, and if I am having to add case fans then I am loosing the quieting fucntionalty that is desired.
this looks like a good idea , and from reading the FAQ they have put some thought into this (especially in the area of condensation) but until they can handle more device off of the pump in the case I think I would personally give this a miss.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
They're called peltier devices, and they're still around. They're not popular because they require water cooling to work well with the current batch of CPUs.
See, an AMD Thunderbird will dissipate as much heat as a sizable incandescent light bulb and do it in a very, very small space. Peltier devices aren't magic -- they still have to obey the laws of physics. Yes, one side gets cool, but the heat has to go somewhere. It goes to the other side.
The catch is that the peltier device draws a lot of current, so it has to dissipate a lot of heat of its own. So, collect all of the heat coming off your CPU, plus all of the added power dissipation (a huge amount) generated by the peltier device. All of this heat will turn up on the "warm side" of the peltier, which really ought to be called the "hot as freaking lava" side.
If you hook a 100 watt peltier up to your Athlon (which you'll need because an athlon may be dissipating 60-80 watts) and you don't water cool your peltier, you'll quite literally melt it to pieces and it will stop working within a matter of minutes or even seconds. Of course, once the peltier has more or less dissolved into little chunks, there will be no "cool side" to keep your CPU cool and your CPU will fry as well.
Even if you do get a peltier+water rig working, it's never quite safe because the cool side gets so much cooler than room temperature that condensation starts to form all over the place and you end up shorting your CPU out anyway.
In short, it's safer to just cool things to room temperature using a water rig without the peltier element, which is just too risky and will still need water to cool it with any recent CPU.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'm leery of plugging anything even remotely close to leaking into a computer. (How often does my car leak, you ask?)
Does anyone know what happened to those cooling systems that used a crystal that would absorb/emit heat as electricity was applied? I remember seeing ads for them as much as 8 years ago, then they suddenly disappeared...
They just strike me as the best of both worlds.. an actual cooling affect instead of a fan, without the risk of a liquid based system. (These crystals *were* mounted on a fan, they were energized on the one side and released on the outside so as to yank the heat out of whatever they were mounted on)