My 80ft Open Loop Bathtub Watercooling Project for Cutting Edge Audio

[cheez]

Hi guyz,

I started my wattacoolin' project over a month ago, to cool my CPU and GPU in my HTPC. It has been successful so far, but there's a lot to tell. Maybe you can learn from my project and experience to get stellar audio.


The aircooled test bench was very noisy. Lowered the stock CPU HSF fan to minimum (800rpm) through BIOS. I wasn't able to do anything about my screaming stock HSF on the ATi X1959XTX video card. It was the loudest in the bunch. Fan noise, Raptor hard drives, it was a noise city in terms of both sound and electrical.

I was broke pretty bad (still am now) as hell as I spent all on power cables. I couldn't spend several hundred dollars on the watercooling. Here's the pic of my previous setup.




So I decided to go wattacoolin'! and it has to be a unique one, not something that everyone does typically, and needs to be VERY effective.

I was coming up with ideas. I thought I would need something like this to put water and ice and use it as a reservoir.




But I realized that this isn't going to cool my liquid sufficiently, and it will get hot. So this wasn't a good idea.

I decided to run open loop watercooling my HTPC from living room all the way to the bathtub in my 2nd bath. Use the bathtub as a reservoir. The one way trip from PC to the bathtub is almost 40 feet. One complete loop (round trip) is 80 feet.


Since I didn't have money I had to real cheap as possible. I bought the following:

- D-Tek FuZion GFX 2 Universal GPU block - $37.99
- D-Tek FuZion? v2 CPU block - $44.99
- Water tubing, barb fittings, and hose clamps - $30?

And use my existing 12 year old MaxiJet MP1200 water pump. This pump has gone through 8 years of use with some abuse. I wasn't sure if this pump will be able to take the load. This is 80 feet guys, going through 4 90 degree turns (for round trip) in the hallway, then through the CPU block, and the GPU block. This is a long distance open loop wattacoolin'. I had never gone water loop this long before so I wasn't sure how all this will work out.

My system spec:

- Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard
- Intel Core2Duo Conroe 2.4ghz CPU
- Asus Xonar DX7.1 PCI-E sound card
- ATi Radeon X1950XTX video card
- Focal CMS65 speakers



I will post the rest of my progress shortly.


cheez