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

[Splave]

Id just a get a case like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...FQue4AodYzQA7g

I have it and the water 2.0 and I literally sit next to it at work all day, it is inaudible and keeps a 3770k with ht at in the 30-60c range

[Buckeye]

Lol !

[cheez]

Here's my GPU block installed.

[cheez]

Here's my CPU watta block installed. Bought the rest of the stuff (tubing, fittings, hose clamps, etc). I had to have the guy cut the tubing to 75 ft as I could not afford 80 ft.

[cheez]

Let da wattacoolin' begine.


Version 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sra1v...ature=youtu.be


Version 2 if the first one is blocked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sra1v...ature=youtu.be


That's around 45~ 50 gallons of water in the tub. There are no fans anywhere in the cooling / PC system except for the PSU which will eventually get replaced with a fanless PSU. The tub acts a reservoir and a heat exchanger. I tried throwing a bucket full of ice into it and got colder but after several hours the temp returned back to normal, it's cool / cold to the touch. My thermometer battery died so I'll have to replace it to get the temp reading.

All the fans were removed for various reasons:

- Remove fan noise
- Lower power consumption = Lower electrical noise
- Minimize vibration. All these for audio



Questions? Concerns? Compliments? Feel free to ask.

thanks


cheez

[redmax]

This is pretty cool. I once read a project where some guy buried an copper coil loop in his yard (about 10 feet down) so he could run a completely fanless system. He claimed the ground source kept the water super cold and worked awesome.

[Buckeye]

Don't give him ideas. The next thing he will do is bury his bathtub and run it there

I do have a nice big swimming pool out back and have thought of using that as a huge res. The water is getting pretty cold to swim in now, maybe it will warm it up enough for swimming in the winter ?

[retropcdos]

I thought the overprice power cable was bad enough, this is ridiculous. You sure have spend more money on the PC

Here a good example of what a watercooled system looks like. This one mines.